Post-socialist Transformation Research Articles

“No woman's land?” The gendered patterning of urban street names in Romania

The gendered patterning of urban street names as part of the spatial production of broader male-centric memorial landscapes has been documented in a growing body of scholarship. Scholars from various cognate fields, such as cultural geography, gender and memory studies, and urban sociology, have unraveled the stark gender disparities favoring men inscribed into symbolic landscapes through place names, public monuments, and other memorial artefacts. This article sets out to overcome some of the limitations characterizing this strand of research – namely, the lack of statistical sophistication and the preference for case studies based on singular cities – by developing a multi-level modelling of gendered street nomenclature at the national level. The approach developed in this paper employs the complete collection of urban street names in Romania to assess the empirical adequacy of five hypotheses regarding the gendered structuring of the country's urban namescape. This analysis highlights the factors underpinning the variation of gender disparities in terms of Romania's historical regions, ethnic demographics and local ethnopolitics, city ranking within the national territorial administration and intra-urban stratification of the road network, as well as the effects brought about by postsocialist transformations.

БИРОБИДЖАН: ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЕ ПРЕОБРАЗОВАНИЯ ТОРГОВЫХ ПРОСТРАНСТВ ГОРОДА-СПУТНИКА

A number of studies are devoted to the urban development of settlements in the Far East, but they do not consider trade spaces as structureforming spaces, whereas they often form the framework of the city. After studying the cadastral maps of Birobidzhan, topographic survey materials, online maps and other documents, we identified five historical periods of formation of outdoor trade spaces in Birobidzhan and their architectural and planning features. The first stage was 1928-1933: the period of free development of the territory, when the trade environment was an instrument of social adaptation of the developed space. The second was 1932-1937, when professional architects were invited to the planning and development of the city, and the market square received its official status. The third stage was 1937-1990: the period of planned development of the territory, when the planned trade environment was formed. The fourth was in the 1990s: it was the time of post-socialist transformation, the typical feature of which was self-organization of market space, the trade street reflected the crisis phenomena in the urban system. The fifth stage lasts from 2000 to the present and includes reorganization of trade spaces: demolition of old pavilions and stalls in the Central Market area, emergence of seasonal fairs as a new form of open trade in the city, concentration of small open trade spaces near the existing markets at the same time with separate functioning of large shopping centres that close the adjacent territories from street trade. The comprehensive programme for the implementation of the concept "Compact competitive city with jewish colour on the border with China" (master plan of Birobidzhan until 2030) envisages, among other things, the renovation of trade spaces. It should take into account trade as a social phenomenon.

Totalitarian Flower Pavilion: The Dubious Post-Socialist Legacy of Contemporary Eastern European Cities

More than three decades after the collapse of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, local urban processes are still very often associated with that historic period or post-socialist transformation. This article aims to undermine the concept of the post-socialist city itself as reductionist, given the crucial importance of factors that differ from the influence of the pre-1989/91 times. The article confronts the discussion on the applicability of the post-socialist framework with field research conducted in selected Polish and Ukrainian cities, in particular the examples of the Kvity Ukrainy (Flowers of Ukraine) protest movement in Kyiv, Ukraine, and the 2003 spatial planning reform’s results in Krakow, Poland. The analysis is based on interviews with representatives of different actors involved in the policymaking process, such as local government representatives, policy advisors, urban planners, journalists, business circles, and members of grassroots initiatives.

Stolen Transformation, Conspiracy Theories and Female Detectives in Contemporary East-Central European Films and Series

The essay discusses the surging popularity of crime fiction as a reflection of the evolving social climate and the erosion of illusions regarding the post-socialist transformation in the 2010s Central Europe. It focuses on Entanglement (2011), a Polish paranoia thriller, X – The eXploited (2018), a Hungarian political thriller and Sleepers (2019), a Czech HBO production spy thriller series to examine how they portray symptoms of social and political crisis, perceived manipulation of the transition, and the struggle for female individual agency. These films offer a unique portrayal of the notion of a ‘stolen’ regime change, framed within conspiracy narratives suggesting the involvement of former state security personnel who managed to maintain their influence during the transition. Additionally, each narrative features a female protagonist who embarks on an investigation, uncovering a political conspiracy intertwined with her personal history. The fusion of conspiracy thriller elements with the emotional detective archetype represents a pivotal characteristic of these films, underscored by their transnational ambiguity. With the coupling of conspiracy narrative and female emotional detectives, paranoia and individual suffering, these films highlight the prevailing ­disillusionment and the sense of inaction that characterizes the contemporary social climate in the region.

Green Neighbourhood Sustainability Index – A measure of the balance between anthropogenic pressure and ecological relevance

Peri-urban landscapes grow more urbanised due to suburbanisation. This, in turn, makes them environmentally and culturally susceptible to changes. Keen demand for residential areas threatens the sustainability of the peri-urban landscape. Green spaces are at particular risk of conversion. Recently, researchers focused on the function of green sites in urban environments. What is more, research on green spaces involves mainly their mapping and analysis of spatiotemporal changes. Nevertheless, there is a research gap in the multi-criteria research on the hypothetical sustainability of green spaces and the identification of areas that are the most at risk of conversion. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to develop a simple technique tool for objective measurement of the sustainability of green spaces in peri-urban areas. To this end, we developed the Green Neighbourhood Sustainability Index (GNSI), with which one can assess the sustainability of the landscape and green spaces using spatial data and GIS technology. The GNSI was then put to the test in the peri-urban zone of Kraków (Poland). The research shows that as the area of agricultural land increases, the sustainability of nearby green spaces decreases. Forest land, on the other hand, improves sustainability. The structure of land use types in the peri-urban zone of Kraków is well balanced. It is both desirable and good for landscape sustainability and harmony. The GNSI can be among the aids used by decision-makers to take science-informed strategic spatial planning decisions to ensure the sustainability of green spaces and the proper functioning of the ecosystem in peri-urban areas, especially in post-socialist transformation countries.

Moving post-socialist publics: citizens, spaces, and practices

ABSTRACT This Introduction to the Special Issue on moving post-socialist publics aims to lay out how existing mobility politics and discourses in the region under scrutiny are intertwined with historical, socialist-era mobility practices, and infrastructures. Mobility paths and policies are imbued with a contested understanding of socialist legacies as well as capitalist realities. The Special Issue explores how transport options and choices confront citizens with social diversity, transformations of social norms, institutions and routines, values, concepts, and traditions. Valuable lessons can be learnt in terms of critical mobility geographies beyond the region as post-socialist transformations address justice and changing social norms and understandings of state roles. A decolonial inspiration that challenges existing readings of the formerly socialist region and transgresses the analytical “Othering” of its transition experience can be traced throughout the papers. Instead of arguing whether or not post-socialism is still a valid analytical framework, authors see the region as marked by multiple experiences of modernity and coloniality. In the former Soviet peripheries, urban mobility shapes socio-spatial contentions, making visible multiple and conflicting narratives of modernity and coloniality, tracing flows and dependencies at different scales, and taking into account complex constellations of actors, cultures, and materialities. The post-socialist lens is meant to critically scrutinize continuities and changes, providing particular interpretations for contemporary issues: mobile post-socialist publics are thus a turn away from what was before but in a context in which a strong relation to the past is embedded in several continuities in institutions, materialities, and practices.

Reality vs Regulation: Informal Practices of Spatial Development in Krasnodar, Russia

In the research environment, informal urban development has traditionally been studied in the cities of the Global South. However, in the Eastern European context, informal urban development differs as land use regulation goes through the process of post-socialist transformation. Krasnodar is one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in Russia, where informal construction practices and bottom-up approaches in spatial redevelopment are widely spread despite the strict regulation of housing construction and precise tools for identification of informality. The work presentsa step towards the discovery of this phenomenon. In the spotlight we put the exploration of inner synergetic inconsistency of legal relations, connecting economic, institutional, demographic, and sociopolitical context to understand the contradiction between formal and informal urban life. The research methods include spatial and regulatory documents analyses, in-depth interviews with different collective actors (city administration, activists, experts in urban development, locals living in informal). The core of the research — the machinery of the conflict behind the legalization process. Findings of this work illustrate a number of reasons behind the spread of informal settlements in Krasnodar and their role in urban development. While administrative power does not seek compromise with locals and migrants, the mistrust of others embodies itself as unguided and spontaneous urban development.

Neoliberal Takeover? How the Social History of Economic Ideas Contributes to Historicising Post-socialist Transformations

Neoliberal Takeover? How the Social History of Economic Ideas Contributes to Historicising Post-socialist Transformations

Overlooked and Undeserving: Older People in Narratives of Return in Post-1989 East Germany

The German right-wing populist party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) opposes diverse family lifestyles by promoting the return to a family model of father, mother, and children. This “Narrative of Return” paves the way for the party’s anti-gender, anti-childlessness, and anti-immigration agendas. The article examines how narratives about families as promoted by AfD reflect or address experiences of the post-socialist transformation in East Germany. It turns out that Narratives of Return (NoR) overlook the elderly as acting individuals and disregard the ways they engage with their families, and how they continue to organize their lives autonomously in old age. NoR instead depict older people as an anonymous group of supposedly undeserving retired, who benefit from society and family without having any function in them. However, discourses on care for the family can be traced down to a micro-level that confirms how care for the family is, in fact, care for older people. The article presents two selected life stories of advanced-age East Germans to substantiate this claim. The life stories reveal that older people themselves believe in various notions of family, despite being served with NoR in recent past. Experiences in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) even seem to prevent older people from again falling for totalizing schemes that order and prescribe uniform (family) experience. Consequently, it is not to be expected that NoR will succeed in closing discourses on care for the family easily.

East-west or up the urban hierarchy? Internal migration patterns in Slovakia since post-socialist transformation to COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Changing spatial patterns of migration are closely related to the transformation of economy and society. Most current studies focus either on international migration or on the migration of particular urban regions. Our study evaluates migration trends in the entire national regional system, and thus it contributes to its comprehensive understanding. The study aims to evaluate the relationship of internal migration from economically lagging eastern to more developed western regions of Slovakia on the one hand, and migration between categories of regions according to the hierarchical position of their urban core on the other hand. The study follows the differential urbanization concept and analyses detailed data on individual migrations in Slovakia in 1996–2020. It thus covers the period from the post-socialist transformation to the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show the increasing intensity of east-west and up the urban hierarchy migration. Due to the significant polarization of migration between the eastern and western regional subsystems, we examined separately in both subsystems the migration excluding flows between the subsystems. The results revealed a concentration of population into metropolitan regions in both subsystems, although the intensity of the processes was lower and the onset of trends delayed in the eastern subsystem. A significant feature of development in the post-socialist period was intensive exurbanation in both subsystems. The study thus points to the importance of subnational and regional approaches to migration research, and reveals trends that can contribute to the explanation of migration development even in countries where such detailed migration statistics are not available.

Running and Reading Remnant Danwei Walls in China's Postsocialist City

Abstract Built on visual and running/walking ethnography, this article analyzes visual traces left on remnant danwei walls in postsocialist China. The article considers danwei walls as yiji (remnant traces) that serve as loci of political memory and as a medium to host other visual traces by a variety of different actors. Drawing on a range of concepts from cultural studies and visual ethnography, the article provides a close reading of these traces, treating them as important historical documents and examples of how human actors interact with the built environment during China's postsocialist transformation. The article is built around three case studies, each of which captures different stages of the physical decay of the danwei as represented in the materiality of the walls in varying states of (dis)repair and the different nature of the visual traces local actors have left on them. The analysis of traces—understood as signs on the walls as well as the walls themselves—reveals a story of the ways in which humans interact with a very specific part of China's built environment at a moment of transition and of how relationships between these human actors change in the process. The article provides a reading of visual social phenomena, contributing to the understanding of signifying practices in postsocialist urban China.

CHF-indexed housing debts in Serbia: dependent financialization, housing precarity and housing struggles

The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) loans in Serbia with a focus on their relation to class mobility in the setting of a transition to the market economy that transformed the methods of housing acquisition. This process resulted in an extreme housing precarity and declassing for segments of the post-Yugoslav middle and working classes, which has manifested in their dispossession of secure housing, savings, pensions, and the sense of having social security, working towards one’s own house and building a family. We demonstrate how besides contributing to declassing, housing precarity played a significant role in rendering CHF-indexed housing debt an opening that activated individual and collective strategies of resistance. Resistance by debtors, and its articulation in the public sphere, relied on multiple logics and tactics—from appeals for existing laws to be respected, to demands for a legal codification of the right to home, to the physical prevention of evictions. These sometimes contradictory and competing logics reflected varied social and economic positions of debtors with their related moralities as well as corresponding different reasonings on acquiring housing, social mobility, and approaches to the financialization of everyday life. By combining the analysis of debtors’ personal narratives, public discourses, and the political economy of dependent financialization in Serbia, we flesh out the connection between financialization, housing, ideas about social mobility, post-socialist transformation and declassing. The article reveals how and why predatory loans in post-socialist conditions lead to declassing through precarity and new forms of collective action.

Revolution, Transformation and the Role of the Subject

Abstract In order to understand today’s social and political situation in East-Central Europe, one should particularly examine the consequences of post-socialist transformation. The negative and often very painful effects of the social changes that affected Central and Eastern Europe over the past three decades have not been overcome until today. This makes it all the more important to be better prepared philosophically for future social changes. François Jullien offers a number of solutions. In the first part of my paper, taking Jullien’s book The Silent Transformations as a point of departure, I show that many of the problems that still exist in East-Central Europe largely result from placing too much emphasis on the event of the revolution and too little on the transformation experienced by the region’s populations. In the second and third parts, I indicate, pace Jullien, a way towards a moderate, “sober”, but nevertheless creative and productive understanding of the active agent by appealing to the works of Hans-Herbert Kögler and Fabian Heubel.

The Influence of Orthodox Christianity on Economic Behaviour

Weber’s very important theory on the influence of religion on economic behaviour was tested in the societies which belong to different cultural and religious circles. However, due to various socio-political circumstances, the testing of Weber’s theoretical-methodological framework has been largely neglected in the countries where Orthodox Christianity is dominant. However, the difficulties that arose in Orthodox societies during the post-socialist transformation, as well as the shift from the economic research paradigm to the cultural one on the global level, along with the revival of religion in Eastern Europe as one of the most important institutions of ideological and social life, contributed to the focus of our scientific interest be directed in this direction. The central questions that we tried to answer on this occasion were primarily related to the specifics of the concept of work in Orthodox Christianity and the relationship to the accumulation of capital.

ОЦЕНКА РОЛИ ФАКТОРОВ СРЕДЫ ОБИТАНИЯ В ФОРМИРОВАНИИ МНОГОЛЕТНЕЙ ДИНАМИКИ ЗАБОЛЕВАЕМОСТИ ДЕТЕЙ

Results of a research and assessment of a contribution of local and regional (background) factors of the habitat to formation of annual incidence of the children's population of Bratsk of the Irkutsk region during post-socialist transformations are given

Bio-politics of Protest: Student Protests in Serbia and Bulgaria as a Mechanism of Security for a Social System

The research-based ethnographic study presented in the paper aims at explaining why the extensive student protests of the last decades in Serbia and Bulgaria do not facilitate the post-socialist transformation. Along with a high occurrence of political upheavals that commonly evoke images of mass unrest and swift social reconfigurations of power, no significant change in politics towards more democratic regime has taken place. Despite the presence of multiple liberal semantics in the public debate, the Balkan discourse on democracy seems fairly remote from the political and social practice. All the well-established theories of protest and social movements remain inconclusive in answering this query. In search of an explanation, the concept of security and the bio-political paradigm of Michel Foucault have been adopted. The distinctive conceptual framework helps to explain how protests became a kind of security mechanism preventing an unstable social system from radical changes. Based on that concept the anthropological investigation allowed to identify some systemic milestones, or structural dimensions, bringing some counterintuitive results when it comes to the assessment of key social functions of protest, and a rather expected disclosure of deep authoritarian settings of governing institutions. Finally, the article discusses some similarities between the contentious events in Serbia and Bulgaria, and how the private stories recorded during in-depth interviews conducted between 2014 and 2017 in Belgrade and Sofia combine into one legitimate public narration on the Balkan political issues

Social Legitimacy of Mass Privatization: The Case of Bulgaria

Mass privatization is an important part of the Bulgarian post-socialist transformations. Because of citizens’ direct involvement in it, its social legitimacy is crucial for the social acceptance of the privatization in general. The paper analyzes the problem of the social legitimacy of mass privatization in a long-term period and the main research question is: did privatization succeed in acquiring social legitimacy or did the attitude towards it remain mostly negative. To contextualize the topic, a brief overview of the results of mass privatization in the Czech Republic and Russia is also included in the analysis. The main research hypothesis is that privatization could not legitimize itself as the right path taken in Bulgarian society. The main reason behind this is the non-success of the main wave of the Bulgarian mass privatization. To prove the main hypothesis, data of national representative survey is analyzed in the paper.

Trajectories of value capture, strategic coupling and labour regime reconfiguration: Coal mining, automotives and business services in post-socialist Romania

Drawing on global production network research and conceptual explanations of the changing spatial divisions of labour, this article investigates the transformative effects of the dynamic interplay between strategic coupling and multiscalar changes across labour regimes in Central and Eastern European post-socialist sectoral trajectories. It interrogates critically whether sectors across peripheral regions have been able to slot themselves into lead firms’ transnational production systems, resulting in processes of value creation, value capture or value destruction. The empirical analysis reveals that the capacity of domestic resources to purposively match and align themselves to global lead firms and their strategic objectives is influenced by local historical legacies, spatiality, elite agency and labour agency, which combined to shape distinct meso-level transformations. The methodology is based on analysing the post-socialist transformation of three sectors in Romania, which have different historical legacies, institutional configurations, and spatial and temporal vectors of development, allowing us to trace interactions between different modes of strategic coupling or decoupling and labour regime reconfiguration. The central thrust of the article highlights how different modes of strategic coupling into global production networks, or decoupling from global production networks, are causally linked to the reconfiguration of labour regimes, leading to long-term regional socio-economic transformations.

City-regions in Central Eastern Europe: emerging metropolitan territorialities in post-socialist planning systems

ABSTRACT City-regions in Central Eastern Europe are still underrepresented in academic debate on metropolitan planning and governance. However, they may provide a valuable insight into the early stages of creating planning partnerships that struggle to cope with problems arising from uncoordinated spatial development in the period of post-socialist transformation, which was not addressed adequately by formal planning systems and regular territorial-administrative units. The paper presents a comparative analysis of six city-regions in Central Eastern Europe based on a review of strategic and planning documents, and direct interviews with representatives of key stakeholders in each area. The main findings of the paper include the significant but underestimated role of the second-tier local governments in metropolitan institutional setups and the crucial position of emerging coalitions of academics, metropolitan-oriented officials and planners for establishing a sustainable planning agenda in the city-region. City-regions in CEE do not follow the categorization of soft spaces of planning that is derived from other territorial contexts. This is because the spatial planning efforts within city-regional soft spaces in CEE are more sustainability-driven than growth-oriented. Yet, more ambitious spatial visions may be overshadowed by a strong focus of local elected politicians on infrastructure projects.

DYNAMICS AND METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION

Emphasis is placed on the dynamics and methodological aspects of economic transformation. It is noted that consideration of the dynamic theory in economics continued in science for several centuries, and this issue remains relevant. The concept of "transformation" together with its content and essence has been studied. The study was conducted using a comparative method in order to define categories of "statics" and "dynamics". The difference between these terms was established by constructing a comparative table. The content and nature of dynamic theory as an integral component of the transformation process is considered. The relationship and interdependence between dynamic theory and economic transformation are defined. The results of the study proved the influence of time series on the relevance of the study of the causes of economic growth. It is emphasized that the analysis of macroeconomic indicators has significant importance, taking into account the influence of time series in terms of economic transformation. A conclusion is drawn regarding the presence of interdependence between the type of economic dynamics and the type of structural shifts which occur during the process of post-socialist transformation. In Ukraine, these structural shifts took the form of bifurcation points, which meant a turning point and a new round of development. The nature of bifurcation points in terms of post-socialist transformation is considered in detail. Thanks to the dynamic theory, bifurcation points that have developed in terms of the post-socialist transformation in Ukraine have been determined. Conclusions are made regarding the current situation of the socio-economic system of Ukraine in the context of post-socialist transformation.