Three Metals and the ‘Post‐Socialist City’: Reclaiming the Peripheries of Urban Knowledge

Abstract

Urban theory has long been in the grip of a handful of cities and, despite the recent recalibration of the catalogue of cities that inform it, the emerging geographies of urban studies remain skewed, at the expense of cities often referred to as ‘post‐socialist’. This essay considers the notion of the ‘post‐socialist city’, suggesting that it inadvertently poses limits to our imagination, parochializing research, pauperizing its theoretical capacity, and limiting its potential for comparison by automatically organizing differences into the preconceived categories of what it is and what it is not. It is proposed that the concept (re)produces artificial boundaries that consign ‘post‐socialist’ urban research to the peripheries of urban knowledge, joining the vast ranks of ordinary cities that fail to meet the criteria of relevance or admissibility embedded in the hegemonic theorizations stemming (mainly) from the northwest quadrant of the world map. Using the example of an extremely peripheral city in Kazakhstan, this essay argues that research on the ‘post‐socialist city’ should turn its focus to relations, networks and flows while simultaneously dropping the ‘post‐socialist’, which (re)produces differences vis‐à‐vis the supposed normality of the ‘Western’ city––differences that are either imagined, exaggerated, misrepresented, outdated or imposed.

Goodbye, Postsocialism!

“…Hann dismissed its conceptual value tout court: 'the term has brought no theoretical advance' (Hann 2006, p. 5). It is scholars from postsocialist societies in particular who have raised their voices to interrogate a term that they had little agency in shaping (Červinková 2012;Makovicky 2014a;Horvat & Štiks 2015;Chelcea & Druţǎ 2016;Tlostanova 2017;Gentile 2018).…”

Policy mobilities as comparison: urbanization processes, repeated instances, topologies

“…Part of the difficulty has been the territorialized imagination of "post-socialism" as a container, a demarcated regional "other" (Tuvikene, 2016). Here, tracing the many lines of connection which tie emergent dynamics of urbanization in this region to global trends -such as those of property investment, urban design, economic flows, borrowing from valued political systems (Hirt, 2012;Gentile, 2018) has the effect of de-territorializing post-socialism, and offering this as a concept which might be put to work in articulating the after-lives of socialism, as well as multiple lines or new potentialities which emerge in continuity or opposition with socialist pasts, highly varied across this putative region (Tuvikene, 2016).…”

Editorial: In search of the post-socialist urban geography. How do we see the post-socialist city today?

“…The past few years alone saw a plethora of major academic publications and special issues, as well as many conferences and workshops (see e.g. Brade, Neugebauer, 2017;Ferenčunhová, Gentile, 2016;Gentile, 2018;Frost, 2017;Hagen, Diener, 2018). This is understandable.…”