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From Sýkora, L., 2015. Cities Under Postsocialism. In: James D. Wright
(editor-in-chief), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences,
2nd edition, Vol 3. Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 605–611.
ISBN: 9780080970868
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.
Elsevier
Author's personal copy
Cities Under Postsocialism
Ludek Sy´kora, Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
In postsocialist cities, urban environments formed under socialist regimes are being adapted to new conditions shaped by the
transition to capitalism. With the establishment of market rules and pluralistic democracy, social practices of individuals,
firms, and governments became imprinted in urban landscapes. Urban change has been especially influenced by internationalization,
economic restructuring, social differentiation, postmodern culture, and neoliberal political practices. The main
transformations in the spatial organization included the commercialization of city centers, the dynamic and spatially selective
revitalization in inner cities, and the radical transformation of suburban hinterland affected by sprawl.
Introduction
This article discusses urban change in postsocialist cities. The
term postsocialist refers to societies which had been prior the
revolutions of 1989 known as ‘socialist’ and which have been
since 1989 undergoing transformations toward capitalist societies
with market-based economy and pluralistic democracy in
political decision making. While the former socialist and so
called ‘second’ world (Andrusz, 2001) included countries on
most continents, this article mainly builds on the experience
and situation in major capital cities of postsocialist Central and
Eastern Europe, since these are the cities that have been studied
the most. The generalization based on these cities may also be
relevant for other postsocialist cities.
The city is understood as complex dynamically evolving
sociospatial formation. It is internally differentiated and
structured not only in terms of social, economic, or political
differences between individuals and social groups, but especially
in terms of local sociospatial formations such as residential
neighborhood including ethnic enclaves of immigrants,
gated communities of better off population, middle-class
suburbs, or ghettos of socially excluded, as well as functional
zones such as industrial areas, office districts, shopping, and
entertainment nodes. The city is also integrated through interaction
between people, firms, and organizations, between
residents, entrepreneurs, and politicians, and, as these actors
are spatially embedded, also between local sociospatial
formations integrated into an urban region.
This article is focused on urban change, on processes
through which the city and places within urban space are
produced, reproduced, and transformed. It emphasizes relations
between social processes and spatial structures via social
practices. In established societies, the social practices are guided
by a set of broadly accepted rules. The unfolding daily life
framed within relatively stable institutions results in relatively
stable spatial patterns. The correspondence between social
institutions, social practices, and structures and spatial
arrangements might gradually change in the course of ongoing
evolutionary social processes, such as transition from Fordism
to post-Fordism, industrial to postindustrial society, and social
to neoliberal state or during second demographic transition.
However, the evolutionary relatively gradual processes of
urban change may be interrupted by periods of radical urban
restructuring influenced by turbulent revolutionary transformations
in political and economic principles of societal
organization. This is the case of postsocialist cities, where the
institutional setup was radically changed in the 1990s. The
capitalist political economy leads to distinctively different
social practices and urban spatial organizations. Contradictions
between the inherited socialist urban patterns and newly
established capitalist rules created tensions resulting in the
restructuring of existing urban areas and the formation of new
postsocialist urban landscapes (Sýkora, 2009). Even though the
principles that influence the production of urban environments
were changed quickly, the pace of change in the built environment,
land-use patterns, and residential differentiation is
much slower. The urban transformation of postsocialist cities is
an unfolding process that may take decades. Revolutionary
transformations in urban spatial organization, such as
dynamically developing sprawl and increasing residential
segregation, pose significant challenges. They call for anticipation
of future developments and critical engagement in
debating urban change.
The postsocialist cities offer a chance to trace the impact of
transformations in political and socioeconomic forces and
changing social practices on the logic of urban space generation
under the condition of revolutionary, radical, and rapid
transformations framed by the transition from communist
totalitarian to democratic political regimes and from command
to market economies. We can not only compare how two
distinctively different societies of socialism and capitalism
produce their own urban spaces, but in an online perspective
observe how capitalism appropriates and reconstructs the
former patterns to its own needs.
There is a widespread recognition of the diversity of urban
transformation in former socialist countries indicating that
different postsocialist trajectories may be developing (Tosics,
2005). Differences have emerged between the countries that
have managed to apply more comprehensively the Western
concept of capitalism, and those whose development is more
based on the locally specific recombinations of selected aspects
of socialism, capitalism, and unique features that have emerged
during postsocialism. However, the rejection of communism
and the acceptance of capitalist features have placed the postsocialist
societies, countries, and cities on a similar trajectory
leading away from communism and toward various forms of
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capitalism. In this article, while acknowledging the contextual
embeddedness of urban transformations and their consequent
local specific features and trajectories, the general and common
features developing under the imperative of globally spreading
capitalism will be highlighted.
The article starts with the reflection of the trajectories,
patterns, and underlying forces of urbanization under
socialism. This is followed by a section that overviews the
recent transformations toward capitalism, juxtaposing two
different political and economic systems with their own logic
of urban space generation. Specific attention is devoted to
relations between socialist legacies and global capitalism in
shaping postsocialist urbanization and to major challenges that
postsocialist cities face on their transformation path.
Socialist City
The studies of cities in Central and Eastern Europe suggested
that a socialist city existed as a specific entity different from
cities in developed capitalist world (French and Hamilton,
1979; Smith, 1996). However, while some scholars emphasized
the specific nature of socialist urbanization referring to
distinctively different socialist and capitalist political and
economic systems (Szelenyi, 1983), others advocated similarities
between urbanization in socialist and capitalist countries
highlighting the universal influence of industrialization and
modernization (Enyedi, 1996). While we can accept that both
socialist and capitalist cities were variants of a more general
twentieth century modern urban development, important
features, such as lower levels of urbanization, less urbanism,
and distinct urban spatial structure (Hirt, 2013), distinguished
cities in socialist and capitalist countries.
Similarly to capitalist cities, the socialist city was shaped by
cultural modernity, industrialization, technological progress,
and advanced division of labor. However, the particular character
of socialist political and economic organization mediated
through the state planned distribution of resources and planned
urbanization (Musil, 1980; Smith, 1996) yielded new
economic, social, and territorial patterns. They included the
lower share of services and higher share of industries in terms
of employment and land use, sociospatial disparities specific to
socialist production and allocation of housing, and a more
compact urban morphology in comparison with capitalist
cities. Under the condition of modernity, socialist cities represented
the major alternative to capitalist urbanization.
The built environment, land use, and segregation patterns
in socialist cities were shaped by political and economic forces
that were radically distinct from capitalism. The socialist regime
claimed to attain a socially just society with economy serving
wider population needs. The essential starting point in forming
socialist societies was the elimination of private ownership of
means of production and market allocation of resources, which
were seen as the key mechanisms being responsible for
producing social inequalities. The essential aspects of the
socialist system were the common ownership of the means of
production and the administrative allocation of resources
overseen by the state authorities guided by the power of
Communist parties. The flow of resources between governments,
firms, and households was regulated by the top-down
hierarchically organized system of central planning. The
economic growth shall guarantee an ever-increasing quality of
life and socially equitable distribution of resources. However,
the priority given to production and strategic (mostly heavy)
industries, led to the underdevelopment of consumer services.
The inefficiencies of central planning, especially its low capability
to stimulate innovations, resulted since the 1970s in
exhausting inner resources and slowing down economic and
social development.
The industrialization of the socialist economy was at the
nexus of development priorities. It led to the boom of urban
industrial centers that attracted rural migrants pushed away
from their villages by the collectivization of agricultural land
and the mechanization of agricultural production. As a result,
the socialist countries experienced a fast growth in their levels
of urbanization. However, the growth of urban jobs was not
paralleled by a corresponding supply of new housing. A
significant portion of the rural population employed in cities
retained their rural residence leading to an increasing share of
rural residents commuting to cities, using mass public transit
systems. The phenomenon of discrepancy between the urbanization
of jobs and housing was described as underurbanization
(Murray and Szelenyi, 1984; Szelenyi, 1996).
Socialist cities and their metropolitan areas were managed
through the top-down centralized control of territorial development
as a hierarchically organized system. With land
development under the control of state authorities, government
policies concentrated the spatial allocation of public
investments and thus urban development in few target areas.
First of them was the expansion of industrial capacity by the
development of new and the extension of existing industrial
zones stimulated by the preference of production over
consumption and political goal of keeping manual workers as
the revolutionary force in major cities. Second, the construction
of massive housing estates at the urban edges provided standardized
supply of new housing. Third, a dense network of
public transportation was developed to assure effective
commuting between places of residence, work, services, and
leisure activities. Fourth, services were provided in hierarchically
organized system of neighborhood, district, and city
urban centers, in order to guarantee economies of scale as well
as even accessibility by population. Finally, city centers were
redesigned as monuments of the social and economic prosperity
achieved under the leadership of ruling communist
parties.
Although central areas concentrated retail and other
consumer services, they did not resemble the picture of capitalist
urban downtowns dominated by commerce. In societies
governed by central planning machinery, there was no room
for financial and other business services. Similarly, the state
organized supply of basic and standardized good has not
required the development of retail and other consumptionoriented
services on the scale known from capitalist societies.
Consequently, socialist city centers retained substantial
proportion of residential function. The political strategy to
keep manual workers as the revolutionary force in major cities
as well as nonexisting market pressure on a more economically
efficient utilization of land purposefully maintained a higher
share of industry in terms of both employment and land use
within cities. Industrial areas penetrated from old inner city
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quarters to newly established outer city zones. Sections of the
inner city presocialist neighborhoods decayed due to the
disinvestment of the state whose prime concern was to build
new socialist areas. Renewal programs applied in last two
decades of socialism often led to brutal redesign of presocialist
inner-city landscapes. The majority of new construction
concentrated at city edges in high-density residential areas of
multistory apartment buildings and new industrial zones. In
a contrast to sprawling North American and West European
metropolitan areas, the socialist cities developed without
suburban residential areas and nonresidential ribbon developments
typical for capitalist urbanization. The extent of urban
industrial land use and the scale of housing estates constructed
for several thousands of inhabitants, and the consequently high
proportion of industrial labor force and multiple-family
housing noticeably distinguished the socialist city from the
capitalist city.
Population in urban space was primarily differentiated by
its demographic characteristics (Musil, 1987). The urban
landscapes build under socialism looked like a mosaic of
relatively large housing estates each containing particular age
cohort of population with similar positions in family and life
cycle. The formation of such pattern was conditioned by the
state financed housing construction, which was spatially
concentrated in large districts built-at-once, by the administrative
allocation of dwellings to young families with children
at the start of their family and housing career, and low levels of
overall migration after retaining first housing. Particular
generations of housing estates corresponded with certain age
cohorts of population. Despite the low level of residential
socioeconomic differentiation, sociospatial inequalities existed
due to the access of people with higher societal and communist
party merits to better housing. Large areas, characterized by
social mix of households and less segregated and more evenly
distributed homes of working class population, were contrasted
with socialist elites concentrated in few exclusive
neighborhoods. In general, the socioeconomic status declined
from city centers toward urban hinterland, with the exception
of higher social status of some well-located new housing
estates. Most socialist countries were ethnically homogeneous
and with the exception of Roma concentrations, ethnic differentiation
was not a distinguishing feature of urban social
landscapes. However, in the cities within the Soviet Union, the
sociospatial pattern was more complex due to the migration of
ethnic minorities within USSR (Smith, 1996).
City in Transition: Postsocialist Urban
Transformations
Since the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern
Europe, cities in the former socialist countries have entered
a period of dramatic reconfigurations. In the 1990s, these
countries abolished socialism and set on the path toward
capitalism with democratic governments and free markets. The
installation of market rules and pluralistic democracy began to
change social practices of individuals, households, firms,
organizations, and governments leading to the development of
new social processes reshaping social structures that have been
for decades moulded by the socialist regime. The social changes
became imprinted in urban landscapes bringing dynamic
sociospatial reorganization of former socialist cities. Urban
environments formed under the socialist system have been
adapting to the new circumstances generated by the political,
economic, social, and cultural changes associated with the
transition to capitalist market economy and democratic political
regimes (Enyedi, 1998; Hamilton et al., 2005; Tsenkova
and Nedovic-Budic, 2006; Stanilov, 2007).
In the 1990s, former socialist countries abolished socialism
and set on the path toward the establishment of capitalism
with democratic governments and free markets. The process of
societal change is generally referred to as the postsocialist
transition. The term transition has been initially associated
with the neoliberal agenda of shock therapy, based on the
radical replacement of the basic political and economic institutions
of socialism with democratic and market arrangements.
However, a number of experts have responded to the visions
and rhetoric of neoliberal designers of the transition pointing
to path dependencies and impacts of socialist legacies (Nielsen
et al., 1995; Pickles and Smith, 1998). Using the term transformation
they accentuated continuities and highlighted the
hybrid nature of postcommunist realities with respect to the
recombination of socialist and capitalist elements as constituents
of the new postcommunist society (Stark, 1996). This
body of work has contributed to the realization that postcommunist
transition is not a simple replacement of one social
system with another, and that real-life transformations include
not only new social forms but also a recombination of new and
old elements. The postsocialist transition is now commonly
understood as a broad, complex, and a lengthy process of social
change (Herrschel, 2007).
The radical change in the political and economic setup has
stimulated transformations in virtually all spheres of societal
development with its imprint into changing urban structures.
The notion of postsocialist city has provided an umbrella
concept for insights into urban restructuring stimulated by the
government reforms of the 1990s. Two decades since the
collapse of former Communist regimes, the relevance of postsocialism
began to be put into question. However, while
systemic institutional transformation may be over, postcommunist
cities are still very much undergoing transformations
in their built environment, land-use, and
sociospatial patterns (Sýkora and Bouzarovski, 2012). The
issue is whether the processes of urban change, such as
gentrification or suburban sprawl are new forms of neighborhood
change and city development under capitalism or
whether they are related to the adjustments of inherited
socialist urban legacies to new societal conditions. As the
development of these processes is stimulated by structural
deficiencies produced under socialism that has sprung up with
the establishment of capitalist market economy, they should be
interpreted as an integral part of the overall postsocialist
transformations.
Transformations take place at many levels and include
processes occurring at different speeds (Sýkora and
Bouzarovski, 2012). While the systemic institutional transformations
have been relatively fast, the pace of changes in
social practices has been much slower. The complex environmental
systems of cities and urban regions, which embody not
only social institutions and practices but also physical artifacts,
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have the longest time-span of change and persistence. Distinguishing
three levels of postcommunist transition: “i) the
institutional transformations that created a general societal
framework for transition, ii) transformations of the social,
economic, cultural and political practices exhibited in the
everyday life of people, firms and institutions and resulting in
social restructuring, and iii) the transformation dynamics of
urban change”; Sýkora and Bouzarovski (2012) argue that:
“The key aspect for understanding post-communist urban
change is the distinction between the short-term period when
the basic principles of political and economic organization are
changed, the medium-term period when peoples’ behaviors,
habits and cultural norms are adopted to a new environment
and transformations in a number of spheres and begin to effect
broader societal change, and the long-term period in which
more stable patterns of urban morphology, land use and residential
segregation are reshaped.”
In the first years of the transition, the leading force of
transformations was played out by systemic governmentcontrolled
reforms that aimed to establish a capitalist system
based on a pluralist democracy and a market economy, and to
integrate socialist countries into global capitalist economy. The
establishment of democratic political system with free elections
and the plurality of political forces was followed with
economic reforms aimed at the introduction of market system
through the privatization of state assets, the liberalization of
prices and free foreign trade relations. These reforms were
necessary preconditions for other societal transformations to
take place through the changing practices of firms and people
in turn reflected in changing economic, social, and cultural
environments. Urban change has been especially influenced by
internationalization and globalization, economic restructuring
in terms of deindustrialization and the growth of producer
services, increasing social differentiation, new modes of postmodern
culture, and neoliberal political practices (Sýkora,
1994; Stanilov, 2007).
International companies and foreign direct investments
became leading agents in reshaping local economies and urban
geographies. Foreign investment in real estate reflected the
demand for space generated by international firms in producer
and consumer services as well as in industrial production and
started radically reshape urban landscapes and skylines. Foreign
managers and high-salary employees as well as low-paid
immigrant workers formed new mutually polarizing segments
of population on the housing market. Deindustrialization,
which presented the downward side of economic restructuring,
has been in many placed counterbalanced by the growth of
new industries and consumer services. However, both offering
mostly low paid-jobs. Only major urban centers, usually capital
cities, benefited from the growth in advance producer services.
Economic change mediated through labor markets was
expressed in increasing wage and income disparities that
contributed to social polarization among households, formation
of new sociospatial formations, and increasing territorial
disparities. Social inequality and conflicts appeared in initially,
socially, and ethnically homogenous urban societies.
New conditions allowed for the development of a greater
plurality of values, with particularly strong tendency toward
individualism and promotion of self-interests. This impacted
not only rapid decline of family formation leading to aging
urban populations but especially rapid proliferation of
consumption oriented life style. National and urban governments
often pursued political strategies grounded in a neoliberal
discourse, which saw free, unregulated market as the
mechanism of allocation of resources that would generate
a wealthy, economically efficient, and socially just society.
While the state was perceived as the root of principal harms to
the economy and society, urban transformations have often
been left to the operation of free market partially bound within
the framework of traditional rigid physical planning instruments.
In such constellation, powerful investors have often
steered politicians and planners to facilitate urban development
in a manner favorable to capital (Altrock et al., 2006;
Horák, 2007)
In postsocialist cities, the urban environments inherited
from socialist era, have been adapted to the new conditions
created by government reforms and ensuing economic, social,
and cultural transformations. With the introduction of capitalist
urban economy, the contradictions between capitalist
rules of the game and socialist urban environment led to the
restructuring of the socialist urban features and structures and
the formation of new capitalist urban landscapes. Most urban
growth and change concentrated in city centers, selected inner
city nodes and areas, and in rapidly expanding suburban zone
(Figure 1).
First years of transition were characterized by the rapid
commercialization and physical regeneration of expanding city
centers accompanied by the decline of residential functions,
densification of land uses, traffic congestion, and conflicts with
historical heritage. In the course of time, urban change spread
to inner city areas, which have been affected by both growth
and decline. Deindustrialization left behind extensive brownfields,
which presents not only the threat of decline but also
potential for redevelopment. Urban restructuring was driven by
the replacement of inherited land uses with new and
economically more efficient activities. In major cities, new
commercial growth concentrated in out-of-centre office clusters
and retail and entertainment complexes. Besides the formation
of new secondary commercial nodes and ribbon development
areas along highways, waterfronts received particular attention
of development industry.
The shifting housing preferences placed many socialist
housing estates and some older presocialist neighborhoods on
downwards spiral. On the other hand side, gentrification began
to bring some inner city quarter to their former glory and
prestige. Together with newly constructed condominium
districts and gated residential areas reflected desires of new
middle classes to live apart. Considering the formation of
immigrant enclaves and ghettoization of Roma and socially
vulnerable populations in housing estates in declining old
industrial cities, the new residential landscapes began to exhibit
bold segmentation in housing supply and evolving segregation
processes. With the increase in personal wealth of population,
people started to move to urban hinterlands to fulfill their
dreams of single family home. Sprawling residential districts
have been accompanied with big-box retailing, warehousing,
and industrial districts located along highways and on their
major intersection. Suburbanization has become the most
dynamic process changing the landscapes of postsocialist city
regions (Stanilov and Sýkora, 2014).
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Global Capitalism, Socialist Legacies and Challenges
of Postsocialist Urbanization
One of the key debates in postsocialist urban studies has been
evolving about the issue of interaction between socialist legacies
and neoliberal capitalism. Gentile et al. (2012) coin the
term heteropolitanization referring to increasing internal urban
complexity and heterogeneity of postsocialist city characterized
with the simultaneous emergence of new social and spatial
patterns in an environment, where powerful legacies preserve
the patterns inherited from the previous era” (Gentile et al.,
2012: p. 297). Golubchikov et al. (2013) emphasize the
“mutual embeddedness of the legacies of socialism and the
workings of neoliberal capitalism that jointly produce .
the hybrid spatialities of transition” (Golubchikov et al., 2013:
p. 618). They go in their argument even further speaking about
“the subsumption of the inherited systems into the very logic of
capitalist and neoliberal relationships, so that, while capitalist
practice feeds on the legacies of state socialism, it also alienates
them from their history to make them the infrastructure, and
often the agency, for its own expansion” (Golubchikov et al.,
2013: 630).
The postsocialist developments bring the re-emergence of
some presocialist patterns, transformations in some areas from
socialist times and creation of new postsocialist urban landscapes.
While the present urban patterns can be interpreted as
hybrid (Gentile et al., 2012), in the course of time, new capitalist
urban developments will be gaining even more important
role in the overall urban organization. Postsocialist city shall be
seen as a temporary phenomenon existing in the time-period
between the institutional reload through the replacement of
the socialist with the capitalist rules of the game and the
completion of corresponding transformations in urban built
and social environments (Sýkora, 2009). While many features
resembling socialism will certainly remain present even in
distant future, the essence of daily urban life and city operation
will be capitalist.
The dynamic development of suburbanization, a boom of
gated communities and gentrification of inner city quarters, the
emergence of socially excluded localities and enclaves of
immigrants, the establishment of office parks and shopping
districts, all are linked with the expansion of capitalism to
former second world countries. These similar forms of urban
developments, nowadays observable across the globe, are the
results of the social practices of firms, households, and
governments under the political, economic, and cultural
conditions of globally spreading capitalism. Global capitalism
has been the most powerful agent in the spread of similar
urbanization trends and features across the former socialist
countries of Europe, as well as in many other regions around
the world. The impact of global capitalist forces on postsocialist
urban change is, nevertheless, far from uniform. While the
global capitalist system embraces nearly the whole planet,
individual countries, regions, cities, and neighborhoods are
integrated into it in a highly uneven manner. In postsocialist
countries, the legacies of socialism, the character of new capitalist
institutional setup, the size and attractiveness of market,
etc. produce internally differentiating local outcomes of global
capitalism.
The most distinguishing feature of local postsocialist urban
restructuring under the imperative of global capitalism is the
spatial selectivity of investments and territorially uneven
growth. The desire of capital to utilize profit opportunities has
not been counterbalanced by public sector striving for more
socially and territorially balanced development. The urban
development in the postsocialist cities has been managed
through a mixture of free market practices of private firms
struggling for their share of newly emerging markets and
a highly decentralized, locally based, and regionally uncoordinated
system of land development in city regions.
Rapidly developing suburban sprawl and residential segregation
are two key processes of uneven development in postsocialist
cities, symptomatic features of global urbanism
spreading across former socialist countries and, at the same
time, major challenges for public policies. Residential and
commercial activities have decentralized into cities’ hinterlands
and radically transformed the compact physical morphology of
the former socialist city. The dynamics of population and job
growth in new suburbs has been remarkable bringing city
regions in postsocialist countries among the most sprawling
Figure 1 The pattern of investment and disinvestment in socialist and
postsocialist city. Source: Sýkora, L., 2009. Postsocialist cities. In:
Kitchin, R., Thrift, N. (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human
Geography. Elsevier, Oxford, pp. 387–395.
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areas in Europe (EEA, 2006). Suburbanization has increased
the range of housing options for the middle and upper income
households and brought employment and shopping opportunities
closer to residents living in the hinterland of cities. At
the same time, sprawl, which has become the typical form of
postsocialist metropolitan growth, has undermined the prospect
of achieving smart, inclusive, and sustainable development.
Suburban growth is rarely recognized as an integral
component of the overall process of metropolitan development,
leaving it to the decisions of numerous suburban
municipalities competing for their stake in the circuits of real
estate investments and population flows.
The simultaneous growth of gated communities, gentrified
areas, and suburbs of wealthy on the one hand side, and the
degradation of some housing estates, formation of socially
excluded localities, and spatial concentrations of immigrant
workers, reflect tendencies toward segregation and the emergence
of sociospatially polarized city (Hirt, 2012). Surprisingly,
the level of sociospatial inequality has not increased during the
first decades of capitalism (Marcinczak et al., 2013). While
inner city gentrification and suburbanization of middle class is
lifting up these residential zones from below average social
status, socialist housing estates that under socialism concentrated
younger and better-educated population are declining
from their better-off position toward city average. The simultaneous
operation of segregation processes and decline in
sociospatial disparities is a temporary paradox of postsocialist
transformation. In the course of time, the capitalist urban
economy accompanied with neoliberal practices of urban
development will strengthen and expand the new localities that
concentrate populations from the opposite sides of social
spectrum and capitalist segregation will definitely erase
socialist legacies.
The emerging social urban problems call for the reconsideration
of urban and regional planning, policies, and practices
pursued since the early 1990s. The postsocialist governments
placed high priority on individual choice, economic freedom,
and private property rights, without recognizing that urban
development is not just a matter of personal but of societal
choice. Fighting suburban sprawl and residential segregation
requires the coordination of urban development at the
metropolitan level and in interscalar coordination with
national and local governments. However, the stronger role of
governments in social and territorial development has been
resisted.
Conclusions
Postsocialist cities are cities under transformation. Urban
landscapes formed under socialism are being adapted and
remodeled to new conditions shaped by the political,
economic, and cultural transition to capitalism. The development
of cities in former socialist countries is now largely
governed by market forces and democratically elected governments.
However, the reorganization of urban landscapes in
postsocialist cities that began with the reforms of the 1990s has
not been completed yet. “Their defining feature remains the
incessant and relentless process of structural transformation
that has started to unfold since the end of communism”
(Sýkora and Bouzarovski, 2012: p. 44).
Even though the series of political and economic transformations
is already two decades old, the postsocialist transition
is a project still not finished. At present, sprawl and
segregation dramatically reconfigure urban landscapes. These
urban developments can be seen as outcomes of present day
choices that will impact the development of society for decades
to come. Postsocialist societies are still facing critical junctures.
Unfortunately, negligible attention is given to the anticipation
of future developments, their critical evaluation, and the
discussion of alternative development paths. Postsocialist
developments can lead to the formation of new path-dependent
lock-ins that these societies will later regret (Sýkora, 2008). They
can learn from analogical developments and alternatives known
from other countries and pay attention to the problematic
developments that may be avoided if alternative development
paths are taken sooner rather than later.
See also: Cities: Internal Structure; Gated Communities;
Gentrification; Planning During Post-Socialism;
Suburbanization and Suburbanism; Urban Neoliberalism;
Urban Policy in Europe; Urban Sprawl.
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