The text presents the most popular ideas about the end of the world that spread in Bulgaria in the post-socialist period. In the years of transition after 1989, social and political changes, as well ...as an economic crisis, favoured apocalyptic expectations. In contrast to the past, when the religious explanation of the world’s end dominated, in contemporary times the apocalypse is more frequently related to cosmic and natural disasters or to the negative effects of human activity. A characteristic view of the end of the world is imagining it as a new beginning. In the present, there is also a transformation in the mechanism for shaping ideas about the end of the world. Modernization, globalization, and new technologies are changing both people’s daily lives and their ideas about the fate of the human world. After the boom of apocalyptic expectations in Bulgarian society at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, in recent years we have seen a rationalization of the eschatological notions and their close connection with ecological and political arguments.
Suburbanization processes in the hinterland of Bratislava represent one of the most significant socio-spatial transformations in the post-socialist history of Slovakia. The trend of settlement ...decentralisation within the dynamically growing metropolitan region contrasts in many ways with the settlement development of the period of state socialism, during which centrally controlled and planned settlement transformation and industrial urbanisation brought about the most intensive urban development and settlement transformation on the territory of the Slovak Republic to date. The aim of the present paper is to examine the main ideological underpinnings and implemented public policies that have influenced, and continue to influence the processes of settlement development, urban growth and decentralisation tendencies within urban regions.
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.
This article situates feminist research and activism in the post‐socialist world. Focusing mainly on Ukraine and Russia, but drawing on research from around the region, this genealogy explores the ...unique contributions of feminist and gender‐based activism before, during, and after state socialism. It is organized around the tension between feminism and nationalism that has been present in Ukraine from the 19th century to the present day, and it asks how this tension has generated a vibrant feminist discourse despite backlash. The article highlights the overlap between feminist scholarship and activism, treating both as essential to the development of a regional feminism.
This article studies the development of Warsaw's Służewiec neighbourhood, Poland's largest business district, as a case of real estate financialization. We argue that the neighbourhood's chaotic ...‘de‐contextualized’ growth was shaped by Poland's semi‐peripheral position in the global economy on the one hand—enabling a process of subordinate financialization—and legacies of state socialism on the other. In so doing, we mobilize research on peripheral financialization and global economic hierarchies, and studies of post‐socialism to enhance debates about real estate financialization. Commercial real estate—and office development in particular—is a crucial domain in which contemporary core–periphery structures are produced and negotiated. A key function of subordinate financialization is to absorb globally mobile capital—the product of financialization in the core. The case of Służewiec shows that only by considering the interplay of global hierarchies (Poland's position as capital absorbent), local dynamics (fragmented urban development, which was characterized by competition among these unequal municipalities, with local growth coalitions in some municipalities, but not in others) and specific historical legacies (Warsaw's socialist‐time functional organization and its transformation, which weakened the city) can we fully understand the specific dynamics that shape real estate financialization in different places.
•Proliferation of farmers’ markets (FMs) in post-socialist global semi-periphery.•FMs’ functional differences disguised by their apparent sameness with the core.•Importance of organisers’ discourse ...for understanding the difference of FMs.•FMs’ alternativeness in terms of food quality rather than sustainability.•FMs constituted by imported ideas intersecting (mismatching) with local context.
Alternative food networks in post-socialist settings are often studied using concepts and analytical tools developed in the Anglo-American context. As a result, the findings tend to replicate and confirm rather than challenge and extend the extant knowledge and theorisations. Based on a recent study of farmers’ markets in the Czech capital Prague, the paper claims that viewing these ‘from the periphery’ produces novel insights complementing those garnered in researching them in the West. In the context of earlier alternative food initiatives, the boom of farmers’ markets, which Prague experienced in the early 2010s, was unparalleled. In less than 24 months, 41 farmers’ markets were established in and around the city. Focusing methodologically on the discourse of the organisers of farmers’ markets and theoretically on the complex hidden geography underlying the farmers’ markets’ boom, we are able to unpick the intricacy and paradoxical nature inherent in this development. While acknowledging the farmers’ markets embeddedness in the local context, we argue that a more comprehensive understanding of farmers’ markets requires engagement with a flow of ideas and know-how transcending the locality. The ensuing type of farmers’ markets is a result of interactions among different travelling concepts as well as of their encounter with the specificities of the local post-socialist context. We argue that the fact that these concepts were not necessarily concordant with each other and also insufficiently adapted to the local context had a profound effect on Prague farmers’ markets’ boom.
Women entrepreneurs in Bucharest, Romania, increased by six times (compared to five times for men) between the 1992 and 2002 censuses, during a period of transition from a centrally planned to a ...market economy. A study of over 150 territory referential units shows a concentration of business women in central, high income areas and a correlation between the entrepreneurial status and education. Data from 50 telephone interviews show that women with university degrees are more likely to operate at a city-wide or national scale, in fields such as cosmeticology, consultancy, law, design, art, and manufacturing. Women without higher education tend to operate at a local, smaller scale. Both spatial concentration and education have an impact upon business behaviour.
While scholars have developed a nuanced understanding of agriculture as a form of care, the temporal organization of farming practices has received little consideration. Focusing on how farmers ...organize and experience agriculture, we track diverging approaches to care work on urban farms in Vilnius, Lithuania. Our ethnographic fieldwork and interviews show how Lithuanian urban farmers are struggling to reconcile the civic ideals of the global urban farming movement with their historical understandings of care for specific plants and the land. Whereas the older generation views farming as kinship-based individualized work focusing on particular plants and garden ecologies, the younger generation approaches it as a way to unwind, mediate, and build a community. These different perspectives on farming translate into divergent temporalities of care in which productivist goals rooted in socialist self-provisioning practices and embodied in orderly landscapes encounter new trends of agricultural care manifested in the natural aesthetics of the farms. We examine dynamic tensions between the two farming modalities by linking them to different understandings of moral commitments and responsibilities for plants and land. Through the lens of temporality, we also show how these divergent care modes are themselves grounded in gender inequalities reproduced on the farms and enabled by by the welfare state institutions, including maternity leave and retirement policies.
In this article we explore how nature becomes part of the city through the example of allotment gardening in the city of Prague, in the Czech Republic. Prague allotments were established based on an ...ongoing political‐ecological process of urbanization of nature that was locally driven by socialist (from 1948 to 1989) and later neoliberal governance. We employ a situated urban political ecology (UPE) approach to analyse changes in the planning of allotments and the impact thereof on the experience of gardeners. This double focus allows us to uncover the effects of neoliberalization on the processes of production of urban nature in respect of both policy and everyday practice. We contrast contemporary capitalist urbanization with its socialist predecessor by showing the immediate effects of the acceptance of neoliberal modes of governance on allotments, urban nature and the understanding of the city. We open allotments as a terrain for UPE to turn attention to the (uneven) production of urban nature in a post‐socialist context that has thus far been largely absent from the UPE literature. We demonstrate that post‐socialist urbanization is a fruitful terrain that offers new opportunities to unmask the effects of neoliberalization on the production of uneven urban space and thus improves our understanding of contemporary uneven urbanisms.
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