This timely and interdisciplinary book deals with urban marginality as a multi-faceted process of urban transformation that engenders a wide range of experiences world-wide.
Through the application of new empirical material and novel theoretical syntheses that exceed conceptual binaries (East-West, North-South), the authors explore shifting contemporary experiences of marginality in various urban contexts in Eastern Europe (EE). The unique articulation between global processes – such as gentrification, financialization, racialization and spatialization – and the distinctive histories, contestations and dislocations that characterize EE cities calls for increasing scholarly attention. The volume explores new patterns and drivers of urban marginality and racialization, and at the same time connects these to wider problematics of “advanced capitalist” cities as well as to post-socialist and anti-colonial urbanisms. The fourteen chapters contribute to a more nuanced understanding of global urbanism that decentres dominant Anglophone conceptualisations. Contributions focus empirically and theoretically on Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine.
The volume is recommended for students and urban scholars in EE and beyond, but will also be of interest to activists involved in housing and urban justice as well as in broader struggles towards the anti-racist city.
Table of Contents:
'1. Thinking from the East: Urban marginality, racialisation and interdependence in Eastern Europe. Part 1. Racialisation and the production of the urban margins. 2. Dispossessed, segregated, exploited: On racialised residential capitalism in postsocialist Czechia. 3. Urbanization of racial capitalism in Serbia: Transition, racialisation, evictions. 4. From social housing to evictions: State-led displacement and the urban poor in Bucharest. 5. Maintaining marginality: A genealogy of security mechanisms against Roma in Baia Mare. Part 2. Mobilities and the shifting urban margins. 6. Human capital and digital citizenship: Postsocialism’s urban dispossessions. 7. Locked in permanent temporariness: Internally displaced persons in Serbia. 8. The Russian minority in the Baltic capitals: Examining marginalisation in the context of urban dynamics. Part 3. Enduring and countering urban marginality. 9. Depoliticised urban commons: Romania’s perpetuating slum formations, deepening housing struggles, and political disinterest. 10. Doing and undoing communities: Opposing municipal narratives and spatial politics in a diverse neighbourhood of Budapest. 11. Between transformation and marginality: Urban life and socially engaged art at the fringe of Prishtina. 12. Infrastructures of marginality in a city with “war on the horizon”: Insights from Lyman, Ukraine. Part 4. Race, post-socialism and the city: Reflections and new horizons. 13. Roma ghettos within the abyss of European modernity: Technologies of control and emancipatory horizons. 15. Post-socialist racial geographies studies.
About the Author :
Filip Alexandrescu is a Senior Researcher (2nd degree) at the Research Institute for Quality of Life in Bucharest, Romania.
Ryan Powell is Professor of Urban Studies in the School of Geography and Planning at the University of Sheffield, UK.
Ana Vilenica is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for the ERC project ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing’ at the Polytechnic and University of Turin’s Inter-university Department of Regional & Urban Studies and Planning (DIST) and a core member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab.
Review :
“This is a crucial and long overdue intervention in critical urban thought that refines our understanding of interdependence. By explaining global urban linkages hitherto only partially considered while centring the margins of heterogeneous geographies of the European East, its thoughtful lessons will spur both scholarly debates and community struggles for racial justice”.
-Giovanni Picker, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Glasgow, and author of ‘Racial Cities’.
“The volume is a rich kaleidoscope of faces of urban marginality in Eastern Europe – from racialised dispossession of Roma, through forms of collective displacement to glimpses of hope and resistance. A scholarly case for analytical relevance of categories of racial capitalism and post-socialism in the 21st century”.
-Barbora Černušáková, Hallsworth Fellow, University of Manchester.
“Eastern European cities have been at the forefront of many ambitious and contested forms of urbanism in the 20th century, and are at the forefront of illiberalism, racial capitalism, and urban warfare in the 21st century. This is a tour-de-force for provincializing the study of urban marginality”.
-Liviu Chelcea, University of Bucharest.
“The book is essential to East European scholarship. It could be a start, alongside similar endeavors from the region, for remaking urban studies beyond geographical dichotomies by examining how capitalism became global through dismantling East European state socialism and shaping its post-socialist transformations.”
-Enikő Vincze, urban and housing studies scholar and activist.
