Syllabus
The course would like to investigate the urban experience in the post-socialist period, and contrast it with the socialist period, i.e. focus on the ways people have lived their urban lives, how they have lived through the changes and how they perceive the differences between the socialist and postsocialist period. Other topics the course will deal with is urban landscape, monuments, urban material culture, urban design and architecture, property issues, social cleavages and ethnic divisions, consumerism, leisure and life style, urbanisation and (transnational) migration.
Annotation
After the end of Communism, many cities in Eastern Europe are undergoing rapid social and economic change, which has had major effects on the physical outlook of these cities. It also has affected the ways in which people, urbanites as well as non-urbanites, perceive these cities and urban life in general.
This course wants to investigate how, in the post-socialist context, city dwellers perceive, define and use this rapidly transforming urban space, as well as how they try to shape and appropriate it (make their own "place" out of urban "space"). The course will also look at the ideological uses of the city, i.e. the ways in which peasants and other non-urbanites (but also urbanites themselves) perceive cities not only as "free" and anonymous places, offering a wide range of new economic possibilities, but also as sources of widely felt insecurity, danger and threat.
In some parts of Eastern Europe, such fears have been reinforced by the lack of political control over processes of urban growth and development. Many changes seem to evolve without planning, which is in marked contrast with the socialist period.
During the 1990s, existential fears under new political and economic conditions have fuelled anti-urbanist discourses, and boosted forms of populism and nationalism. This has been salient in the case of the former Yugoslavia: the urban-rural division has been important in understanding the violence of the 1990s, some local intellectuals going as far as to characterise the war as a form of "urbicide".