Description
Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures critically elaborates on often forgotten, but some of the most essential, aspects of contemporary urban life, namely infrastructures, and links them to a discussion of post-socialist transformation.
As the skeletons of cities, infrastructures capture the ways in which urban environments are assembled and urban lives unfold. Focusing on post-socialist cities, marked by neoliberalisation, polarisation and hybridity, this book offers new and enriching perspectives on urban infrastructures by centering on the often marginalised aspects of urban research—transport, green spaces, and water and heating provision.
Featuring cases from West and East alike, the book covers examples from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Germany, Russia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Tajikistan, and India. It provides original insights into the infrastructural back end of post-socialist cities for scholars, planners and activists interested in urban geography, cultural and social anthropology, and urban studies.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Linking Post-Socialist and Urban Infrastructures
Tauri Tuvikene, Wladimir Sgibnev and Carola S. Neugebauer
2. Energy Poverty in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): Understanding the European Union’s core-periphery divide
Stefan Bouzarovski and Sergio Tirado Herrero
3. The Thermodynamics of the Social Contract: Making Infrastructures Visible in the Case of District Heating in Two Towns in Serbia and Croatia
Deana Jovanović
4. Ideologies and Informality in Urban Infrastructure: The Case of Housing in Soviet and Post-Soviet Baku
Sascha Roth
5. Changing times, persistent inequalities? Patterns of housing infrastructure development in the South Caucasus
Joseph Salukvadze and David Sichinava
6. Post-Soviet ‘Nuclear’ Towns as Multi-Scalar Infrastructures: Relating Sovereignty and Urbanity Through the Perspective of Visaginas
Siarhei Liubimau
7. Green Infrastructure in Post-Socialist Cities: Evidence and Experiences from Eastern Germany, Poland and Russia
Dagmar Haase, Diana Dushkova, Annegret Haase, Jakub Kronenberg
8. Moscow Urban Development: Neoliberal Urbanism and Green Infrastructures
Daniela Zupan and Mirjam Büdenbender
9. Bengaluru’s urban water infrastructure through the lens of post-socialism
Chandrima Mukhopadhyay and Tauri Tuvikene
10. Public Transport in Brno: From Socialist to Post-Socialist Rhythms
Ondřej Mulíček and Daniel Seidenglanz
11. Predictability and Propinquity on the Sofia Metro: Everyday Metro Journeys and Long-Term Relations of Transport Infrastructuring
Anna Plyushteva
12. Infrastructures as Fluidities: How Marshrutkas Help Us to Overcome Static Conceptions of Road-Based Mobility Service Provision
Tonio Weicker and Wladimir Sgibnev
13. Conclusion: Infrastructure and Post-Socialism in Theory and Practice
Carola S. Neugebauer, Wladimir Sgibnev and Tauri Tuvikene
