The Socialist City as a Development Model for the EU Era

• In Event: Counterintuitive Communism: Unexpected Outcomes of State Socialist Policies

Abstract

This paper will focus on the fate of socialist cities in the former Czechoslovakia and Poland in the post-1989 period in the context of on-going urban change in an era of dominant neoliberalism in Europe. Historians, geographers, and urbanists have often struggled to create productive comparisons between the socialist city and the capitalist cities of the postwar era, especially with respect to the processes of urban renewal that swept many parts of the world from the 1960s to the 1980s. The two urban types, socialist vs. capitalist, have often been studied in disconnected silos with scholars interested primarily in comparative case studies within the political systems even if both participated processes of urban renewal.



The focus of this paper is to create a dialogue about post-1989 changes in socialist cities, such as Prague, Ostrava, and Warsaw, as a parallel process to the neoliberal urban agenda in the capitalist context in the same period. As a further development of my earlier writing about the socialist city, this paper proposes that socialist cities were organized in ways that encouraged investment of private capital and minimized debates about the potential pitfalls of rapid real estate development. This has led to cities that compare favorably on economic measures to others in the EU much more quickly than may have been anticipated, and at the same time the emergence of typical problems of capitalism such as gentrification and income inequality.

Author

• Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Iowa State U