The East European Socialist/Post-socialist City as a Comparative Endeavor: Rethinking Our Research Perspective

Eastern Europe has been portrayed as the West’s undeveloped “other” since the French Enlightenment. In this brief debate article, we argue that Eastern Europe’s marginalization has only been augmented, even if inadvertently so, in scholarly debates on the “socialist city” and the “post-socialist city.” Explicitly or implicitly, both debates use Western cities as a “natural” point of comparison and as examples of a more advanced type of urbanism. This approach has led to systematic underappreciation of the specific and sometimes positive aspects of East European urbanism. The article calls for a renewed engagement with East European cities in which they are studied on their own terms, rather than in perpetual comparative dependency on their Western counterparts.