From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities

Alexander C. Diener is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas where he works in the field of political and social geography. His research explores the relationship between identity and place through the themes of geopolitics and borders, nationalism and transnationalism, mobility and migration, and urban landscape change. His regional expertise includes Central Asia, Russian borderlands, and Mongolia.Joshua Hagen is Professor and Chair of the Geography Department at the Marshall University. His research focuses on the political geographic dimensions of nationalism, borders, international relations, totalitarianism, urban design, and historical preservation. He has worked on these issues in European, Eurasian, and North American contexts.

• 1. Introduction: From socialist to post-socialist cities: narrating the nation through urban space 2. Urban space, political identity and the unwanted legacies of state socialism: Bucharest’s problematic Centru Civic in the post-socialist era 3. Millennial politics of architecture: myths and nationhood in Budapest 4. The Southern Square in the Baltic Pearl: Chinese ambition and “European” architecture in St. Petersburg, Russia 5. “Civilizing the city center”: symbolic spaces and narratives of the nation in Yerevan’s post-Soviet landscape 6. The production of a new Eurasian capital on the Kazakh steppe: architecture, urban design, and identity in Astana 7. Leaving Lenin: elites, official ideology and monuments in the Kyrgyz Republic 8. City of felt and concrete: Negotiating cultural hybridity in Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar 9. In search of lost time: memory politics in Estonia, 1991–2011