Explicit Definitions and Implicit Assumptions about Post-Socialist Cities in Academic Writings

In the past five years, several critical commentaries have been published about the state of the art in research and theory on post‐socialist cities. Besides overviewing and generalizing the findings of previous studies, authors have identified several weak points in this field. This paper attempts to echo this body of work through reflecting on one simple, yet crucial question that has emerged in some of the contributions. This question is what the post‐socialist city actually stands for in urban research. The paper discusses the variety of meanings that this concept has acquired in academic literature and in scholars' attempts to explain the characteristic development of cities in former socialist countries since the 1990s. It argues that besides explicit definitions, different implicit imageries of the post‐socialist city have appeared in urban research. It has been presented as a passive structure moulded by the events in the political and economic sphere, as a specific place creatively responding to local and translocal processes, and as a place of innovation. The last post‐socialist‐city‐imagery partly responds to impulses coming recently from international urban theory, especially from the calls for a critical rethinking of the hierarchies reproduced in and through theoretical concepts (Robinson 2006; McFarlane 2010). I argue that we are currently witnessing a shift in the way the concept is being used. This brings new stimuli, topics, and also challenges to this field of research.