If Cars Could Walk: Postsocialist Streets in Transformation

In the last twenty-five years, the explosive rise of car mobility has transformed street life in postsocialist cities. Whereas previously the social fabric of these cities ran on socialist modes of mobility, they are now overtaken by a culture of privately owned cars. If Cars Could Walk uses ethnographic cases studies documenting these changes in terms of street interaction, vehicles used, and the parameters of speed, maneuverability, and cultural and symbolic values. The altered reality of people’s movements, replacing public transport, bicycles and other former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility with privatized mobility reflect an evolving political and cultural imagination, which in turn shapes their current political reality.

Ger Duijzings is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universität Regensburg. He has done extensive research on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and is currently studying urban transformations in post-socialist cities. His publications include Global Villages: Rural and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Bulgaria (Anthem, 2013) and, along with Ben Campkin, the co-edited volume Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (I.B. Tauris, 2016).

Tauri Tuvikene is Professor of Urban Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His research covers the intersection of urban cultures, mobilities, cities, and policies. He has published widely on these topics in various journals, as well as co-edited Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures (Routledge, 2019) with Wladimir Sgibnev and Carola S. Neugebauer. He was Project Leader for a HERA-funded project on public transport as public space (2019-2022).