Urban Marginality, Racialisation, Interdependence: Learning from Eastern Europe

This timely and interdisciplinary book deals with urban marginality as a multi-faceted process of urban transformation that engenders a wide range of experiences world-wide.

Through the application of new empirical material and novel theoretical syntheses that exceed conceptual binaries (East-West, North-South), the authors explore shifting contemporary experiences of marginality in various urban contexts in Eastern Europe (EE). The unique articulation between global processes – such as gentrification, financialization, racialization and spatialization – and the distinctive histories, contestations and dislocations that characterize EE cities calls for increasing scholarly attention. The volume explores new patterns and drivers of urban marginality and racialization, and at the same time connects these to wider problematics of “advanced capitalist” cities as well as to post-socialist and anti-colonial urbanisms. The fourteen chapters contribute to a more nuanced understanding of global urbanism that decentres dominant Anglophone conceptualisations. Contributions focus empirically and theoretically on Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine.

The volume is recommended for students and urban scholars in EE and beyond, but will also be of interest to activists involved in housing and urban justice as well as in broader struggles towards the anti-racist city.

Filip Alexandrescu is a Senior Researcher (2nd degree) at the Research Institute for Quality of Life in Bucharest, Romania.

Ryan Powell is Professor of Urban Studies in the School of Geography and Planning at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Ana Vilenica is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for the ERC project ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing’ at the Polytechnic and University of Turin’s Inter-university Department of Regional & Urban Studies and Planning (DIST) and a core member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab.