Postsocialist Shrinking Cities

Chung-Tong Wu, Maria Gunko, Tadeusz Stryjakiewicz, Kai Zhou, Chung-Tong Wu, Maria Gunko, Tadeusz Stryjakiewicz, Kai Zhou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000545562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book provides a comparative analysis of shrinking cities in a broad range of postsocialist countries within the so-called Global East, a liminal space between North and South. While shrinking cities have received increased scholarly attention in the past decades, theoretical, and empirical research has remained predominantly centered on the Global North. This volume brings to the fore a range of new perspectives on urban shrinkage, identifying commonalities, differences, and policy experiences across a very diverse and vivid region with its various legacies and contemporary controversial developments. With chapters written by leading experts in the field, insider views assist in decolonizing urban theory. Specifically, the book includes chapters on shrinking cities in China, Russia, and postsocialist Europe, presenting comparative discussions within countries and crossnational cases on theoretical and policy implications.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars researching urban studies, urban geography, urban planning, urban politics and policy, urban sociology, and urban development.

Part IShrinkage in the postsocialist countries: Concepts and theory

1IntroductionUrban shrinkage in the postsocialist realm

Maria Gunko, Chung-Tong Wu, Kai Zhou and Tadeusz Stryjakiewicz

DOI: 10.4324/​9780367815011-2

Objectives and origin of the book

Shrinking cities, in general, have received increasing scholarly attention since the early 2000s, but the geographic focus of case studies and theory building has remained predominantly restricted to the Global North (Pallagst et al., 2014; Haase et al., 2014; Hollander, 2018). Shrinking cities in the so-called postsocialist “Global East” (Chan et al., 2018; Müller and Trubina, 2020) are in danger of “double exclusion”, positioned outside both mainstream urban studies and postcolonial debates (Tuvikene, 2016). Moreover, there is a lack of in-depth comparisons between shrinking cities within this vast, contested, and diverse region.

In one of the first studies of its kind, Kubes (2013) identified the lopsided coverage of postsocialist shrinking cities. Even though the criterion he used excluded studies of Chinese cities and the Asian part of Russia, he identified over 180 articles published on Leipzig, which at the time was far more than any other postsocialist shrinking city (Kubes, 2013). More recently, Doringer and others examined 100 case studies of shrinking cities in the European Union (EU) and Japan, with about 30 percent of the case studies covering postsocialist Europe (Doringer et al., 2019). They noted a paucity of comparative studies. Bajerski (2020), investigating which countries and institutions have been contributing to the study of postsocialist cities, found a dominance of research from countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but his coverage identified an increasing number of articles on China and a notable absence of Russian institutions among the top 20 research institutions publishing on the topic (Bajerski, 2020). The above is indicative that there is a need for comparative studies of shrinking cities that include a broad range of postsocialist countries to identify commonalities, differences, and policy experiences. This book is an attempt to remedy this situation through contributions from researchers based in 15 institutions of the postsocialist “Global East” to offer a view from the inside and help to decolonize knowledge. Specifically, we have organized the book to include chapters on shrinking cities in China, Russia, and postsocialist Europe, offering a comparative discussion within countries and cross-national cases on the theoretical aspects and policy implications. With this, we believe that the book partly responds to Hollander’s call: “if there were more, better, and especially cross-national research on shrinkage, the on-the-ground truth might turn out to be more complex and interesting” (Hollander et al., 2009, p. 230).

The idea for this book originated from two sessions on shrinking cities organized as part of the 2018 04–06 June International Geographic Union (IGU) thematic conference dedicated to the centennial of the Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Practical Geography and 21st Century Challenges held in Moscow. The roster of authors has been expanded to ensure the book has an adequate geographic and thematic coverage. Thus, the authors are situated in diverse institutions but have relevant backgrounds.

The postsocialist label

Early discussions of urban changes within the researched region tend to use the terms “postsocialist”(Andrusz et al., 1996) or “postcommunist” (Pickles and Smith, 1998; Sykora and Bouzarovski, 2012) to group countries together either for the sake of convenience or based on a set of ideas about the specific nature of a socialist city that ultimately predefined the specific nature of the postsocialist one (this assumption is currently debated by some scholars (see, for example, Hirt et al., 2016)). Referring to cities in eastern Europe, Szelenyi (1996: 294) asserts that there are qualitative differences between socialist cities and capitalist cities. He posits socialist countries tend to have low urbanization and less spatial concentration, a lack of functional diversity and are uneconomical in the use of space. However, even in the mid-1990s, there was recognition of vast diversity among the former socialist states. In a book with much broader geographic coverage, including CEE, Russia, China, Vietnam, and others, Pickles and Smith emphasized the need to take into account the historic context and regionally uneven development when examining the impacts of the postsocialist transformations (Pickles and Smith, 1998). Pickles and Smith were the few researchers who included China and Russia in their coverage of postsocialist transformations and its impacts on urban development.

Until the early 2000s, there were few studies of postsocialist shrinking cities, while the few available tended to focus on the European cases (Stanilov, 2007). An analysis of publications on postsocialist shrinking cities noted the lopsided interest, even within Europe, with one city in former East Germany receiving the most attention, although the author of this study was careful to note that his criteria excluded China and the Eastern part of Russia (Kubes, 2013). Further research on postsocialist shrinking cities has also had a strong geographical bias focusing on Europe; though its comparative nature drawing on various cases from this region and the strive toward enhancing the concept of “urban shrinkage” with the postsocialist perspective, should be acknowledged (Haase et al., 2016).

The recent discussion on postsocialist cities, including shrinking ones produced within different disciplines, tends to focus on the stricture that the “postsocialist” label places on theory-building, at the same time recognizing that it is unhelpful to examine them with the use of models based on “western” experience (Humphrey, 2001; Tuvikene, 2016). Stenning and Horschelmann (2008) argue that there are multiple postsocialisms. Framing the application of the term postsocialism in the discourse of postcolonialism has raised issues on how and if the term may be used purely for marking a time period, a spatial area (second world in development studies), or is more divisive in terms of knowledge production (Cervinkova, 2012). Numerous scholars have voiced their objections to marginalizing the postsocialist cities as either “cases unto themselves” or “deviations” from the universalistic western “grand models” of urban development (Roy and Ong, 2011; Robinson, 2011; Gentile, 2018; Peck, 2015; Sjoberg, 2014). They argue for “multipolar, cosmopolitan, and comparative modes of urban theory making” (Peck, 2015: 160). Furthermore, Müller has declared “goodbye postsocialism” as a way to say that it is no longer relevant as a reference point since issues such as neoliberalism, globalization, and mass migrations are much more important for shaping the current urban form (Müller, 2019). Though we do see the debates on abandoning the “postsocialist” label as having a point, since the early scholars did tend to use postsocialism as a predefining condition; however, it would be remiss to altogether deny the importance of various socialist legacies and path-dependencies that still explicitly or implicitly play a role in contemporary urban development within China, Russia, the postsocialist European countries and other countries that experience state socialism.

Some early studies of postsocialist cities in Europe assert these cities have similar spatial restructuring issues in spite of variations in the national context (Stanilov, 2007; Ferencuhova, 2016, Sykora and Bouzarovski, 2012). However, neither all postsocialist cities change in the same way nor do they necessarily have a similar approach toward urban shrinkage within the country or compared to other postsocialist countries. For instance, abandoned housing and large tracks of brownfield sites are not necessarily common in shrinking cities if we draw our attention to China and Russia. Furthermore, as demonstrated by the cases from postsocialist European countries and Russia, what may appear to be the same urban transformation process has very different actors, causes, and outcomes—the pro-growth orientation in Russian cities, which appears at first glance to be led by an entrepreneurial pro-growth “coalition”, may instead be a group of state agencies appointed by the government to implement development projects (Kinossian, 2012; Müller, 2011). At the same time, the diversity in postsocialist outcomes does not erase their past shared experience of state-owned means of production, residential control, and planned economies — all elements that contribute to the way their urban systems evolved and still evolve today.

So, does the postsocialist label help or obscure? It is a convenient way for a geographical grouping of countries that shared a similar po...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Part I Shrinkage in the postsocialist countries: Concepts and theory
• Part II China
• Part III Russia
• Part IV Postsocialist Europe
• Part V Conclusions, policy implications, and research
• Index