The cultural landscapes of Central European cities reflect over half a century of socialism and are marked by the Marxists' vision of a utopian landscape. Architecture, urban planning and the visual arts were considered to be powerful means of expressing the 'people's power'. However, since the velvet revolutions of 1989, this urban scenery has been radically transformed by new forces and trends, infused by the free market, democracy and liberalization. This has led to 'landscape cleansing' and 'recycling', as these former communist nations used new architectural, functional and social forms to transform their urbanscapes, their meanings and uses. Comparing case studies from different post-socialist cities, this book examines the culturally conditional variations between local powers and structures despite the similarities in the general processes and systems. It considers the contemporary cultural landscapes of these post-socialist cities as a dynamic fusion of the old communist forms and new free-market meanings, features and democratic practices, of global influences and local icons. The book assesses whether these urbanscapes clearly reflect the social, cultural and political conditions and aspirations of these transitional countries and so a critical analysis of them provides important insights.

Public Space: Between Reimagination and Occupation examines contemporary public space as a result of intense social production reflecting contradictory trends: the long-lasting effects of the global crisis, manifested in supranational trade-offs between political influence, state power and private ownership; and the appearance of global counter-actors, enabled by the expansion of digital communication and networking technologies and rooted into new participatory cultures, easily growing into mobile cultures of protest. The highlighted cases from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America reveal the roots of the pre-crisis processes of redistribution of capital and power as an aspect of the transition from the consumerist past into the post-consumerist present, by tracing the slow growth of social discontent that has led only a few years later to the mobilization of a new kind of self-conscious globally-acting class. This edited volume brings together a broad range of interdisciplinary discussions and approaches, providing sociologists, cultural geographers, and urban planning academics and students with an opportunity to explore the various social, cultural, economic and political factors leading to reappropriation and reimagination of the urban commons in the cities within which we live.

Public Space: Between Reimagination and Occupation examines contemporary public space as a result of intense social production reflecting contradictory trends: the long-lasting effects of the global crisis, manifested in supranational trade-offs between political influence, state power and private ownership; and the appearance of global counter-actors, enabled by the expansion of digital communication and networking technologies and rooted into new participatory cultures, easily growing into mobile cultures of protest. The highlighted cases from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America reveal the roots of the pre-crisis processes of redistribution of capital and power as an aspect of the transition from the consumerist past into the post-consumerist present, by tracing the slow growth of social discontent that has led only a few years later to the mobilization of a new kind of self-conscious globally-acting class. This edited volume brings together a broad range of interdisciplinary discussions and approaches, providing sociologists, cultural geographers, and urban planning academics and students with an opportunity to explore the various social, cultural, economic and political factors leading to reappropriation and reimagination of the urban commons in the cities within which we live.