Preliminary Programme

The paper deals with a massive housing programme carried out by the socialist government, starting in the 1960s. The process of privatization after 1990 and the lack of an urban masterplan then led to an uncontrolled sprawl, both in the city center and at the outskirts. Socialist block areas were confronted with an absence of planning and controlling by the official authorities, while in the meantime the new owners of tha apartments started to renovate and refurbish the newly gained properties according to their individual aesthetic and material visions - but also in connection to post-socialist commercial buildings that shaped the urban landscape in a massive way. The paper focuses on conflicts on "proper" and "correct" ideas of individual renovation and public modernization in Drumul Taberei, a block of flats in the Romanian capital. (Show less)

Tourism, which has increased considerably since 1991 in the two Georgian cities of Tbilisi and Batumi, is closely intertwined with prostitution: On the one hand a part of the international tourists come to both cities for using the opportunity of commercial sex, on the other hand women also come to the two Georgian cities as tourists and make their business with commercial sex. The paper explores in a comparative perspectives how this process has shaped the re-spatialization of both cities, in particular its city centers. (Show less)

Lviv and especially its central part is one of the most popular points of tourist attraction in Ukraine. However, since the Soviet times the center of the city had been a place of leisure for the residents of Lviv as well, many of whom from working class background. This situation has changed in the last decade, as a single company took over the restaurants, bars, cafes etc. all over central Lviv, transforming the palces from affordable for the majority of Lviv residents and guests to exclusive tourist-oriented. The change has produced social exclusion, expecially in terms of leisure. The paper aims at analyzing these processes through the prism of urban political economy, namely David Harvey's thesis on accumulation of capital in space, as well as urban regime theories, which focus on the interconnections between private and public actors in the city. Apart from addressing the mechanisms of the urban transformation, we reveal their outcomes, such as two types of socio-spatial exclusion - exclusion in leisure and consumption ( so called soft gentrification) and in term of residency ('classic' gentrification). (Show less)

The city of Mitrovica underwent a dramatic transformation from the model industrial city of Socialist Kosovo to an ethnically segregated fault-line city in the ongoing conflict between Kosovo and Serbia. This paper analyses how the socio-spatial differentiation that characterised socialist urbanisation infuses meaning into the current ethno-political re-spatialization of the city. (Show less)