ABSTRACT
During the Cold War geopolitical division of the world, the cities of the former Soviet Bloc were the subject of ideological stereotypes, as well as the object of idealistic imaginations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Since the end of the Cold War, cities of the ex-Soviet Bloc have often been subject to teleologies of postsocialist ‘transition to capitalism,’ which emphasized the emergence, and indeed the necessity, of free-market urbanism and the value of private property, as well as the retreat of the state as part of the imagined road to a propertied civil society. Early theorizations of postsocialism indicated that the Cold War division between West and East meant a form of ‘knowledge and a cognitive organization of the world.’ The ‘urbanization of anti-communism’ has had palpable effects on urban transformation.
