ABSTRACT
Shrinking cities in the so-called postsocialist “Global East” are in danger of “double exclusion”, positioned outside both mainstream urban studies and postcolonial debates. 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. 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. This introduction also presents an overview of this book.
