Explicit Definitions and Implicit Assumptions about Post Socialist Cities in Academic Writings
In the past five years, several critical commentaries have been published about the state of the art in research and theory on post socialist cities. Besides overviewing and generalizing the findings of previous studies, authors have identified several weak points in this field. This paper attempts to echo this body of work through reflecting on one simple, yet crucial question that has emerged in some of the contributions. This question is what the post socialist city actually stands for in urban research. The paper discusses the variety of meanings that this concept has acquired in academic literature and in scholars' attempts to explain the characteristic development of cities in former socialist countries since the 1990s.