Description
Book Synopsis In the last twenty-five years, the explosive rise of car mobility has transformed street life in postsocialist cities. Whereas previously the social fabric of these cities ran on socialist modes of mobility, they are now overtaken by a culture of privately owned cars. If Cars Could Walk uses ethnographic cases studies documenting these changes in terms of street interaction, vehicles used, and the parameters of speed, maneuverability, and cultural and symbolic values. The altered reality of people’s movements, replacing public transport, bicycles and other former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility with privatized mobility reflect an evolving political and cultural imagination, which in turn shapes their current political reality.
Trade Review “When, some fifteen years ago, I started writing about automobility in socialist societies, little could I have imagined that the postsocialist countries of Europe would inspire a profusion of young scholars to examine their specific mobilities. If Cars Could Walk conveys all the excitement and even frisson of a pioneering venture.” • Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Michigan State University
“This book is an important addition to urban mobility studies and it surely will enrich our understanding of the transformations of street connectivity in the countries of Eastern Europe.” • Elena Trubina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Table of Contents Introduction
Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene
Chapter 1. Seven Imaginary Images of the Transition of GDR Streets, 1989–1995
Kurt Möser
Chapter 2. Liberated or Lawless? Social Life on Prishtina’s Postwar Streets
Rita Gagica and Ger Duijzings
Chapter 3. ‘Changing Everything Fast’? Young Men in the Streets of Tbilisi
Costanza Curro
Chapter 4. Coproducing the Car and the Stratified Street: Automobility and Space in Russia
Jeremy Morris
Chapter 5. Bucharest’s Centura: Encircling a City in Transformation
Ger Duijzings
Chapter 6. Pedestrianizing Moscow: Disparities Between the Centre and the Inner Periphery
Sabina Maslova and Tauri Tuvikene
Chapter 7. Between Non-place and Public Space: Life at a Postsocialist (Trolley)Bus Stop
Andrey Vozyanov
Chapter 8. Where the Streets Have No Name: Toponymic Changes, Wayfinding and Tashkent’s System of Orientiry
Nikolaos Olma
Chapter 9. No Future Without a Motorway Exit: Roadside Communities in Postsocialist Poland – the case of Torzym
Agata Stanisz
Conclusion
Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene
Postscripts
No Alternative to the Car; Or: What Remained of Socialism after 1989/91?
Luminita Gatejel
Periodization, Postsocialism and the Directionally Challenged
Joshua Hotaka Roth
‘Where is the Postsocialism Here?’
Peter Norton
