22 - Urban Economies: Learning from Post-Socialist Contexts

Summary

Introduction

The study of urban economies is a key example of the challenge of ‘provincializing’ economic geography: that is, expanding disciplinary conceptual and empirical foci towards the non-Western parts of the world. City-specific case-study research remains pivotal for understanding the multi-scalar dynamic of contemporary capitalist development (Robinson, 2016). While many cities continue growing, others shrink (Haase et al, 2014) and these multifaceted processes are linked to both the advantages and disadvantages stemming from the international economic integration, at least for some world regions and subnational regions. These uneven trends have substantial impact on governments’ responses to globalization and economic shocks which include protectionism, resource nationalism and the backlash against globalization (see Chapter 12 in this volume).

Post-socialist cities provide a fertile ground for comparatively and relationally examining a periodic reshaping of urban alliances in order to cope with difficulties in financing the development of cities. They are also a significant context upon which to reflect on the expansion of state and transnational institutions and the promotion of market logic across all spheres of life. Economic geographers’ interest in global economic integration has prompted scholars to advance relational and comparative analysis of cities, revealing radically interlocked and differently scaled links and networks among different practices and policies in the cities of the Global Easts (Robinson, 2016; Gentile, 2018). While cities in general comprise part of the expanding ‘geographies of contemporary economic geography’ (Cockayne et al, 2018: 1514), the focus has been Western-centric, rather than developing a global perspective, and thus there remain cities and urban economies that typically remained marginal to the production of urban knowledge (Galuszka, 2022) and to traditional economic geography (Smith and Stenning, 2006). Post-socialist cities are a prime example. These cities’ economic practices combined the informal post-socialist economy (Morris and Polese, 2014), regional variegations of capitalism with a recent socialist past and the repercussions of the global financial crisis of 2008– 09 as well as the 2014 Russian financial crisis (Yakovlev, 2021).