The development of post-socialist cities has emerged as a major field of study among critical theorists from across the social sciences. Originally constructed under the dictates of central planners and designed to serve the demands of command economies, post-socialist urban centers currently develop at the nexus of varied and often competing economic, cultural, and political forces. Among these, nationalist aspirations, previously simmering beneath the official rhetoric of communist fraternity and veneer of architectural conformity, have emerged as dominant factors shaping the urban landscape. This article examines patterns, processes, and practices concerning the cultural politics of architecture, urban planning, and identity in the post-socialist city. In addition to assessing the main contours of this burgeoning field of research, this article highlights how this special issue of Nationalities Papers contributes to a broader understanding of contemporary cultural and political change in post-socialist urban settings.

This paper explores the relationship between the urban cultural landscape of Bucharest and the making of post-socialist Romanian national identity. As the capital of socialist Romania, central Bucharest was extensively remodelled by Nicolae Ceauşescu into the Centru Civic in order to materialize Romania's socialist identity. After the Romanian “Revolution” of 1989, the national and local state had to deal with a significant “leftover” socialist urban landscape which was highly discordant with the orientation of post-socialist Romania and its search for a new identity. Ceauşescu's vast socialist showpiece left a difficult legacy which challenges the material and representational reshaping of Bucharest and constructions of post-socialist Romanian national identity more broadly. The paper analyzes four attempts to deal with the Centru Civic: developments in the immediate post-1989 period; the international architectural competition Bucureşti 2000; proposals for building a Cathedral of National Salvation; and the Esplanada project. Despite over 20 years of proposals central Bucharest remains largely unchanged. The paper thus deals with a failed attempt to re-shape the built environment in support of national goals.

Politics in Hungary since 1989 has been focusing on nation-building. Each government has had a license to articulate what it is to be Hungarian, in the public realm with public funds. While current political debates are heated and focus yet again on defining Hungarian national identity, this article takes a distance from contemporary politics. It studies a situation ten years earlier, when the current government party Fidesz -which took a landslide victory in the 2010 general elections after eight years of socialist-liberal government - was in office for the first time from 1998 to 2002. Exploring the debate from the perspective of architecture, it reveals how Fidesz sought to mark their space and express their sense of nationhood in Budapest around the millennium. Beside publicly sponsored institutions and commemoration, architectural forms became contested as they were used to express nationality. The National Theatre, Millennium Park and House of Terror Museum, each broke with the urban flow in the left-leaning metropolis while representing the Fidesz discourse on Hungary. The article, besides analyzing postcommunist nation-building, reflects on the interconnection between architecture, politics and memory in an urban symbolic landscape. It discusses how myths of nationhood can be represented in the cityscape.

The Baltic Pearl is a 205-hectare development project underway southwest of St. Petersburg, Russia, originally financed and designed by a consortium of firms from Shanghai, China. This paper analyzes the discourse surrounding the development of one section of the Baltic Pearl, the commercial multiplex Southern Square, particularly the use of the term “European” as used to signal the project's intended cultural orientation and to exert control over the interaction between Russian planners and Chinese developers. In the negotiation over the form of the multiplex, control over architectural style emerges as leverage for preservation of cultural norms and local autonomy. In further analysis, the situation emerges as an example of Sassen's [(2008) Territory, Authority, Rights. From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press] shifting assemblages, that is, a reassembling of global influences in a space invoked as national as well as local.

In the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the landscape of Armenia's capital has transformed tremendously. Promoting a new vision for the city, Armenia's political elites have imbued the urban landscape of Yerevan with narratives of modernization, progress and a renewed sense of nationalism. While this new vision is noticeable throughout Yerevan's landscape, it is most apparent in three places in the center of Yerevan - Opera Square, Northern Avenue and Republic Square. These three prominent places represent the vision that the Armenian elites have for the city of Yerevan, while at the same time serving as backdrops for the expression of a critical voice regarding the changing urban landscape from the local residents. These three places are compelling representations of the tensions and struggles that are present in contemporary Armenian society. In this article, I examine the symbols and narratives that Armenia's elites produce and promote in and via these places, and consider the complicated set of reactions from residents that have formed in response.

In December 1997, the Republic of Kazakhstan officially proclaimed that the city of Astana would be its new capital. The decision to transfer the seat of government from the city of Almaty in the south to the more centrally located Astana was connected to the process of nation building in a multi-ethnic society where the titular nation represents little more than half of the population. Efforts to transform the rather remote regional center, Akmola (later renamed Astana) into a modern capital city have been underway since the late 1990s. One important component of this transformation is the idea of building a “metabolic” and sustainable “Eurasian” city. As the symbolic center of the whole country, this new capital would function as a showpiece of Kazakh culture and identity. The city would also become a symbol of economic prosperity and the regime's geopolitical vision. While the government's intensions are expressed rather openly, it remains unclear to what extent these politically verbalized leitmotivs are actually being realized through contemporary architecture and structure. This article offers a critical assessment of what has been achieved to date and argues that the production of the new Kazakhstani capital has often failed to translate rhetoric into reality.

Many Lenin monuments remain in cities around the former Soviet republics and a few national or regional authorities have decreed it against the law to deface or remove them. The Lenin monument in Bishkek, capital city of the Kyrgyz Republic, is an example of both policies. On two main counts, however, the fate of this particular bronze statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin has been unusual. Only in the Kyrgyz case was the country's central Lenin monument left untouched for over a decade after the collapse of communism, a decree for its preservation as a national treasure being put in force as late as 2000. And, when, in 2003, the government after all decided to remove the monument, it was then relocated only some 100 yards from its original location. These twin issues of timing and new spatial framing offer a window on the relationship between state ideology and politics in the Kyrgyz Republic. I propose to use an official ideology approach to understand the Kyrgyz ruling elite's ideological relationship to the Lenin monument after the collapse of communism.

Capital cities play an integral role in the construction of national identity. This is particularly true when the capital is the country's only major urban center. Over the course of its history, Mongolia's capital of Ulaanbaatar has been periodically reshaped to reflect competing trajectories of national culture. This article examines the evolving symbolism of architecture, urban design, and public space in Ulaanbaatar as a means of exploring Mongolia's complex negotiation between its traditional culture (mobile pastoralism and Shamanism/Buddhism), its socialist legacy, and globalization. Amidst the rampant social change of the last two decades, rather ambiguous national narratives have emerged in Mongolia. Like the capital's cityscape, these narratives reflect aspects of both recent and distant pasts, as well as contemporary economic, political, and social realities. This article reveals how increasingly palpable global economic and cultural practices are fomenting material change in the current phase of Ulaanbaatar's evolution. A combination of secondary source research and observations drawn from several months of fieldwork provide the basis for a discussion of the city's role as a forum for cultural contestation and national reform.

This article analyzes memory politics during the first 20 years (1991-2011) of the newly independent Estonia. Memory politics is understood as a politics endeavoring to shape the society's collective memory and establish notions of what is and is not to be remembered of the past, employing to this end both legislative means and practical measures. The paper presents one possible scheme for analyzing Estonian memory politics and limits its treatment in two important ways. Firstly, the focus is on national memory politics, that is the decisions of the parliament, government, and president oriented toward shaping collective memory. And second, only internal memory politics is discussed; that is, bi- or multilateral memory-political relations with other states or political unions are not examined separately. The analysis is built on four interrelated dimensions of memory politics, which have played the most important roles in Estonia: the legal, institutional, commemorative, and monumental dimensions. Also, a general characterization and temporal articulation of memory politics in newly independent Estonia is proposed.