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KalenderUrban Spaces after Socialism (Workshop)
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Titel
Urban Spaces after Socialism (Workshop)Termin
Mittwoch, 24.02.10Ort
Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Mohrenstr. 40/41, Raum 212Downloads (PDF)
Ethnographies of Public Places
veranstaltet vom Projekt B4 "Identitätspolitiken im Südkaukasus", SFB 640, in Kooperation mit dem Stadtlabor, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, HU Berlin
This workshop focuses on ethnographies of public places in urban localities in Central Eurasia that present a merge of declining Soviet planed infrastructure and of a new body of confusing ‘global’ architecture including undesired informal infrastructures. Associated with as a space of uncertainty, conflict, chaos due to the economic decline and political upheaval postsocialist cities again build up spaces for celebrating new national identities by the process of ‘capitalizing’ urban materiality and urban spaces, imagineering or re-inventing new city symbols, reorganizing its sociality. In this sense cities undergo a remarkable process of merging and emerging of old and new public places which takes place on several levels: changing surface and materiality of existing building, parks and roads, rebuilding king’s palaces in a city center or marking a place by new groups of actors (youth, gays, creatives, migrants, refugees and planners). Ethnographies of public places, desired or undesired, in both their rise and decline phases, seek to approach to the urban space as a socializing project by regarding ‘built forms’ as they are inhabited or not inhabited, contested, celebrated and negotiated.
The main question of this workshop concerns practices of social production and construction of public urban space in post-socialist cities and how these practices shape embodied space, language, translocal images, and behavior nowadays. To what extent socialist public spaces, which were subjects of political interest, ideology and to deprived privacy with their own specific understanding of ‘social justice’ continue to dominate modern urban landscapes? To what extent the legacy of socialism still shape the contemporary symbolic infrastructure and city landscape in Tbilisi, Tashkent or Baku in spite of the growing popularity of pre-Soviet historical heritage? What kind of dramatic modification and deterioration undergo the iconic ‘socialist objects’ such as the Palace of Republic in Berlin or Houses of Culture in Siberian cities? To what extent universal urban changes like migration, privatization, commodification lead to a fragmentation of space in Bishkek or Baku? What happened to the economy and morality of markets in a small Azerbaijan city which have been always a part of the socialist city landscape?
