Governing The Post Communist City

When faced with the rapid and disorienting transition from communism to democracy, many eastern European leaders sought simple, immediately rewarding answers to complex policy problems. Undoubtedly, this hurried approach had a significant impact on the quality of democratic government in formerly communist countries. Through an analysis of urban politics in Prague between 1990 and 2000, Governing the Post-Communist City sheds new light on the factors that shaped policy in eastern Europe at the time of its democratic transformation. The first book-length study of post-communist urban politics in a city outside of Russia, Governing the Post-Communist City links the difficulties of democratic government in 1990s Prague to decisions made shortly after the fall of communism. Focusing on the issues of road infrastructure and downtown development, Martin Horak argues that local leadership was more concerned with insulating policy-making processes from public influence than with creating new policies suited to post-communist urban development. This set a precedent for the whole institutional environment of post-communist Prague and entrenched itself in the city's politics throughout the 1990s. Original, engaging, and authoritative, this study has much to say about the political climate in Prague after the downfall of communism, and makes insightful conclusions about the factors that contributed to present political circumstances in the region.

Examines democratic party competition in four post-communist polities in the 1990s. The work illustrates developments regarding different voter appeal of parties, patterns of voter representation, and dispositions to join other parties in alliances. Wider groups of countries are also compared.

In recent years "smartness" has risen as a buzzword to characterize novel urban policy and development patterns. As a result of this, debates around what "smart" actually means, both theoretically and empirically, have emerged within the interdisciplinary arenas of urban and regional studies. This book explores the changes in discourse, rationality and selected responses of smartness through the theme of "transition." The concept of transition provides the broader context and points of reference for adopting smartness in reconciling competing interests and agendas in city-regional governance. Using case studies from around the world, including North America, Europe and South Africa, the authors link external regime transition in societal values and goals with internal moves towards smartness. While reflecting the growing integration of overarching themes and analytical concerns, this volume further develops work on smartness, smart growth, transition, city-regionalism, governance and sustainability. Smart Transitions in City Regionalism explores how smart cities and city regions interact with conventional state structures. It will be of great interest to postgraduates and advanced undergraduates across urban studies, geography, sustainability studies and political science.

The editor of this book has brought together contributions designed to capture the essence of post-communist politics in East-Central Europe and Eurasia. Rather than on the surface structures of nominal democracies, the nineteen essays focus on the informal, often intentionally hidden, disguised and illicit understandings and arrangements that penetrate formal institutions. These phenomena often escape even the best-trained outside observers, familiar with the concepts of established democracies. Contributors to this book share the view that understanding post-communist politics is best served by a framework that builds from the ground up, proceeding from a fundamental social context. The book aims at facilitating a lexical convergence; in the absence of a robust vocabulary for describing and discussing these often highly complex informal phenomena, the authors wish to advance a new terminology of post-communist regimes. Instead of a finite dictionary, a kind of conceptual cornucopia is offered. The resulting variety reflects a larger harmony of purpose that can significantly expand the understanding the “real politics” of post-communist regimes. Countries analyzed from a variety of aspects, comparatively or as single case studies, include Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.

Hauptbeschreibung This book looks at the consequences and implications of an emerging new way of local politics in Europe. With the term governance1/2, changes in the political and social constitution of cities are analysed. Based on theoretical and empirical studies by scholars from ten countries, different aspects of urban governance1/2 will be presented

This book explores sub-municipal units’ (SMU) role in decision making, decentralized institutional innovation, social innovation and, in rural areas, service delivery. Focusing on fourteen European countries, the book examines the impact of political cultures, administrative traditions and local government systems on the functioning of the SMUs. An under-explored topic in the literature, this book provides a comprehensive, comparative European, thematically broad, descriptive book on sub-municipal governance.

This book explores urban dynamics in Europe fifteen years after the fall of communism. The ‘urban mosaic’ of the title expresses the complexity and diversity of the processes and spatial outcomes in post-socialist cities. Emerging urban phenomena are illustrated with case studies, focusing on historical themes, cultural issues and the socialist legacy. Among the cities analyzed are Kazan, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, Komarno, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia and Tirana.

"Localism" has been deployed in recent debates over planning law as an anodyne, grassroots way to shape communities into sustainable, human-scale neighborhoods. But "local" is a moving category, with contradictory, nuanced dimensions. Reconsidering Localism brings together new scholarship from leading academics in Europe and North America to develop a theoretically-grounded critique and definition of the new localism, and how it has come to shape urban governance and urban planning. Moving beyond the UK, this book examines localism and similar shifts in planning policy throughout Europe, and features essays on localism and place-making, sustainability, social cohesion, and citizen participation in community institutions. It explores how debates over localism and citizen control play out at the neighborhood, institutional and city level, and has come to effect the urban landscape throughout Europe. Reconsidering Localism is a current, vital addition to planning scholarship.