If Cars Could Walk: Postsocialist Streets in Transformation 9781805390312, 9781805390329

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. Seven Imaginary Images of the Transition of GDR Streets, 1989–1995
Chapter 2. Liberated or Lawless? Social Life on Prishtina’s Postwar Streets
Chapter 3. ‘Changing Everything Fast’? Young Men in the Streets of Tbilisi
Chapter 4. Coproducing the Car and the Stratified Street: Automobility and Space in Russia
Chapter 5. Bucharest’s Centura: Encircling a City in Transformation
Chapter 6. Pedestrianizing Moscow: Disparities between the Centre and the Inner Periphery
Chapter 7. Between Non-Place and Public Space: Life at a Postsocialist (Trolley)Bus Stop
Chapter 8. Where the Streets Have No Name: Toponymic Changes, Wayfinding and Tashkent’s System of Orientiry
Chapter 9. No Future without a Motorway Exit: Roadside Communities in Postsocialist Poland – the Case of Torzym
Conclusion
Postscript 1. No Alternative to the Car; or: What Remained of Socialism after 1989/91?
Postscript 2. Periodization, Postsocialism and the Directionally Challenged
Postscript 3. ‘Where Is the Postsocialism Here?’
Index

Citation preview

If Cars Could Walk

Explorations in Mobility

Founding Editor Gijs Mom, Eindhoven University of Technology General Editors: Georgine Clarsen, University of Wollongong Cotten Seiler, Dickinson College Mimi Sheller, Drexel University The study of mobility opens up new transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to fields including transport, tourism, migration, communication, media, technology, and environmental studies. The works in this series rethink our common assumptions and ideas about the mobility of people, things, ideas, and cultures from a broadly understood humanities perspective. The series welcomes projects of a historical or contemporary nature and encourages postcolonial, non-Western, and critical perspectives.

Volume 7

Volume 3

If Cars Could Walk: Postsocialist Streets in Transformation Edited by Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene

Driving Modernity: Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922–1943 Massimo Moraglio

Volume 6

Volume 2

Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art Edited by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding

The Devil’s Wheels: Men and Motorcycling in the Weimar Republic Sasha Disko

Volume 5

Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895–1940 Gijs Mom

Iron Landscapes: National Space and the Railways in Interwar Czechoslovakia Felix Jeschke Volume 4

A U-Turn to the Future: Sustainable Urban Mobility since 1850 Edited by Martin Emanuel, Frank Schipper, and Ruth Oldenziel

Volume 1

If Cars Could Walk

Postsocialist Streets in Transformation

5 Edited by

Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2023 Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Duijzings, Ger, 1961- editor. | Tuvikene, Tauri, editor. Title: If cars could walk : postsocialist streets in transformation / edited by Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Explorations in mobility; volume 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023000711 (print) | LCCN 2023000712 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390312 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390329 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Urban transportation. | Automobiles. | Transportation. | Post-communism. Classification: LCC HE305 .I42 2023 (print) | LCC HE305 (ebook) | DDC 388.4--dc23/eng/20230503 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000711 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000712 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-031-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-032-9 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390312

Contents 5 List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgementsix Introduction

1

Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene

Chapter 1.  Seven Imaginary Images of the Transition of GDR Streets, 1989–1995

30

Kurt Möser

Chapter 2.  Liberated or Lawless? Social Life on Prishtina’s Postwar Streets

46

Rita Gagica and Ger Duijzings

Chapter 3.  ‘Changing Everything Fast’? Young Men in the Streets of Tbilisi 

70

Costanza Curro

Chapter 4.  Coproducing the Car and the Stratified Street: Automobility and Space in Russia

89

Jeremy Morris

Chapter 5.  Bucharest’s Centura: Encircling a City in Transformation106 Ger Duijzings

Chapter 6.  Pedestrianizing Moscow: Disparities between the Centre and the Inner Periphery

136

Sabina Maslova and Tauri Tuvikene

Chapter 7.  Between Non-Place and Public Space: Life at a Postsocialist (Trolley)Bus Stop Andrei Vazyanau

162

viContents

Chapter 8.  Where the Streets Have No Name: Toponymic Changes, Wayfinding and Tashkent’s System of Orientiry

186

Nikolaos Olma

Chapter 9.  No Future without a Motorway Exit: Roadside Communities in Postsocialist Poland – the Case of Torzym

205

Agata Stanisz

Conclusion

223

Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene

Postscript 1. No Alternative to the Car; or: What Remained of Socialism after 1989/91?

229

Luminita Gatejel

Postscript 2. Periodization, Postsocialism and the Directionally Challenged

233

Joshua Hotaka Roth

Postscript 3. ‘Where Is the Postsocialism Here?’

238

Peter Norton

Index245

Illustrations 5 Figure 2.1.  Cars parked on the pavement, 2007. © Ger Duijzings.

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Figure 2.2.  Mother with children walking in the middle of the street, 2018. © Rita Gagica.

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Figure 5.1.  Map of the centura. Image created by Anu Printsmann with open-source data. 107 Figure 5.2.  Cemetery in Leordeni with Glina landfill in the background, 2018. © Ger Duijzings.

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Figure 5.3.  Hawker selling counterfeit perfumes, 2011. © Iosif Király.

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Figure 5.4.  Traffic on the northern section of the centura (modernized), 2018. © Ger Duijzings.

118

Figure 6.1.  The map of pedestrianized streets in the Moscow city centre. Image created by Anu Printsmann with OpenStreetMap.146 Figure 6.2.  Examples of renovated pedestrian streets in the centre of Moscow, 2014. © Sabina Maslova.

148

Figure 6.3.  The density of pedestrian crossings by administrative district, 2014. Image created by Anu Printsmann with OpenStreetMap.151 Figure 6.4.  Examples of neglected pedestrian spaces in the periphery. The photographs were taken in 2014 during field observations in neighbourhoods northwest of the city centre (Dmitrovskoe Shosse and nearby areas). © Sabina Maslova.

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Figure 7.1.  Trolleybus stop in Mariupol (2021). © Andrei Vazyanau. 164

viiiIllustrations

Figure 8.1.  Map of the specific orientiry mentioned in the chapter based on the author’s material, 2020. Image created by Anu Printsmann with OpenStreetMap. 192 Figure 9.1.  Map of Torzym. Image created by Anu Printsmann with OpenStreetMap.

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Acknowledgements 5 This book has been a long journey, starting in 2013 in London at UCL when we first met and started to discuss our shared interest in postsocialist ‘street studies’. Rather than having been a smooth ‘road journey’ – or a fast-paced whizzing along the academic highway – the process can better be characterized as a slow-moving ‘street itinerary’, with many digressions and unexpected encounters and occasional coffees and chats with friends and acquaintances encountered on the way (to use a distinction we utilize in the book). One stopover in this itinerary was a workshop, which we organized in Regensburg in October 2016: some authors presented their papers there for the first time, while other contributions were harvested after the workshop. As happens on urban streets, the book is the product of a thoroughly collaborative, interactive and civic endeavour. Over these years, quite a few individuals and institutions have crossed our itinerary and deserve our warmest gratitude for the support they gave and the inspiration they provided. Most of all, we want to thank our current home institutions, the University of Regensburg and Tallinn University for providing logistical and financial support. Credit is also due to the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg and the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) in Leipzig. Over the years, important input has come from various related projects in which we participated or are still involved, such as Cities Methodologies at the UCL Urban Laboratory, PUTSPACE (Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting), funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), and the Joint Research Programme on Public Spaces (co-funded by Academy of Finland, The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research with the DLR Project Management Agency, the Estonian Research Council and the European Commission through Horizon 2020). We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support received from the University of Regensburg. Additional support for the production of the volume was provided by the Tallinn University School of Humanities research fund, and Estonian Research Council grants PUTJD580 and PRG398.

xAcknowledgements

We also would like to thank James Gibbons, for doing, as always, an excellent job in terms of editing, Anu Printsmann for the maps, and Thalia Prokopiu for the preparation of the manuscript. A final word of thanks should go to William H. Fain, whose Collection If Cars Could Talk: Essays on Urbanism (2012) not only resonates with our critique of car-enabling urban planning, but also inspired us, after a little t­weaking – changing ‘talk’ into ‘walk’ – with the perfect title for our volume, ­bringing an end to years of mulling and pondering.

5 Introduction Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene Urban street life has long enjoyed broad interest from scholars, ­writers and artists. Its vibrancy – spawning chance encounters and forms of productive friction – has been no small part of its enduring attraction. This volume looks at street life in postsocialist cities: specifically, its transformations in the wake of the radical post-1989 political and economic reforms. ‘Postsocialism’, however much it continues to be debated as a concept and as lived reality (Verdery 1996; Hann 2002; Dunn and Verdery 2015; Müller 2019), has hardly ever been explored at the ‘street level’. The latter involves looking at micro-scale everyday life and face-to-face interactions in public spaces, as, for example, Erving Goffman famously did in his work (see particularly Goffman 1971). In the present volume we explore postsocialist streets as places where ‘society meets itself’ (Bahrdt 1974: 35): as key sites for mobility, dwelling and social interaction that have changed beyond recognition because of the unparalleled explosion of private car mobility. We want to ask what this massive car ‘invasion’ has meant for the urban fabric of cities in the former socialist world. Whereas in the capitalist ‘West’ automobiles became dominant via a gradual process that spanned the entire twentieth century, in the formerly socialist ‘East’ privately owned cars ‘hit the streets’ precipitously only during the 1990s and 2000s. Public transport, pervasive under socialism, was supplanted by a surging capitalist car culture, which, in fulfilling individuals’ long-deferred consumerist dreams, changed how people move around and use public spaces. Streets accommodate new mobilities and forms of habitation, including the type of ‘dwelling’ that happens ‘in motion’, within the protective cocoon of the private automobile (Hannam et al. 2006). While car culture in the West has been studied extensively (see Fyfe 1998; Norton 2008; Hall 2012; Moran 2005, 2010; Miller 2001; Featherstone et al. 2005; Mom 2014), there are few such explorations addressing the socialist and postsocialist world. Existing studies focus on automotive production under socialism and the concomitant growth of a ‘consumerist’ car culture in competition with the capitalist West (Siegelbaum 2008, 2011; Möser 2002; Kuhr-Korolev and Schlinkert 2009). They pay

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less attention to clashes with other transport modalities or the transformation of streets into car-dominated spaces, as there were fewer reasons for concern than in the West. These studies, in addition, do not track the changes into the postsocialist period, which is our aim here. Our work complements Burrell and Hörschelmann’s edited volume (2014) examining socialist and postsocialist ‘mobilities’ (see also Tuvikene 2018), but whereas their treatment is more general, ours represents a fine-grained mode of enquiry, using ethnographic methods that are sensitive to local contexts (Duijzings 2018). Even though geographers have shown some interest in streets in terms of their toponomy and renaming after the end of socialism (Light 2004; Therborn 2006; Light and Young 2014, 2015), micro-scale ethnographies of everyday life and the vernacular strategies of adaptation to new circumstances in postsocialist streets are indeed largely lacking (but see Dalakoglou 2017; Steigemann 2019). We argue that abrupt changes in the availability of private cars have led to radically transformed streetscapes. To take one, relatively extreme example, Albania allowed no private-vehicle ownership until 1991, when the first postsocialist government lifted the ban (Dalakoglou 2017: 38). The number of private automobiles shot up from zero in 1990 to 300,000 in 2007 (Dalakoglou 2017: 112). Now, with a population of three million, Albania has more than half a million registered vehicles (World Bank 2020: 99–100). Similar changes occurred everywhere across the formerly socialist world, as countries seeking to ‘catch up’ with the (supposedly) more advanced West saw the rapid emergence of a private car culture. This is our focus: the effects of this explosive growth in private car ownership on street life. We explore not rising car mobility per se (as is common amongst traffic engineers, focusing on enabling traffic flows) but rather its various ramifications on the urban environment. We shift attention away from an exclusive focus on circulation towards the ‘convivial’ aspects of street life, from the (networked) ville to the (social) cité, borrowing Richard Sennett’s set of concepts (2018). We perceive streets indeed to be quintessentially social spaces, facilitating not only mobility but also forms of dwelling and social interaction, rival functions that may ‘bite’ one another (Prytherch 2018: 13). What makes the postsocialist context particularly interesting is the extraordinary pace of change and the ‘drama’ caused by radical regime change (Therborn 2006). Cars suddenly became the preferred and dominant mode of everyday mobility, causing problems that had largely been unknown under socialism. This volume explores these changes in concrete settings within specific cities, drawing attention to the recalibration of social life within public spaces. It advances an anthropological and ethnographic approach to

Introduction

3

everyday life as it unfolds in streets and public spaces, affected as they are by intense motorization and the related restructuring of the urban environment. Transformations take place at different speeds and scales and with varying intensity in particular locales. While the material legacies from socialism – the built environment and inherited infrastructure – may resist change, allowing for historical continuities, other aspects such as styles of governance may adapt more rapidly (Sýkora and ­Bouzarovski 2012; Collier 2011). Social practices may change too, yet it is not uncommon for them to also become sites of everyday resistance to the new conditions. As can be observed in the case studies offered here, transformations can be locally specific, leading to diverse experiences of this specific historical juncture that we tend to subsume under the catchall term ‘postsocialism’. While often part and parcel of globalizing processes that ‘touch down’ differently in local contexts (see for example, Stenning et al. 2010 on the diverse impacts of neoliberal restructuring), transformations constitute singular historical experiences and trajectories for specific former socialist localities and cities. Regardless of these local variations, this volume engages with concerns around urban governance and the right to urban space in a part of the world that was subjected to the ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberal reforms (Collier 2011). These reforms also led to new post-totalitarian ‘openings’: streets and public spaces, for example, began to offer opportunities for political protest, in marked contrast with the regimented public sphere of the socialist period. The art historian Piotr Piotrowski has argued that this opening up of public spaces after the end of socialism led to a surge in ‘agoraphilia’, revealing a ‘drive to enter the public space, the desire to participate in that space, to shape public life’ (Piotrowski 2012: 7). We look at this not so much from the perspective of its political manifestations but rather from the mundane viewpoint of everyday life. In our view, the right to the city is not just the right to raise, on occasion, one’s voice, but also to be present and insert oneself into public spaces and thereby shape urban futures (Hubbard and Lyon 2018; Campkin and Duijzings 2016). Despite these new freedoms, in certain postsocialist contexts the streets and public spaces remain under strict ‘agoraphobic’ surveillance (to use again Piotrowski’s term): the authorities need to assert themselves, because, as exemplified by numerous anti-­ government protests in Eastern Europe and beyond, losing streets to protesters means losing control (Fyfe 1998). As Leif Jerram has argued with regard to more distant historical examples, authoritarian regimes do everything they can to win (back) the street in order to stay in power (2011: 38–41).

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Even if the state’s regimentation is unavoidable, each street contains and retains genuine elements of the ‘public’, even if its ‘publicness’ is suppressed or denied, as during socialism or in today’s commodified spaces such as shopping malls, where protests are equally unwelcome. Citizens (particularly artists) have found ways of subverting the spatial order, sometimes carrying debates and art interventions into alternative spaces such as private apartments and basements, or forests and fields, and in so doing carving out spatial niches of relative freedom at semi-private or exurban sites (Cseh-Varga and Czirak 2020: 8; Bryzgel 2017: 2). Susan Gal and Gail Kligman’s sophisticated approach to the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ as a ‘fractal’ distinction is helpful in this context, as it allows us to understand each concrete spatial situation as a mix of and balance between the two, from the socialist into the postsocialist period (Gal and Kligman 2000: 37–62; see also Duijzings 2010: 114–17). Their approach allows us to see and recognize ‘publicness’ in presumably private spaces and ‘privateness’ in public spaces, where people, for example, use their cars as an enclosed ‘living room on wheels’.

Streets and Roads Every city consists of a complex meshwork of streets and roads that facilitates movement and allows citizens to interact. Streets help to sustain the social fabric, providing spatial anchors for communities and neighbourhoods and creating an ‘identity’ for the city and its constitutive parts. Streets are dynamic places replete with ‘socially interactive mobilities’ (Conley 2012), providing inhabitants with a mix of experiences involving conviviality and conflict. To properly experience a city, one is advised to stroll its streets and dwell in its public spaces, encountering people and observing their activities (Hubbard and Lyon 2018). As architect Allan Jacobs writes in the book Great Streets: There is magic to great streets. … The best are as joyful as they are utilitarian. They are entertaining and they are open to all. They permit anonymity at the same time as individual recognition. They are symbols of a community and of its history; they represent a public memory. They are places for escape and for romance, places to act and to dream. On a great street we are allowed to dream; to remember things that may never have happened and to look forward to things that, maybe, never will. (1993: 11)

As cars have invaded these spaces, it makes sense to distinguish between ‘streets’ and ‘roads’, even if the boundaries between the two are not sharp and each can blend into the other. Roads, as ­thoroughfares,

Introduction

5

primarily facilitate motorized traffic, whereas streets are multifunctional ‘convivial’ spaces that, apart from facilitating mobility, also serve important social functions, providing the ‘spaces for public congregation, encounter and community-making’ (Hubbard and Lyon 2018: 938). The latter have many contradictory features, combining flow and friction, speed and slowness, and mobility and immobility, and as such are governed by formal and informal codes of conduct alike. For some, the street is a performative space, a place to be seen, while for others it is a place to seek anonymity and escape social control. In physical and material terms, streets tend to be linear and paved, and they often include pavements and shops. According to the doyenne of ‘street studies’, Jane Jacobs (1961), the ideal street has motorized traffic flanked by broader pavements and a variety of shops on both sides, and lots of attentive ‘eyes on the street’ (local residents and shopkeepers) observing what is happening, allowing for a degree of public safety, trust and security.1 However, streets vary considerably in terms of the density of social interaction, which is determined by historical and cultural context (Dines 2018). Some streets are livelier than others due to the presence of shops (Zukin et al. 2016) or because local inhabitants use the pavements as an extension of their living space (for the different and often conflictual uses of pavements, and their regulation, see Blomley 2011; Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009). Not only do streets facilitate movement, they are also enjoyable to dwell in. At one end of the spectrum, we find the narrow passages, alleyways and dead-end streets, normally unsuited for vehicles, in historic city centres and informal neighbourhoods, which are often bustling with life but are also part of the parochial rather than the public realm (Dines 2018; Lofland 1998). At the other end, we find the commercial high streets in city centres, designated for shopping and leisure, which attract visitors from the rest of the city and beyond. Streets may be pedestrianized (Maslova and Tuvikene, this volume) or colonized by cars parked on pavements so that nobody can walk there (Gagica and Duijzings, this volume; see also Sherouse 2018), and so forth. Not every paved surface called ‘street’ deserves to be named as such: some are primarily roads or arteries facilitating the movement of motorized traffic. In brief, we reserve the term for an inclusive public space that is multifunctional and caters to a variety of usages, including the facilitation of different modes of mobility and transport, not only motorized traffic. Roads, on the other hand, facilitate the flow of motorized traffic: they are not accessible to all. Together with thoroughfares, ring roads and highways, they provide the infrastructure for motorized traffic (­Dalakoglou 2017: xi–xii). Normally spacious enough to facilitate t­raffic

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across demarcated lanes, they have smooth surfaces that make highspeed frictionless movement possible, excluding slower modes of transport (Dalakoglou 2017: 5). Unlike streets, enmeshed as they are with social interactions and manifestations of community life, roads are associated with speed, progress and modernity (Curro, this volume). Important in providing fast connections between localities, roads often cut through cities, towns and villages: as traffic slows down roads are temporarily transformed into streets (Stanisz, this volume; see also Kuligowski and Stanisz 2015). Movement nevertheless takes priority over the social and convivial aspects of streets. They remain ‘traffic corridors’, detached from the local context: they always impede social interaction and impact negatively on the social fabric of a local settlement or an urban neighbourhood (Jacobs 1961). On the other hand, roads and arteries may enable new neighbourhoods such as residential areas, suburbs and gated communities to emerge at the periphery of cities (Duijzings, this volume). Roads, too, exist in many formats and sizes, connecting places of different size and at variable distance. Since their function is to facilitate rapid vehicular movement, meaningful social interaction with other road users (beyond what happens in the car itself) is reduced to a minimum, which is why Marc Augé labelled them ‘non-places’ (1995). Components of road and highway infrastructure such as bridges and flyovers may nonetheless develop social aspects and provide members of marginalized groups, such as homeless people and refugees, with opportunities to find shelter, establish encampments or engage in commercial activities (see for example Harris 2016 or Aggermann et al. 2008). In most cases, however, roads are seen as spaces for motorized traffic, not for social activities or forms of dwelling (see for example Moran 2005; Dalakoglou 2017; Harvey and Knox 2015). Road ethnographies indeed define roads as entities that facilitate high-speed movement, connect distant localities and create, if at all, social ties across spatial divides, such as between urban and rural places. Critical urbanists such as Jane Jacobs (1961), Peter Norton (2008), David Prytherch (2018) and Richard Sennett (2018) deplore how highspeed vehicular traffic transforms streets into mobility corridors, thwarting their potential for conviviality. As Marco te Brömmelstroet points out, streets initially consisted of open spaces between buildings that performed an important role in the daily life of a community, offering opportunities to meet others, to play or to earn a living (Brömmelstroet 2020: 25; see also Prytherch 2018; Gehl 2011). Rapid mobility is indeed a historical novelty: only with the rise of the automobile did high-speed circulation begin to ‘collide’ with the hitherto dominant everyday

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uses of the street. At the beginning, motorized vehicles were seen as ­intruders and a hazard for non-motorized road users (as indeed they are) – but in the end the cars triumphed, with traffic engineers prioritizing motorists’ right of movement (Norton 2008). Streets were turned into transit spaces, with vehicle (instead of pedestrian) velocity declared the ‘normal’ speed (Brömmelstroet 2020: 34). Traffic engineers idealized the free and uninhibited flow of motorized traffic, with pedestrians taking a back seat, as it were, regarded as key obstacles to such flows and blamed for jaywalking and reckless behaviour when they continued to walk ‘mindlessly’ on and across streets. In his book Fighting Traffic (2008), Norton describes how, at the end of the 1920s, US traffic engineers began to create the blueprint for the automotive city – which was regulated in transport and traffic codes and standardized in street design, traffic signs and engineering paradigms (see also Prytherch 2018). Streets were turned into roads enabling flows of movement, diminishing and marginalizing their social and convivial functions. Because many street patterns were unsuitable and not designed for high-speed traffic (if ‘designed’ at all), city authorities and planners replaced them with rectangular street grids consisting of wider streets and thoroughfares, creating the conditions not only for the circulation of traffic but also for forms of crowd control, state surveillance and policing. The nineteenth-century modernization of Paris under Haussmann served as the template for these urban interventions aimed at traffic circulation and effective governance (Sennett 2018: 30–35). Vehicular traffic strips down people’s communicative behaviour, especially as it becomes motorized (Vanderbilt 2008). Moving around in cars, as quickly and seamlessly as possible, leads to the suspension of social engagement with other traffic participants and street dwellers, dissolving environmental awareness in the broadest sense, turning cars and other fast-moving vehicles into ‘cognition-impairing machines’ (Sennett 2018: 185; see also Illich 1973: 52). As a result, street sociality utterly recedes due to the ubiquity and importance of cars: the ‘traffic world’, as Brömmelstroet argues, overwrites the ‘social world’ (2020: 70). During transit, social digressions need to be minimized, or otherwise (presumed) valuable time will be lost. This normative definition of streets as transit spaces is also discernible in some urban anthropological accounts: Roger Sanjek, for example, attends to dominant US traffic narratives by focusing exclusively on the ‘stopping points’ – the stationary places of activity where urbanites arrive after traversing the city – as the only locations where the ‘social’ happens (2000). We instead argue that ‘the social’ also happens in streets while one is traversing the city, and even on roads and in various ‘non-places’ seemingly devoid

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of sociality (Duijzings 2012: 110). Transit spaces may display the signs of social life, even if the latter are fleeting and volatile. The threatened sociality of transit spaces is analysed in Agata Stanisz’s contribution (this volume), showing how modernized road infrastructure in postsocialist Poland jeopardizes the survival of roadside communities, turning these once flourishing sites of mobility into zones of stagnation. Once flourishing towns and villages had dotted a major road running from eastern to western Poland, but the construction of a new motorway deprived them of their economic and social raison d’être. Only concerted efforts and a political campaign for a motorway exit helped one particular town to retain its economic significance.

Postsocialism Whereas in capitalist countries the private car was prioritized, socialist policy deemed the automobile incompatible with collectivist ideals (Siegelbaum 2008: ix–x). Fewer cars meant greater chances for socialism to be realized: in public spaces collectivist ideals could be practised and celebrated. Since the 1990s, the former socialist countries have been ‘catching up’ with the purportedly more developed West, with private automobiles invading streets and effecting rapid (almost overnight) transformations, albeit with the socialist experiences lingering on in collective memory. It is this unique configuration of time and space, or this specific ‘chronotope’ of postsocialist street life, that we want to bring into focus, reconsidering the literature on urban street life and car mobility based on Western examples. Hence, we call for more diversified understandings of street life, considering contexts not previously studied, similar to Edensor’s explorations of Indian streets (1998). We also seek to move beyond any simple comparisons meant to identify similarities and differences between different cases, instead exploring the potentials of adopting ‘postsocialism’ as an analytical lens to improve our understand of streets elsewhere. Path Dependencies Here, we focus on Eastern and Central Europe as well as the former Soviet Union, with contributions covering a wide geographical area ranging from the former GDR, Russia, Poland and Southeastern Europe (Kosovo and Romania), to the Caucasus (Georgia) and Central Asia (Uzbekistan). We do not take countries such as China, Cuba or Vietnam into account since we believe that countries still socialist

Introduction

9

in name and governed through a one-party system require a separate analysis. Instead of lumping together former and current socialist countries, we have chosen to draw historical and transregional parallels with ‘classic’ automobile-oriented societies in the capitalist world such as Germany, Japan and the US. Applying a case study-based and ethnographic approach allows us to avoid drawing a monochrome, essentialized picture: we prefer to talk about postsocialist streets in the plural, rather than ‘the’ postsocialist street. The chapters show indeed that socialist and postsocialist countries have followed diverging paths taken, with (for example) extremely varied levels of car ownership and car mobility under socialism, to mention just one parameter.2 Generally, socialist countries permitted only (very) modest levels of private car ownership. But there were striking variations: Albania banned private cars, as already mentioned, while neighbouring Yugoslavia developed a ‘popular’ socialist car culture, producing small affordable Zastavas for the masses.3 Many socialist countries had their own brands and production plants (Romania had Dacia and ARO, Poland FSO, Czechoslovakia Škoda, the Soviet Union Lada, Volga, Moskvitch and ZAZ, and the GDR Trabant and Wartburg). Even if they ‘trailed behind’ in terms of private car ownership, it would be a mistake – as has been common in mainstream ‘transitology’ – to assume that the former socialist countries simply reproduced trends in the West at a delay of four decades, as if socialism did not matter whatsoever and somehow never happened. It is better to adopt a regional and ‘off-centred’ perspective, analysing postsocialist streets as emerging from their socialist forbears and making the ‘periphery’ into a ‘centre’ of its own, with its own path dependencies, its own connections, openings and exits to various other parts of the world (Robinson 2011). Also, for other reasons it is productive to see postsocialist examples – u ­ sually ignored in urban studies and related disciplines – as instructive and far from ‘peripheral’, since transport legacies from the socialist past can inspire urban futures across and beyond Europe (Vazyanau, this volume; Tuvikene et al. 2020). Filling the empirical gaps in research dealing with postsocialist streets and roads is not the only or even the primary aim of the book. Our aim here is to bring regional perspectives into dialogue with postcolonial critiques of area and urban studies, striving to make the periphery count in our theoretical endeavours. We rely particularly on the work of Jennifer Robinson, who proposes an empirically grounded comparative urbanism that would bring to the fore case studies from other parts of the world, which can help to destabilize the dominant sites of urban theorizing (Robinson 2011). We should ‘think with elsewhere’, between

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and across different cases: new ideas will emerge only if we shift our attention away from the usual sites of urban theorizing to alternative sites where urban change has evolved differently, such as in postsocialist cities. The case studies presented here do not merely fulfil a need to empirically chart a new terra incognita; they also invite us to reconsider similar issues around motorization unfolding in Western-dominated street studies. Taking the ‘postsocialist’ as our purview means more than just looking at a given region in a specific period: it suggests a way of thinking about the relevance of particular socialist pasts and the intersections between ‘socialist’ and ‘non-socialist’ contexts (Stenning and Hörschelmann 2008). We have thus solicited reflections from specialists who have addressed these latter contexts, such as those of Japan and the US (see the postscripts by Joshua Roth and Peter Norton). This permits us to transcend the region and problematize simplistic spatiotemporal notions of postsocialism (Tuvikene 2016). Assuming that there is something specific about particular places at distinct points in time, we suggest the notion of ‘chronotopes’ or distinct time-space configurations. The postsocialist urban chronotope in any given place evolved from the locally specific socialist milieu, and hence is not a carbon copy of urban streetscapes in the West. Everywhere, specific socialist legacies continue to play a role, in the form of the built environment and street layouts or other remnants, material and immaterial alike. From Socialist to Postsocialist Streets Instead of assuming that postsocialist streets are the belated ‘copies’ of ‘more advanced’ Western streetscapes, we highlight the specific characteristics of postsocialist streets without wanting to proclaim them ‘unique’. No place, after all, is completely singular. Postsocialist urban chronotopes represent the coming together of materialities and physical realities, of individual destinies and social lives, of historically contingent local and global (or translocal) processes unfolding in places of ‘socialist’ provenance. Thus, the notion of ‘postsocialist streets’ provides a conceptual perspective tied to transformations that – while particularly pertinent for the region – may also be relevant in other parts of the world. A key aspect of postsocialist streets is the explosive growth of private car mobility, overwriting the ‘socialist’ legacies of public mobilities and collective modes of transportation in strictly regimented public spaces. Such growth has been accompanied by the commercialization and informalization of street life, both tied up with radical processes

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of neoliberal transformation. Even if street life has moved away from socialism, it remains unmistakably embedded in environments that ­display the traces of socialism, at least in terms of materiality. Postsocialist streets are ‘post’ both in the continuities they manifest with the pre-1989 past and in the radical changes evident in and on them. Continuity is stressed in the postscript by Luminita Gatejel, who argues that practices linger on after the shift away from socialism: for example, the informal ‘survival’ strategies that developed out of socialist automobility, dominated by shortages of car parts, continue to inform and inspire postsocialist forms of bricolage and tinkering. A distinctive quality of the socialist city was the authorities’ protruding panoptical (and panaural) presence (Duijzings 2010: 110) as well as the strict regimentation of streets and public spaces (Hatherley 2015). This included collective road construction which has been one of the most vividly remembered aspects of socialist governance: brigades of youthful volunteers were mobilized to construct roads without ever having a chance to use these roads themselves, as Dalakoglou recounts in the case of socialist Albania (2017: 38). Socialist control over public spaces culminated in the ‘magistrales’, the wide boulevards build for representational, ceremonial and political purposes, especially the annual parades and marches on key socialist holidays (Hatherley 2015: 37–90). Streets were controlled and mobility patterns were proscribed from the top, favouring public transport and disallowing private car mobility. Even in the cases where private automobility was permitted, streets were dominated by ‘heavy’ vehicles such as trucks and buses while the smaller cars usually served the needs of the nomenklatura. Cars never dominated streets as they did in the capitalist West. The street scenes in early Soviet films or city symphonies such as Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) show the coexistence of various transport modes in large cities such as Moscow, Odesa and Kyiv. Nonetheless, socialist modernity’s ambition was ‘acceleration’ and progress in all spheres of life, as in the West, in order to leave the proverbial ‘backwardness’ of the presocialist period behind. Motorized vehicles and electric public transport became tokens of progress, with the nomenklatura claiming individual vehicles as their personal prerogative, as already Emma Goldman noted while describing early revolutionary Russia (2020: 171–72; see also Siegelbaum 2008: 4). A key difference with capitalist countries was the dominant reliance on ‘electrification’ instead of fossil fuels in urban transportation, which today gives East European cities a certain edge, environmentally speaking, over their West European counterparts (Vazyanau, this volume).

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The 1980s and 1990s came nevertheless to be associated with ‘stagnation’, exemplified in the proverbial queues of people waiting for something. Late socialism was characterized by persistent supply problems and shortages, while the early 1990s were dominated by endless ‘waiting’ for the bus or tram as public transport crumbled, nowhere so forcefully depicted as in Chantal Akerman’s film D’Est (From the East, 1993). Obtaining a car under socialism also involved prolonged waiting; it usually took more than a decade for citizens to obtain a private vehicle of their own (Gatejel 2011, 2014). Supply issues led to the hoarding of car parts (in hopes they could be exchanged for other items) and to informal practices of barter and tinkering. Many such practices have continued up until the present (Morris, this volume), as most people cannot afford a new car and rely instead on second-hand cars imported from countries such as Germany ‘dumped’ on the East European market. Breaking Away from Socialist Streets Another key aspect of postsocialism is the vast socialist housing estates that continue to dominate the urban landscape. As socialist housing was almost entirely privatized after 1989, with tenants buying their apartments, these new property owners also began to purchase cars. Socialist planners had never anticipated the rapid growth of automobile ownership and thus neighbourhoods built during socialism lacked sufficient parking. Until the 1980s, public transport was the default means of getting around, its total share of motorized traffic hovering consistently between 75 per cent and 85 per cent (Pucher and Buehler 2005: 730). What had often existed under socialism was distant parking in garage areas (see Tuvikene 2010, 2019) for the privileged few who possessed a car. Although the situation has changed entirely, socialism remains a positive reference point for those who remember it, such as the elderly (Vazyanau, this volume). Amongst the younger generations, the socialist past nurtures visions of a more sustainable ‘electric transport’ future even if they have no first-hand memory of socialism. All in all, socialism continues to resonate, allowing for comparisons and providing benchmarks for the ‘good life’ that has been lost. Car ownership has become a marker of the break with the socialist past and a ‘vehicle’ for expressing social and class distinctions between the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of transition. One can afford a new car only if one has a stable, well-paying job; the majority keeps relying on ­second-hand cars, generating different kinds of automobilities (Morris, this volume; see also Green-Simms 2017). As in most parts of

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the world, cars literally form vehicles of distinction, whereby a new ‘middle-class’ car represents an affluent ‘middle-class’ lifestyle (Yazıcı 2013). In the years immediately after the end of socialism, men invested in expensive-­looking cars that would signal their success rather than in upgrades to their (private) apartments. This has since changed, although some people still cultivate and indulge in private car ownership by ostentatiously tuning up cars, speeding and participating in informal races. Pedestrians and drivers of smaller cars must yield to them, making streets sites of conflict (Henderson 2013; Hubbard and Lyon 2018). Those with large and fast vehicles have privileged access, while the less well-off have to give way. Vehicles have a symbolic quality, not only offering the means to express social difference but also exemplifying the postsocialist moral order or lack thereof (Lipset and Handler 2016). Witness the common but informal ‘middle-lane’ for fast and sporty cars driving on exurban roads and through cities, or the use of emergency sirens and flashing lights by privileged state officials and others with connections (Ledeneva 2013: 145–49; Josephson 2017: 134). Speed equals social status, expressing ‘liberation’ from a former condition of subdued living, without cars, imposed by a repressive socialist state. Fast cars give drivers a sense of freedom, which is especially important for those with attitudes hostile to the state, as can be seen elsewhere, too (Tuvikene 2016; Lipset 2016: 9; Josephson 2017: 118). In the ‘feral’ years right after the end of socialism, but also today, driving at breakneck speeds on bad roads seems to compensate for the many ‘lost’ years spent without private cars, turning roads literally into graveyards: Albania’s National Road SH1, between Tirana and Shkodra, and Romania’s National Road DN2 from Bucharest to Bacău, to give just two examples, are both lined with numerous informal cenotaphs and floral tributes for people killed in traffic accidents.4 The postsocialist ‘condition’ is discernible in people’s hostile attitude to the (previously repressive) state. Many drivers, not seeing the state as guaranteeing public order, show disdain for state officials such as the traffic police (Gagica and Duijzings, this volume). Although postsocialist streets may not seem so dissimilar from those in the capitalist West, extreme and transgressive street practices (such as speeding, queue jumping and various other forms of rule-breaking) seem to be more widespread, making traffic in cities such as Bucharest or Tirana look ‘intimidating’. As the state hardly ever punishes this type of behaviour, people continue to improvise and solve traffic and other ‘existential’ issues, such as insufficient parking and a lack of a stable income, by artifice, usually following the maxim ‘necessity knows no

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law’ (Gagica and Duijzings, this volume). This streetwise ‘informality’ and breaking of rules consists not only of finding ‘creative’ solutions including hawking and offering (unsolicited) street services (such as washing windshields) but also of the application and exploitation of unwritten and vernacular rules of interaction that do not correspond to the official rules. In traffic, they complement or replace the formal codes that regulate interaction through universal road signage and engineered traffic devices. In most cities, generalized private car ownership has led to the recalibration of publicness and privateness in streets. Following Susan Gal and Gail Kligman’s notion of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ as a fractal distinction (2000: 37–62), we suggest that street life always has elements of both, even if occurring ‘in public’. The explosion of private car mobility has indeed tipped the balance in favour of ‘privateness’, although elements of ‘publicness’ and social interaction are never far away, for example in terms of the eye contact and gestures needed to negotiate one’s movement in concert with other traffic participants. People manage their copresence on streets through forms of ‘mobile looking’: ‘identifying scans and the exchange of fleeting focused glances, punctuated by the occasional sanctioning look or integrating glance’ (Conley 2012: 223). At a more general level, automobility has made possible new postsocialist forms of ‘community’ and (private) ‘sociability’ – in exurban residential areas, petrol stations, shopping malls, multiplexes and parking garages. Street life displays important asymmetries in terms of (acceptable) gender behaviour, which is usually a reflection of entrenched gender expectations and inequalities. Women are discouraged from doing (or not allowed to do) what men can do on streets and in public spaces. This volume provides examples of mobility-related masculinities, including countercultural ones (Morris, and Curro), and of the limited access for women and their marginalization as pedestrians (Gagica and Duijzings). Cars may express gender disparities: as Joshua Roth notes with regard to Japan (2016), men typically experience driving in larger and faster cars as an activity that ‘sets them free’ and gives them a sensation of speed and power, whereas women use smaller, fuel-efficient cars to carry out common domestic tasks (driving to the grocery shop, taking children to school or to extracurricular activities). While mobility patterns are gendered everywhere, postsocialism adds another layer with ‘traditional’ socialist masculinities having come under threat by the radical political and economic transformations, marginalizing some men to become the losers of transition (see Morris, and Curro, this volume).

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Dwelling and Competing Modes of Mobility Our focus is not only on mobility but also on dwelling, and how the rapid increase in vehicular traffic has transformed street life. The latter has been underexplored in the ‘mobility turn’ literature, as the emphasis is, understandably, on motorized mobility: how it requires a complex system of infrastructural underpinnings, institutions and standardized practices, as well as ideological scaffolding that provide the preconditions for people’s privileged displacement in vehicles (Urry 2004; Lipset 2016: 7–8). Private car mobility takes centre stage, exploring amongst other things the diverse experiences of driving and the ‘democratization’ of car ownership, producing what may be defined as specific (local, national or regional) cultures of automobility (Miller 2001; Argenbright 2008; Green-Simms 2017). It speaks for itself that the (car) mobility literature has neglected forms of dwelling or ‘immobility’ and the convivial aspects of street life, which primarily emerge by virtue of pedestrian and other ‘slow’ non-motorized traffic modalities that are marginalized (Brown and Shortell 2016). In most cases, this literature seems to (implicitly) accept car mobility as a reality entrenched past the point of no return (see for example Dalakoglou 2017). The cultural studies ‘street’ literature focuses particularly on (visual) representations, reading and interpreting the language, signs and signifiers mobilized in fictional, academic and non-academic writing, as well as in photography and cinema, and more often than not ignoring the social and more ephemeral aspects of street life (see for example Hall 2012, and Hatherley 2015). One can draw a long narrative arc from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which can be ‘read’ as a celebration of conviviality on urban streets in the early Soviet city, to the bleaker depictions of car-dominated and congested postsocialist streets such as we find in Alexandru Solomon’s Apocalypse on Wheels (2009). Not seeking to discuss here in detail the shift from utopian to dystopian ‘cultural imaginaries’, we believe it would be rewarding to delve deeper into the cultural representations of socialist and postsocialist street life, a task best accomplished by cultural studies specialists. What we intend to do here is different: to explore, empirically and ethnographically, through systematic fieldwork on the ground, how new forms of dwelling and mobility have reshaped postsocialist street life. While some of the contributors employ visual imagery, either in a metaphoric way (Möser, this volume), or through photography depicting a specific local context, they throw light on typical postsocialist transformations, in concrete street spaces, rather than centralizing signs or symbols per se.

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Street life has changed in terms of traffic interaction, the nature of fleeting encounters, the forms and patterns of communication, and the formal rules and informal codes governing conduct. One way to reflect on these changes is to understand them as shifts in intermodal traffic interaction and friction, based on the fact that people use new modes of transportation (see Conley 2012). Pedestrians, for example, ­experience limitations to their mobility due to the new postsocialist traffic regime that prioritizes private car mobility. In socialist times, pedestrians experienced safer streets because of the sparseness of motorized traffic. Although socialist urban planners may have been more attentive to the needs of pedestrians (Hass-Klau 2015), pedestrians were also here directed through tunnels and overpasses, following modernist city planning principles seeking to segregate road users. Automobility now being the dominant form of mobility has led to a shift in understanding the function of streets and public spaces. Streets have been redefined as (private) mobility spaces, except for the dedicated pedestrianized areas that serve as refuges of consumerism and leisure (Maslova and Tuvikene, this volume). The contrast between traffic arteries and neighbourhood streets has become more pronounced, leading to the stigmatization (and even criminalization) of ‘immobile’ courtyard sociabilities (Curro, this volume). Traffic flows are increasingly separated, pushing pedestrians and cyclists to the street margins, onto (often unsuitable) pavements or bicycle lanes, tunnels and footbridges. In a country like Estonia, it has become compulsory for pedestrians to wear safety devices such as retroreflectors so they can be spotted by car drivers. As in the West, traffic engineering is largely a car-centred discipline, treating the presence of pedestrians as an impediment to traffic flows (Moran 2008: 130). The onus is on these pedestrians (including the inexperienced and infirm, such as children and elderly people) to adapt, protect themselves and behave responsibly. This approach cancels out the fact that pedestrians and cyclists hardly represent a safety threat and thus often do not strictly follow the rules. They also may have no other option: it is common for the authorities in highly congested cities such as Prishtina to transform pavements into designated car parks. As pavements were usually more spacious in socialist cities, they are indeed now providing ample space for parking. Pedestrians must meander between parked cars and other objects and use the middle of the street in making their way, the distinction between pavement and street blurred (Gagica and Duijzings, this volume). The ‘pedestrian shuffle’ that Joe Moran describes for the UK (2008: 124–25) is common in postsocialist cities: pedestrians engage in jaywalking and rule-breaking, weaving between immobile cars stuck

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in traffic jams, not waiting for traffic lights and using other ‘vernacular’ strategies (Scott 2012: 30–56) to move on and make progress despite formal rules of channelling pedestrian traffic. Moran also refers to zebra crossings, where pedestrians wait for a suitable gap to cross (2008: 127) – in a city like Prishtina they are forced to use the ‘mob’ principle, crossing the zebra en groupe, practicing solidarity (especially with elderly people) and building up a critical mass that can deter and stop advancing cars. As in other parts of the world, pedestrians develop their own ‘survival’ strategies, which are country or city-specific: cities shape walking practices, producing different embodied skills of street navigation (Handler 2016; Middleton 2010; Short and Pinet-Peralta 2010). Barnfield (2017), finally, discusses practices of running that constitute a special kind of accelerated walking: elderly people running across zebra crossings in response to approaching cars remains an all-too-common sight in postsocialist cities. Before the rise of the car, cycling was an accepted mode of everyday mobility in smaller and larger cities such as Budapest (see Tóth 2016). It suffered a steep decline after the end of socialism. Elderly people and children still use cycles in residential areas and parks, and many may still regularly cycle in the countryside, such that the bicycle has become for some a symbol of the rural past, a vehicle for ‘peasants’. Cycling has nonetheless experienced a revival in the last decade or so, particularly amongst hipsters and mobile workers such as delivery people and couriers, who want to be able to move speedily around congested cities (for Sofia, see Barnfield and Plyushteva 2015). Smaller towns tend to be more reminiscent of the socialist period, with ‘ordinary’ cyclists (still) being present on streets. Some citizens prefer motorbikes (or the now ubiquitous e-scooters), providing an alternative to the car when one wishes not to compromise on speed (for Vietnam, see Truitt 2008). There has arisen an alternative bikers’ sub- or counterculture, sometimes nurtured in and through male-dominated motor clubs (Jderu 2015). A benefit of moving around, either as a pedestrian, cyclist or motorist, is that it enables moments of contemplation, even if one has to navigate and negotiate one’s way with (anonymous) others. Public transport is particularly rife with encounters of this kind, making trams and buses intensely social spaces (Vazyanau, Gagica and Duijzings, this volume).5 Public transport vehicles form an extension of the street, a shared ‘mobile’ space intersecting with ‘real’ street spaces at transit stops. Hence, a tram or bus can be seen as a ‘street on wheels’, with its own codes of conduct and distinct forms of engagement and detachment, compassion and solidarity, indifference and atomization. Public transport may provide opportunities for encounters across social and spatial

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divides, but it may also end up in segregation based on spending power (cheaper public transport versus more expensive private shared taxis). Even the most private and least sociable of all transport options – the automobile – remains bound up with public space, facilitating forms of social interaction, even if different and more mediated than pedestrian or passenger encounters (Thrift 2004). With cars dominating the cultural imaginary, public transport is seen with a certain disdain. Films such as Nimród Antal’s Kontroll (2003) or Toma Waszarow’s Red Light (2016) show underground ticket controllers, bus drivers and passengers as creatures of the past, as the ‘losers’ of transition, not least because public transport has generally been in a state of disrepair, resulting in widespread system breakdown (Vazyanau, this volume). The freedom afforded by the car contrasts with the ‘humiliating’ dependence on public transport, unreliable services, old vehicles, failing infrastructure and the presence of other passengers (pervaded by members of weaker social categories such as the elderly). Taxis can be seen as a semi-public type of transportation, offering the highest degree of privateness. For drivers, taxiing is not just a way to earn money, it also offers chances to establish social connections and support networks (Gagica and Duijzings, this volume). Taxiing is a type of mobile dwelling, an informal and ‘streetwise’ activity: being a taxi driver requires having a nose for potential danger and knowing how to respond, being able to navigate streets better than anybody else (Olma, this volume; see also Gambetta and Hamill 2005). In postsocialist cities, the volume of available taxis (especially informal ones) has increased a lot and the reputation of drivers has correspondingly plummeted, since virtually anyone can become a taxi driver. Informal taxiing has seen a growth with the upsurge of ride-hailing platforms enthusiastically welcomed in various parts of Eastern Europe (Lanamäki and Tuvikene 2022). Olma (this volume) shows that taxi drivers have an intimate knowledge of their city’s geography (though not necessarily of the street names, which have changed too often) and share vernacular orientiry or orientation points with passengers. His chapter problematizes the issue of wayfinding in a rapidly changing urban environment through the use of landmarks and mobile phones. Critical voices have emerged that deplore the dominance of the car in postsocialist cities. Citizens complain about driving styles, congestion, traffic jams, parking problems and other drawbacks, subsumed under the term avtomobilshchina, coined by Robert Argenbright who tried to evoke with this ‘an image of widespread, uncontrolled, and often violent misfortune’ (Argenbright 2008: 684). They organize cycle protests or claim rights for pedestrians (Sherouse 2018). Traffic blogs

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and forms of traffic activism are on the rise, with people documenting excesses in daily traffic on YouTube or similar platforms, sometimes actively intervening in problematic traffic situations. Certain websites seem to have been set up solely to develop a following based on sensationalism.6 This has been encouraged by motorized drivers now regularly using looping dash cams to collect evidence in case of an accident or ­insurance claim. Increased car mobility and motorization generate forms of ­confrontational publicness, with friction leading to aggression: in Bulgaria, for example, one ‘ethnic’ traffic accident, involving a Roma driver killing a Bulgarian, sparked widespread attacks on the Roma population across Bulgarian cities in 2011. New mobility practices have turned ‘public’ in new ways, occasionally resulting in violent frictions and confrontations bemoaned by ‘civic humanists’ (Blomley 2011). More and more citizens call for reforms, introducing, for instance, cycling infrastructure along the lines of Dutch or Danish examples, in cities such as Tallinn or Riga.

Conclusion In this volume, we demonstrate that postsocialist streets can afford or marginalize certain modes of mobility, with each mode having its own potential to bolster or jeopardize the social fabric of cities. Walking, cycling and public transport, despite their low prestige, enable a more profound engagement with other citizens, allowing for ‘pausability’ and ‘permeability’ (Conley 2012). Cars, on the other hand, commonly lead to distancing, individualism and an opting-out of ‘society’, spawning forms of anti-social behaviour. Bicycling and walking are locally embedded, while public transport allows citizens to venture out while engaging with (unknown and anonymous) others in mobile public environments. As Vazyanau argues in his contribution, social encounters in public transport and at tram and bus stops may seem trivial and insignificant, but they can foster civic engagement and publicness. In addition, (electric) public transport constitutes a socialist legacy that may be revitalized to achieve sustainable urban futures, and inspire other cities, shaping current and future urban realities. This book explores street life and the ubiquitous tension between mobility and sociability through the lens of ‘postsocialism’. As we argue, this constitutes more than just a regional or temporal marker. The contributions indeed use this notion, but they offer so much more than just stories of former socialist cities analysed against (debatable and inappropriate) Western benchmarks. The chapters show that ‘postsocialism’

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has a variety of meanings: they all revolve around specific path dependencies in concrete sites, with emerging and locally specific traffic relations and forms of interaction in streets and public spaces. They include various reconfigurations of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’, different adaptations and lessons to be learned from the socialist past, and ongoing uncertainties amongst the authorities and the wider public concerning what directions to take and where to look for inspiration for sustainable urban futures. Instead of promoting friction-free mobility, as traffic engineers do, we find inspiration in Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet’s (2020) and other critical mobility scholars’ vision of more equitable streets, revoking the ‘right of the fastest’ and protecting the slower and weaker participants in traffic: streets should be again made into ‘sticky places’, for example through traffic-calming measures (Josephson 2017). Being in transit should not be seen as a loss of time but as a meaningful ‘passage’ (Brömmelstroet 2020: 87). People enjoy moving around for a certain amount of time every day, which can be defined as a biological necessity and psychological need, as we are shaped and predestined to do so (2020: 42). The journey is purposeful and rewarding in and of itself, offering a trajectory that creates meanings, sparks memories and releases ‘creative’ energies (as ‘slow’ modes like walking and cycling tend to do). Slow motion also allows for lateral ‘accounting’ and a wider peripheral vision (Sennett 2018: 184–85). This can be a rich terrain from which positive narratives can be constructed, as being mobile (in a slow-paced manner) is central to what it means to be human. Democracy requires us to share spaces with others, to insert ourselves into unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people, to make eye contact, engage in small talk and seek encounters, all of which teaches us to negotiate and abide by our differences (Brömmelstroet 2020: 52; see also Snyder 2017: 81–86). As the Situationist Guy Debord argued in 1959, in Situationist Positions on Traffic: ‘We must go from circulation as supplement of work, to circulation as a pleasure’ (McDonough 2009: 141).

Overview of Chapters Although contributions to this volume come from different disciplines (history, anthropology and geography), virtually all chapters employ a combination of fine-grained ethnographic and qualitative (fieldwork) methods as is common in anthropology. They put flesh on the bones of the idea of postsocialist streets through the elements that we have unpacked here in this introduction.

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Thus, Kurt Möser’s chapter (1) shows how streets played a key role during the 1989/90 ‘peaceful revolution’ in the GDR. People ‘went on the street’, making streets into sites for demonstrations, celebrations and car parades. In the period following German unification, new infrastructure and signage led to a new street and road aesthetics, with Trabants being replaced by (used) cars imported from the West and the GDR’s strict traffic discipline being overtaken by the new ‘freedoms’ offered by driving. The chapter provides several evocative images of ‘die Wende’ now inscribed in collective memory. The following chapter (2), by Rita Gagica and Ger Duijzings, describes the contradictions of street life in postwar Prishtina (Kosovo), focusing on the inner-city areas: these streets have become ‘liberated’ spaces, allowing various forms of performative behaviour, interaction and public deliberation hitherto virtually impossible. Yet Prishtina’s heavily congested streets have also become sites of friction and conflict. Inhabitants find ‘creative’ solutions to cope with traffic conditions and parking problems. New postwar hierarchies are expressed in traffic, while activists try to do something about the worst excesses. The following two chapters deal with changing street socialities. Costanza Curro’s chapter (3) explores a form of dwelling in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi known as birzha: groups of young men hanging out on streets and squares in urban neighbourhoods. By their very ‘im-­mobility’ they challenge the paradigm of mobility promoted by the Saak’ashvili government following the 2003 Rose Revolution: birzha groups are perceived as undermining this postsocialist shift, being reminders of the Soviet past who defiantly resist the government’s efforts to westernize the country and leave behind the backwardness associated with the previous regime. As a result, they have been marginalized and criminalized. Curro discusses their leaning towards ‘locality’ and ‘im-mobility’ from a twofold perspective of exclusion and inclusion: the government’s zero-tolerance policy, and the birzha members’ attachment to their own neighbourhoods, cultivating local forms of trust and solidarity in a hostile social, political and economic environment. Jeremy Morris’s ­chapter (4) focuses on automobility as a mode of self-fashioning for young male blue-­collar workers in a Russian industrial town. It explores how the enduring ­working-class masculinity of the socialist era is inflected by globalization and transforming modes of production and labour, as transnational corporations and the informal economy challenge traditional factory work. It shows how ideals of masculinity have been subject to change due to consumption and DIY car ownership. Choices about what kind of car to own, whether to use credit to buy a Russia-built or fancy ‘foreign’ car, whether to learn how to repair a car or pay a stranger

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to do it – all these forks in the path of becoming automobile owners are related to statements about what kind of ‘man’ one wants to be. Cars as markers of masculinities intersect with aspirational fantasies and the stubborn retrenchments of ‘traditional’ socialist class identities. The two next chapters draw attention to how urban centre-periphery relations help us to understand postsocialist streets. Ger Duijzings (5) provides an ethnographic portrait of the centura, the 70km long ‘belt’ or ring road around Bucharest, bringing into focus the rapid transformations at the periphery of a large and sprawling capital city. The ring mirrors all the city’s contradictions, as it is home to a host of contrasting phenomena that coexist and rub against one another. The ring is also home to multiple ‘displacements’ of undesired but necessary urban institutions such as prisons, waste dumps, cemeteries and archives, all connected to the city through the centura. At the urban fringe, the social fabric is less dense, providing space for informal arrangements and opportunities, forms of ‘traffic’ and fleeting encounters. Sabina Maslova and Tauri Tuvikene (6) also juxtapose centre and periphery, evaluating Moscow’s ambitious programme of pedestrianization and public space upgrading. Parks and squares have been revamped, zones for pedestrians created and street furniture installed, but only in the central parts of Moscow. These measures did not reach the suburbs, where the majority of Muscovites encounter a shortage of pedestrian infrastructure and resulting safety and accessibility issues. Hence, the beneficiaries of ‘Western’ pedestrian-oriented policies are wealthy citizens, tourists and visitors, whereas the majority of the population have not seen improvements in their more ‘peripheral’ neighbourhoods. Postsocialist streets are also marked by other asymmetries in the form of public service disruptions that manifest themselves in urban contexts. Andrei Vazyanau (7) provides an ethnographic portrayal of life at bus and tram stops and in public transport vehicles, all of which can be seen as extensions of the street. Although these spaces are often seen as unsafe, they also serve numerous social functions. Paradoxically, declining public transport in Ukraine and Romania has meant that the stops have been transformed into lively social places: while waiting for the next bus or tram, people use the time to exchange information and to engage in petty trade, small talk and discussions about politics. As public transport is now increasingly ‘modernized’, its social functions tend to diminish. Social differences are amplified by the availability of private marshrutkas or small taxi vans which offer a faster and more frequent service, ‘doubling’ state-organized public transport. Nikolaos Olma (8) describes how Tashkent’s population finds its way around the city by using orientiry or orientation points rather than street names.

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They refer not only to obvious landmarks but also to sites or buildings that vanished or were renamed. This chapter argues that the orientiry system is the de facto toponymic register used by city residents, serving as a vernacular cognitive map developed by the population in exchange with Tashkent’s informal taxi drivers, who provide the city’s most popular means of transport. Given that most taxi drivers are moonlighters who do not know the names of the streets, the exchange of environmental knowledge between driver and passenger is the key mechanism that generates orientiry. Finally, the last contribution covers exurban sites along major roads. Agata Stanisz’s chapter (9) describes a roadside community in Poland, located along an ‘old’ national road and a newly constructed postsocialist motorway, bringing into focus the destinies of provincial spaces and small towns. In socialist times, the national road (the ‘Old Two’) was the main transportation route between eastern and western Poland; it has been replaced by the new, modern A2 highway, celebrated as a milestone in the country’s ‘return to Europe’. These settlements supported livelihoods built on roadside services, which catered to the long-haul transportation of goods and passengers (motels, hotels, petrol stations, bars, restaurants, nightclubs, car repair and car wash stations). Since the opening of the A2, this roadside economy has suffered, except in the town of Torzym, which managed to secure a highway exit off the A2. The final section contains a brief conclusion and three postscripts, by Luminita Gatejel, Joshua H. Roth and Peter Norton. They offer general reflections, based on their expertise, respectively, in socialist car mobility and automobility in Japan and the US. While Gatejel discusses the continuities (rather than discontinuities) of postsocialist car culture, Roth and Norton compare postsocialist contexts with those in Japan and the US, two examples of car-dominated societies which accommodated automobiles into their street spaces at an earlier stage. Roth discusses the Japanese habit of ‘getting lost’ as a form of cultural defiance against the ‘hypermobility’ of postwar Japan, heralding in fact the end of the ‘postwar’ period. He argues that the same phenomenon may be in store for the postsocialist world, announcing the end of ‘postsocialism’. Norton offers a broader reflection on the relevance of the concept of postsocialism, highlighting at the same time the importance of anthropology and ethnography for street and traffic studies. Ger Duijzings is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universität Regensburg. Until 2014, he taught anthropology at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He did extensive research on

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the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and is currently studying urban transformations in postsocialist cities. He has published widely on these topics, amongst others, the edited volume Global Villages: Rural and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Bulgaria (Anthem, 2013), and the coedited volume (together with Ben Campkin) Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (I.B. Tauris, 2016). Tauri Tuvikene is Professor in Urban Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His research covers the intersection of urban cultures, mobilities, cities and policies. His research interests include comparative urbanism and the (re)conceptualization of postsocialism, as well as the experience and regulation of urban mobility, ranging from automobility to walking and public transport. He has published widely on these topics in various journals as well as coedited (together with Wladimir Sgibnev and Carola S. Neugebauer) the book Post-­socialist Urban Infrastructures (Routledge, 2019). He was Project Leader for a HERA-funded project on public transport as public space ­(2019–2022).

Notes 1. Jane Jacobs was a vocal critic of modernist planning catering to cars and fast traffic. She defended instead dense, multifunctional streets where movement could freely mix with forms of play and social interaction. For modernists like Le Corbusier, the ‘messiness’ of the urban street produced unwanted ‘frictions’ and ‘problems’, whereas for Jacobs it fostered conviviality and the acceptance of difference. 2. In 1980, the GDR had the highest share of privately owned cars in socialist Central and Eastern Europe, with 151 cars per 1,000 inhabitants, as compared to 31 cars per 1,000 in the Soviet Union and 11 per 1,000 in Romania (Pucher and Buehler 2005: 726). 3. Especially the iconic Zastava 750, nicknamed ‘Fića’, a longer version of the Fiat 600 licensed to the Yugoslav car producer Zastava in 1962, see Živković 2016. 4. Ger Duijzings carried out explorative fieldwork along Albania’s National Road SH1 in Spring 2022, documenting, on average, one cenotaph or floral tribute per road kilometre. For the Romanian case see an article written by two journalists for the Romanian daily newspaper and online news portal Libertatea: https://www. libertatea.ro/stiri/drumul-crucilor-564-cruci-dn2-bucuresti-bacau-3699931. For Russia’s bad roads and driving behaviour, see Josephson 2017: 117–35. 5. The sociality of public transport was also explored in the PUTSPACE project (Public Transport as Public Space: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting) carried out between 2019 and 2022 and led by Tauri Tuvikene. 6. See for example traffic blogs and YouTube channels in Romania and Russia: https://www.trafictube.ro/ (Romania) or StopXam at https://vk.com/stopxam or https://www.youtube.com/user/stopxamlive (Russia).

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References Aggermann, Lorenz, Eduard Freudmann and Can Gülcü. 2008. Beograd Gazela: Reiseführer in eine Elendssiedlung. Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag. Argenbright, Robert. 2008. ‘Avtomobilshchina: Driven to the Brink in Moscow’, Urban Geography 29(7): 683–704. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Bahrdt, Hans-Paul. 1974. Umwelterfahrung: Soziologische Betrachtungen über den Beitrag des Subjekts zur Konstitution von Umwelt. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlag. Barnfield, Andrew. 2017. ‘Experiencing Postsocialism: Running and Urban Space in Sofia, Bulgaria’, European Urban and Regional Studies 24(4): 368–80. Barnfield, Andrew and Anna Plyushteva. 2015. ‘Cycling in the Postsocialist City: on Travelling by Bicycle in Sofia, Bulgaria’, Urban Studies 53(9): 1–14. Blomley, Nicholas. 2011. Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow. Abingdon: Routledge. Brömmelstroet, Marco te. 2020. Mobility Language Matters. Available online at: https://decorrespondent.fetchapp.com/get/63248097 (accessed on 24 ­December 2021). Brown, Evrick and Timothy Shortell (eds). 2016. Walking in Cities: Quotidian Mobility as Urban Theory, Method, and Practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bryzgel, Amy. 2017. Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Burrell, Kathy and Kathrin Hörschelmann (eds). 2014. Mobilities in Socialist and Post-Socialist States: Societies on the Move. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Campkin, Ben and Ger Duijzings. 2016. ‘Engaged Urbanism: Situated and Experimental Methodologies for Fairer Cities’, in Ben Campkin and Ger Duijzings (eds.), Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 1–20. Collier, Stephen J. 2011. Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Conley, Jim. 2012. ‘A Sociology of Traffic: Driving, Cycling, Walking’, in Phillip Vannini, Lucy Budd, Ole B. Jensen, Christian Fisker and Paola Jirón (eds), Technologies of Mobility in the Americas. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 219–36. Cseh-Varga, Katalin and Adam Czirak (eds). 2020. Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-Based Art in Late Socialist Europe. London: Routledge. Dalakoglou, Dimitris. 2017. The Road: An Ethnography of (Im)Mobility, Space, and Cross-Border Infrastructures in the Balkans. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dines, Nick. 2018. ‘What’s in the Word? Contextual Diversity, Urban Ethnography and the Linguistic Limits of the Street’, The Sociological Review 66(5): 952–67. Duijzings, Ger. 2010. ‘From Bongo Bongo to Boston via the Balkans: Anthropological Contributions to the Study of Urban Transformations in Southeastern Europe’, in Thomas M. Bohn and Marie Janine Calic (eds.), Urbanisierung und Stadtentwicklung in Südosteuropa vom 19. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner (Südosteuropa-Jahrbuch 37), pp. 93–132. ____. 2012. ‘Miejskie trajektorie: Tworzenie antropologii ruchu’ [Urban trajectories: An Anthropology of Movement in the Making], Kultura Współczesna (Warsaw) 72(2): 19–24.

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Hatherley, Owen. 2015. Landscapes of Communism: A History through Buildings. London: Allen Lane. Henderson, Jason. 2013. Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hubbard, Phil and Dawn Lyon. 2018. ‘Introduction: Streetlife – the Shifting Sociologies of the Street’, The Sociological Review 66(5): 937–51. Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Jacobs, Allan B. 1993. Great Streets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Jderu, Gabriel. 2015. Cultura motocicletelor: Studii de sociologia moto-mobilității. Bucharest: Tritonic. Jerram, Leif. 2011. Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Josephson, Paul. 2017. Traffic. New York: Bloomsbury. Kuhr-Korolev, Corinna and Dirk Schlinkert (eds). 2009. Towards Mobility: Varieties of Automobilism in East and West. Wolfsburg: Volkswagen AG (PDF available online at: https://www.volkswagenag.com/presence/konzern/documents/his​to​ ry/englisch/FPD3_EN.pdf, accessed on 24 December 2021). Kuligowski, Waldemar and Agata Stanisz. 2015. ‘On the Road: Polish Modernization from the Perspective of the Anthropology of the Motorway’, in Hana Cervinkova, Michal Buchowski and Zdenĕk Uherek (eds), Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 175–93. Lanamäki, Arto and Tauri Tuvikene. 2022. ‘Framing Digital Future: Selective Formalization and Legitimation of Ridehailing Platforms in Estonia’, Geoforum 136: 283–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.01.016. Ledeneva, Alena V. 2013. Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Light, Duncan. 2004. ‘Street Names in Bucharest, 1990–1997: Exploring the Modern Historical Geographies of Postsocialist Change’, Journal of Historical Geography 30(1): 154–72. Light, Duncan and Craig Young. 2014. ‘Habit, Memory, and the Persistence of Socialist-­Era Street Names in Postsocialist Bucharest, Romania’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(3): 668–85. ____. 2015. ‘Toponymy as Commodity: Exploring the Economic Dimensions of Urban Place Names’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(3): 435–50. Lipset, David. 2016. ‘Charon’s Boat and Other Vehicles of Moral Imagination’, in David Lipset and Richard Handler (eds), Vehicles: Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination. New York: Berghahn, pp. 1–17. Lipset, David and Richard Handler (eds). 2016. Vehicles: Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination. New York: Berghahn. Lofland, Lyn H. 1998. The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory. Hawthorne: Aldine de Gruyter. Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia and Renia Ehrenfeucht. 2009. Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McDonough, Tom (ed.). 2009. The Situationists and the City. London: Verso. Middleton, Jennie. 2010. ‘Sense and the City: Exploring the Embodied Geographies of Urban Walking’, Social and Cultural Geography 11(6): 575–96.

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Miller, Daniel (ed.). 2001. Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg. Mom, Gijs. 2014. Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car. New York: Berghahn. Moran, Joe. 2005. Reading the Everyday. London: Routledge. ____. 2008. Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime. London: Profile Books. ____. 2010. On Roads: A Hidden History. London: Profile Books. Möser, Kurt. 2002. Geschichte des Autos. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Müller, Martin. 2019. ‘Goodbye, Postsocialism!’, Europe-Asia Studies 71(4): 533–50. Norton, Peter D. 2008. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Piotrowski, Piotr. 2012. Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe. London: Reaktion Books. Prytherch, David. 2018. Law, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Way: Imagining a More Just Street. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pucher, John and Ralph Buehler. 2005. ‘Transport Policy in Post-Communist Europe’, in Kenneth J. Button and David A. Hensher (eds), Handbook of Transport Strategy, Policy and Institutions. Handbooks in Transport, Vol. 6. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 725–44. Robinson, Jennifer. 2011. ‘Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(1): 1–23. Roth, Joshua Hotaka. 2016. ‘Is Female to Male as Lightweight Cars Are to Sports Cars? Gender Metaphors and Cognitive Schemas in Recessionary Japan’, in David Lipset and Richard Handler (eds), Vehicles: Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination. New York: Berghahn, pp. 88–108. Sanjek, Roger. 2000. ‘Keeping Ethnography Alive in an Urbanizing World’, Human Organization – Journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology 59(3): 280–88. Scott, James C. 2012. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sennett, Richard. 2018. Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City. London: Penguin. Sherouse, Perry Maxfield Waldman. 2018. ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends: Automobility and Shame in Tbilisi, Georgia’, Cultural Anthropology 33(3): 444–72. Short, John Rennie and Luis Mauricio Pinet-Peralta. 2010. ‘No Accident: Traffic and Pedestrians in the Modern City’, Mobilities 5(1): 41–59. Siegelbaum, Lewis H. 2008. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ____. (ed.). 2011. The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc. Ithaca, NY: ­Cornell University Press. Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. London: The Bodley Head. Steigemann, Anna. 2019. The Places Where Community is Practiced: How Store Owners and Their Businesses Build Neighborhood Social Life. Wiesbaden: Springer. Stenning, Alison and Kathrin Hörschelmann. 2008. ‘History, Geography and Difference in the Post-Socialist World: or, Do We Still Need Post-Socialism?’, Antipode 40(2): 312–35.

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Stenning, Alison, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz Świątek. 2010. Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities. Malden, Oxford, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Sýkora, Luděk and Stefan Bouzarovski. 2012. ‘Multiple Transformations: Conceptualising the Post-Communist Urban Transition’, Urban Studies 49(1): 43–60. Therborn, Göran. 2006. ‘Eastern Drama. Capitals of Eastern Europe, 1830s–2006: An Introductory Overview’, International Review of Sociology – Revue ­Internationale de Sociologie 16(2): 209–42. Thrift, Nigel. 2004. ‘Driving in the City’, Theory, Culture and Society 21 (4–5): 41–59. Tóth, Katalin. 2016. ‘Budapest: Reviving the Bicycle Lifestyle’, in Ruth Oldenziel, Martin Emanual, Adri Alberde la Bruhèze and Frank Veraart (eds), Cycling Cities: The European Experience. Hundred Years of Policy and Practice. Eindhoven: Foundation for the History of Technology, pp. 161–71. Truitt, Allison. 2008. ‘On the Back of a Motorbike: Middle-Class Mobility in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’, American Ethnologist 35(1): 3–19. Tuvikene, Tauri. 2010. ‘From Soviet to Post-Soviet with Transformation of the Fragmented Urban Landscape: The Case of Garage Areas in Estonia’, Landscape Research 35(5): 509–28. ____. 2016. ‘Strategies for Comparative Urbanism: Post-Socialism as a De-­Territorialized Concept’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(1): 132–46. ____. 2018. ‘Post-Socialist (Auto)Mobilities: Modernity, Freedom and Citizenship’, Geography Compass 12(3): e12362. ____. 2019. ‘Between Community and Private Ownership in Centrally Planned Residential Space: Governing Parking in Socialist Housing Estates’, in Daniel Baldwin Hess and Tiit Tammaru (eds), Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries: The Legacy of Central Planning in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Cham: Springer, pp. 321–36. Tuvikene, Tauri, Wladimir Sgibnev, Daniela Zupan, Deana Jovanović and Carola S. Neugebauer. 2020. ‘Post-Socialist Infrastructuring’, Area 52(3): 575–82. Urry, John. 2004. ‘The “System” of Automobility’, Theory, Culture and Society 21(4–5): 25–39. Vanderbilt, Tom. 2008. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says about Us). London: Penguin. Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Verkade, Thalia and Marco te Brömmelstroet. 2020. Het recht van de snelste: Hoe ons verkeer steeds asocialer werd. Amsterdam: De Correspondent. World Bank. 2020. Guide for Road Safety Opportunities and Challenges: Low and Middle Income Country Profiles. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://open​ knowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/33363 (accessed on 24 December 2021). Yazıcı, Berna. 2013. ‘Towards an Anthropology of Traffic: A Ride through Class Hierarchies on Istanbul’s Roadways’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 78(4): 515–42. Živković, Marko. 2016. ‘Little Cars That Make Us Cry: Yugoslav Fića as a Vehicle for Social Commentary and Ritual Restoration of Innocence’, in David Lipset and Richard Handler (eds), Vehicles: Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination. New York: Berghahn, pp. 111–32. Zukin, Sharon, Philip Kasinitz and Xiangming Chen. 2016. Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 1

5 Seven Imaginary Images of the Transition of GDR Streets, 1989–1995 Kurt Möser

How do historians deal with depicting accelerated transformation? There are several conventional options: confronting what had come before and what came after; describing actors and stakeholders in the process of change; analysing the discourses preparing transitions or accompanying them; narrating the processes and their components. Each of these methods has successful examples as well as critics. But sometimes it is not very helpful, it seems to me, to depict the transitional process itself when there are lasting results which, in certain cases, startle observers and contemporary witnesses. To deal with what happened on East Germany’s streets in the ten years from 1989 to 1999, I here put forth a view that neither narrates nor systematically analyses their historic transformation. Instead, I offer something more impressionistic that will nevertheless, I hope, be results-oriented via a presentation of a few imaginary images. I have chosen not to show pictures of concrete, tangible places. Instead, I have opted to describe, narrate and interpret imaginary but nonetheless typical pictures of street transformations. Though not ‘real’, these somewhat idealized images will, I hope, be instantly recognized by contemporary witnesses and historians alike. We all have mental images that can be and indeed are called up at the mention of certain events, persons or places. I argue that such imaginary pictures are as relevant for the individual reception of events and for their social impact as concrete pictures interpreted by historians – in the same way that imaginary objects are highly significant for discourses on the culture of technology (Möser 2018). Thus, I leave it to your visual imagination to follow my descriptions. Of course, any number of objections might be raised against this approach. I suggest that the reader adopt a sympathetic view, judging the value of such an approach only at the end (see Möser 2009).

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Image 0.5: A People’s Demonstration in Leipzig; a Berlin Street with GDR Cars Heading West We all remember that the ‘peaceful revolution’ in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) began with a transformation of the street. GDR city streets were, generally speaking, highly regulated, surveilled, closely controlled and policed areas. Visitors from the West often noticed the discipline shown by users of the street and the general orderliness of things. But a lack of surface repair and of cleanliness was also obvious, occasioning remarks on the overall dilapidation and disrepair of the street infrastructure during the GDR’s final decade. Mass demonstrations in Leipzig and other places transformed this ordered if somewhat dingy street space into a subversive space, with the authorities (fortunately) only half-heartedly attempting to re-­ regulate it in the wake of this revolutionary spatial transformation. Of course, street demonstrations were not new to everyday life in the GDR. Festive days, for instance the national holiday the Day of Victory (8 May) or festivals of the youth movement or the Spartakiaden, were carefully planned events that gave a central place to street parades. The new mass demonstrations drew on these routine practices but essentially changed them: flags, slogans and choruses were used as of old, but in new patterns. The street marches, no longer organized by the ‘organs’ of the state, became more colourful and, obviously, were now politicized in quite a different way. Streets became, for brief periods, stages for semi-spontaneous assembly; slogans evolved without having been planned; the customary discipline of the comrades was jettisoned. This breakdown of the internal street order was followed by the border with the outside world breaking down; the subversive street activities came up against the state’s forced closure of space, a primary source for the growing discontent during the late GDR’s decline. A specific spatial structure had been forced on the GDR’s citizens – the ‘Gebiet der DDR’ (the territory of the GDR), with its typical maintenance of order and policing, the border zones with West Germany and West Berlin characterized by layers of restriction and interdiction, the ambivalent streetscapes of the transit motorways having service stations and rest areas shared with the ‘class enemy’, and the country sharing semipermeable borders with its ‘socialist brother states’. The GDR had defined a complex web of rigorous monitoring and access areas as well as opaque zones of control. For instance, the street areas in front of Western embassies or near military barracks were policed more heavily than backstreets, whereas the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin was a sort of tolerance zone – up to a point, stopping at ‘Zusammenrottungen’ (illegal gatherings) of

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dissidents. The control of spatial orders was exemplified, too, by the mapping of the national territory, which blotted out in elaborate ways sensitive areas such as military installations or power stations. In the autumn of 1989, in these ambivalent and hybrid spaces – rigid and authoritarian as well – the spatial structures were transformed. The order that had been enforced from the top down gave way. Immediately after the border was opened, car processions celebrated the end of the long confinement. Car parades became a typical feature and a symbolic act of one era’s end and of the onset of a new beginning, manifestations of a new spatial order. All these forms – demonstrations, subversive acts, blockades and symbolic parades – were phenomena characterizing a revolutionary transformation of street spaces. The street became a stage on which to make this abstract political/social transition tangible, visible and, at the same time, popular. This seems to align well with recent research aimed at identifying subversive mobility (see Shell 2015: 4–6), which has interpreted the street as a possible space of counter-politics, a counter-cultural space, a space to act out rebellion. The socialist street on the eve of the GDR’s collapse became a space for politics from below.

Image 1: The Empty Grid of a New Industrial Park After reunification, the disrepair of the street infrastructure became even more obvious than it had been in the 1980s. Such dilapidation became – in the West at least – one of the symbolic fields categorizing the failure of the exhausted socialist system. An early stage saw the West German government deciding on a general planning-oriented, politically topdown approach to achieve the ‘Herstellung gleicher Lebensverhältnisse’1 (‘creation of equitable living conditions’) via the planned re-building of marode (i.e. dilapidated) infrastructures. Their actions were part of a long historical vector of fostering economic growth through investment in transport infrastructure via state intervention. This tendency can be traced back to the railway building programmes instituted even before the founding of the German Reich. This top-down approach was rather typical of German transport-based economic policy (see Möser 2004). The economist Albert O. Hirschman (1958) suggested a model to explain the connection of transport and economy: either the transport sector lags behind general economic growth and is stimulated to ‘development by shortage’, or, to the contrary, infrastructure is built to stimulate the development of the ‘direct productive sector’ via better and cheaper transport, supply and trade frameworks – ‘development

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by excess’. This latter approach – whose architects of course gave no credit to Hirschman’s ideas – resulted in the political programme which was programmatically named ‘Gemeinschaftswerk Aufbau Ost’ (Collective Venture Reconstruction East). This blueprint was the outgrowth of a systematic approach towards reconstruction and the building of traffic infrastructure. It joined a tradition that had been established in (West) German economic policy: regarding investment in traffic infrastructure as essential for economic success and economic growth, closely aligned with an attitude characterizing the latter part of the 1950s ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ (economic miracle). ‘Wohlstand kommt auf guten Straßen’ (prosperity comes on good roads) was the appropriate slogan.2 Both cases manifested the conviction that modernizing roads or transport infrastructures generally would be indispensable for economic prosperity. Thus there was a discourse setting the reconstruction programme that West Germany had implemented against the dire neglect of infrastructure in the East – a discourse in line with the East’s failure to supply spare parts (Bauer 1999) due to the planned economy’s greater stress on goods’ production figures and lesser attention to the necessary spare parts and repair and maintenance facilities (Möser 2004). Now a reunited Germany could attempt to replicate an alleged winning recipe for transport policy as a prerequisite for economic success, guided by a policy based on the conviction that the engine for such success would be optimized transport infrastructure. Perceived ‘gaps’ in the federal street web were being closed via high investment; local roads were rebuilt to Western standards; bypasses and ring roads were constructed; and, last but not least, the street infrastructure of new industrial zones was designed – without, it should be said, existing prior demand but in the hopes that such new infrastructure would attract commercial investment activities, creating new industrial cores. And, finally, this programme was charged with meaning: new infrastructure projects became symbols of change and restructuring. But, we need to ask, was this powerful symbolic politics actually economically successful? It seems appropriate to question the validity and the success of this planning-oriented approach. The wisdom of this huge investment programme had in fact been questioned from its very beginning. After a quarter-century, unrealistic assumptions and unwise or misdirected planning ideas show themselves as the mistakes they were. The results of this principle of ‘infrastructure first’ were often disappointing: canal rebuilding did not, in spite of expectations, cause better usage of waterways, and, as this imaginary image indicates, preconstructed industrial plots did not attract an adequate number of users and instead became infrastructural ‘investment ruins’, symbolizing

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questionable preconceived political principles that were based on prioritizing infrastructure over actual demand. Had there been an alternative? In other former COMECON countries, lacking in excess funds and thus unable to indulge the luxury of ‘development by excess’, ‘development by shortage’ may have been quite successful. Traffic infrastructure may have been woefully inadequate or in bad repair even in the second decade after the breakdown of socialism. But I find it difficult to link bad roads to the lack of growth in the economy. Some cases show economic success despite the dilapidated infrastructure. Here, case studies of different infrastructure policy in other central and eastern European countries may be enlightening.

Image 2: A Used Car Dealer in a Suburban Plot, with a Trabant Wreck in the Foreground Street transformation presented quite a different image after 1990: here was now an image of spontaneous transformation, of the rather uncontrolled growth of new enterprises, new businesses, new uses of space. This new situation is typified by an imaginary picture of the site of a fly-by-night car dealer setting up shop in an improvised sales area, typically some abandoned suburban plot, selling junk cars that have been transported hastily from western Germany. This somewhat ­anarchic – certainly unplanned – approach relied on the desire amongst East Germans to obtain long-denied Western cars. These dealerships offered instant fulfilment of the repressed desire for ‘sexy’ automobiles, as opposed to the forced rationalism, unsophistication and obsolescence of socialist cars (see Wolle 2013: 302–305). Thus the former allocation of scarce private automobiles via highly regulated bureaucratic procedures and administrations, requiring forms to be filled out, explanations and long waiting lists (Kirchberg 2005), was supplanted by an all but instantaneous satisfaction of desire. This was at first hindered by the East Germans’ lack of funds before reunification. In the first months after the opening of the border, prospective buyers flocked to car dealers in the Western ‘Zonenrandgebiet’ (border zone area) and tried to buy mainly low-priced cars (‘Der große Auto-Rausch’ 2014). Of course, payment in Ostmark, the East German currency, was not accepted. Ideas were floated about financing the East German longing for cars through Western credits (‘Kontakte geknüpft’ 1990). But no such financing materialized, deferring the used car buying boom proper – ‘der große AutoRausch’ (the great car frenzy) – until reunification and the concurrent

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availability of DMarks. This surge was mirrored by an equally anarchic junking of Trabants and other Eastern cars. Their prices fell dramatically and owners disposed of their formerly cherished vehicles in an unregulated way. Abandoned cars were a typical feature on the GDR’s streets in 1990. Only months later were the wrecks towed away, and their disposal became a problem due to their non-recyclable composite ‘Plaste’ bodywork. The image of an improvised car dealership displaying the longedfor objects springing up in the adventurous months after the border opening and especially after formal reunification attempts to capture this transition. The new and improvised show-spaces created a re-­ economization and commercialization of East German streetscapes, whereas abandoned cars added a certain anarchic element, altering fundamentally the private/public balance of city streets and their use as well. Together, these imaginary images – the first representative of planning, the second of improvisation and anarchy – were typical s­ ymbolic forms of the transformation of the socialist street.

Image 3: Road Works on an Old Motorway Travelling on the GDR’s Autobahns felt like a form of time travel for Western drivers (Doßmann 2003). The experience in the 1980s of driving on motorways that had been built by Nazi Germany before the war and had hardly been altered was certainly rather strange. The state of the transit motorways was often, to Western eyes, a strangely original ‘street face’. They were handed down, preserved without much investment or effort. The old motorways radiating from Berlin were just repaired ad hoc or maintained in one way or another. They still had their grassy banks or hedges between directional lanes but lacked metal crash barriers, gantry signposts, acceleration lanes or safety strips. The entry and exit lanes in many cases retained their paved surface with blue basalt dices. The roadstead itself preserved the old concrete slabs of the 1930s, whose grooves and gaps were responsible for a characteristic acoustic rhythm similar to rail joints when driving at speed. This all changed within a rather short span of time. In the 1990s a radical transformation of the motorway streetscape was initiated. Typical in this regard were the extensive reconstruction and resurfacing projects financed by the ‘Verkehrsprojekte Deutsche Einheit’ (Transport Projects German Unity).3 The planning and construction of urban and village bypasses were carried out, crossings were reconstructed and, last but

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not least, there emerged an entirely new motorway, the A20, running roughly parallel to the Baltic coast. Thus, from the middle of the 1990s onwards, East German motorways and primary roads were clogged with roadworks, adding to congestion and roadblocks and increasing the risk of accidents – the latter because drivers accustomed to GDR traffic norms were not used to the Western practices of road reconstruction. Roadworks became one of the typical images of the former GDR’s roads: a nuisance in the present as well as a promise of a better future for road transportation. Ultimately, by the decade after the turn of the millennium the region was to possess a fundamentally rebuilt major road network which not only matched its Western counterpart but is actually better in many respects: more modern, more compatible with more recent road engineering practices, and better maintained. Heavy investment in Eastern motorways which still experienced less use in the early 1990s was mirrored by declining maintenance of the generally more heavily used Western major road network, which obviously had aged badly. Thus, a quarter-century of road reconstruction and maintenance has resulted in a rather paradoxical picture of better roads in the East. The socialist economies had neglected infrastructure networks due not only to a lack of funds but also to a problem inherent to ‘Planwirtschaft’ (the planned economy), which rewarded the new and let the old slide. New road kilometres made better copy in the publicized planning numbers, as was also the case for figures about completed new cars instead of much needed spares.

Image 4: A Halved Allee with Felled Trees Attempts to modernize traffic infrastructure did not stop at the reconstruction of motorways and major roads. The transformation of country roads and the altering of the landscape were culturally significant undertakings to eradicate the older yet retained roadscape, which was similar to what would have been seen during the prewar era. The justification put forward was that the new initiatives were an investment in security, achieved through the planning of bypasses, the widening of roads, the addition of safety features such as street boundary posts and – a measure which had a big impact – the mitigation of collision dangers via the widespread felling of Alleebäume or trees alongside roads. Thus, a distinctive feature of the northeastern German landscape was radically transformed. A century-old element of landscape culture was utterly eradicated. After reunification a

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significant long-term process in the history of mobility was enacted: the transformation of multifunctional street spaces for just one dominant purpose, that of transport and traffic. This process had begun by suppressing non-­traffic-related road usage even before the First World War, but it continued unabated after 1990, invading streetscapes which many regarded as ‘idyllic’ or ‘nostalgic’: hence the typical hybrid spaces made up of the old and the new. The alteration of the postsocialist street thus affected much more than simply the streets themselves, their surfaces, embankments, signposting or zoning. It resulted in an aesthetic transformation, a fundamental alteration of the landscape. This metamorphosis was also recognizable in town streets and not only in out-of-town roads and motorways. Preserved forms and the familiar visual characteristics of streets were replaced by Westernized structures and the aesthetics of road signage and road zoning. This mixture of the old and the new was typical for at least the first decade after reunification.

Image 5: A Crash Site of an Old High-Powered Western Car One of the dangerous consequences of traffic and road ­modernization – or the sudden influx of Western cars – was a significant increase in serious road accidents. The Mitteldeutsche Zeitung claimed a ‘dramatic rise’ of traffic accidents in August 1990. There were 40,000 vehicle accidents in the first seven months of 1990, up a whopping 52 per cent from the previous year. The rise in the number killed, having risen by 69 per cent to 1379 in these months, was even more dramatic (‘Wildwest’ 1990). During the whole of 1990, fatalities rose by a staggering 91 per cent (‘Fast doppelt’ 1990). There were several dimensions to these disturbing figures: a high number of newly registered cars, which increased by 400,000 from October 1989 to mid-1990, most of them of Western origin; a mismatch of obsolete infrastructure and unfamiliar powerful cars; relaxed control by the authorities; different forms of socialization for drivers and other road users; and overenthusiasm for the new ‘freedom of the road’, which is typical for a fluid state between controlled and semi-anarchic streetscapes. Thus accidents were often caused by an ‘anarchic’ reaction to what had been the overregulation of GDR traffic, resulting in a spontaneous rebellion ‘from below’ against the specific authoritarian form of GDR socialization with regard to mobility, combined with difficulties due to the incongruity, for Eastern drivers, of hyper-powered Western vehicles.

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Obviously, the rise in incidents was not the fault of Western drivers: despite high numbers visiting the ‘new counties’, their share of accidents was only 13 per cent (‘Wildwest’ 1990). Thus the new reckless driving behaviour – ‘Wild West on the Streets’ was the title of more than one newspaper article – produced this dramatic increase in severe road accidents. Such dangerous driving only slowly transformed itself into more relaxed and less perilous driver behaviour. In fact, it took more than a decade for the relative road accident rates in the East to a ­ pproximate those of the West. The superior safety standards of ­Western cars more than counterbalanced the effect of less safe cars, e.g. the Trabant with its resin bodywork. Typical crashes between cars and lorries with widely differing passive safety features intensified the problem. One such typical postsocialist road accident took place in October 1990 on West German soil, on the Autobahn 9 close to the border. Formerly a sleepy provincial road, the Autobahn 9 now bore a vastly increased flow of commuters from East to West and of delivery lorries going mainly in the opposite direction. In a massive crash involving 121 vehicles, ten people were killed and 122 injured (‘Münchberger Senke’; Zeilmann 2015). Another important and dangerous factor was the 1992 revocation of strict GDR speed limits, lifted even against the wishes of a vast majority of East Germans4 and resulting in a steep increase of traffic fatalities to an annual total of more than 11,000 deaths in the larger, reunited Germany.5 Strict speed limits, strictly controlled traffic rules, a more comprehensive driving test and a high degree of regulation, combined with a stunted growth of car ownership, led to collective suffering under a situation of deprived mobility, of unfulfilled longing and the widespread perception of overregulation. This led to an overheated reaction, repeatedly described in the press as ‘anarchy’. The breakdown of authority of the dreaded GDR traffic police (the derided ‘white mice’) mirrored the breakdown of the authoritarian control structures of the East German state. This appears to be typical: often in mobility history individual mobility transgresses into more general political spheres, thus developing into a symbolic field for more overarching political questions. But freedom from the control of traffic often meant a lack of discipline with dire consequences, a grave situation exacerbated by less comprehensive rescue and assistance systems. A novel attitude of GDR drivers towards fines characterized the new traffic culture: whereas the old regime fined misconduct severely and strictly enforced fines, in 1990 only 500 out of more than 3,000 fines were paid at all (‘Fast ­doppelt’ 1990).

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Image 6: Streetside Repair of a Trabant and a Western Car Towed by an ADAC Assistance Truck Under ‘real socialism’ (or actually existing socialism), the drivers themselves had to carry out, by necessity, most of the automotive servicing and breakdown-related repairs due to a lack of adequate and fast facilities dedicated to repair, service and assistance. This aligned with a generally very slow standard of customer service under real socialism. Thus owners or drivers had to develop self-help and mechanical skills, which was facilitated in part by their vehicles possessing a comparatively straightforward technological layout – two-stroke engines, rather simple mechanics and a high degree of standardization (Kirchberg 1999). But maintenance efforts were hampered by a lack of spare parts. Tinkering was a necessary and characteristic experience of mobility in the GDR (Möser 2011: 157–59), whose features one finds amongst drivers in other socialist states: a ‘garage culture’ where males gathered and bonded, a black or grey economy where one acquired spares and the necessity of developing and honing mechanical skills.6 When the first wave of used, often unsellable older Western cars swamped the ‘New Counties’, a distinctly new situation emerged for car-conscious GDR citizens and potential customers for dealers of Western cars. The car culture was swiftly changing: Western cars were much more advanced technologically; but, being mainly old, they were prone to breakdowns and mechanical trouble. The tediously acquired skills of GDR drivers were focused mainly on straightforward two-stroke technology. This familiarity was not very helpful when they were confronted with next-generation cars possessing much more complex four-stroke technologies. From the 1980s onwards these Western cars were increasingly ‘hardened’ against amateur tinkering, and drivers were indeed discouraged to work under the hood. The automobiles were fitted with electronic ignitions and many even had fuel injection instead of carburettors. In addition, maintenance and repair required less standardized replacement parts due to a more complicated technical layout, amongst other more unfamiliar technical features. The typical amateur equipment that had accumulated in private garages – ignition timing devices, grease guns, brake tools – was becoming superfluous or unsuitable. However, specific spare parts as well as adequate professional repair facilities were not yet available due to a rather slow expansion of the network of authorized workshops of Western car companies. The pattern of self-help thus could not continue; acquired skills were no longer of any use. A gap opened between possible self-help and necessary external help.

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At the same time, the Western monopolist of assistance systems, the ADAC, the Allgemeine Deutscher Automobilclub (General German Automobile Club), was speedily expanding into the East, closing this gap by providing essential roadside help via a network of assistance vehicles. The GDR ‘Abschleppdienste’, unreliable and slow to provide assistance, either disappeared or merged with the new services. In only a couple of years the GDR tinkering culture was irreversibly transformed. Here, as in my other symbolic images, there developed an ‘in-between’, a ‘not yet Westernized’ mobility and street culture, with lingering residua of the old which overlaid the intrusion of the new, adding up to a typical hybrid modernization (Edgerton 2006). This prompts the question: which is more ‘modern’ – self-reliance and an amateur competence culture skilled at handling an everyday technology, or the dependence on professional assistance infrastructure backing up a complex, diversified, large-scale technological system? Can changing traffic patterns and mobility behaviour be regarded as making significant inroads into ‘Westernization’, thus forming an important symbolic field of cultural and social transition?

Image 7: A Multicoloured Trabant in a Convoy of Classic Cars A complementary process to the driving back or abolition of the GDR’s specific mobility culture was a nostalgic transformation. In particular, the typical GDR car, the Trabant, underwent a metamorphosis. Formerly a liability – even apostrophized as ‘hazardous waste’ by West German politicians due to its non-recyclable plastic compound body – it was now a collector’s vehicle, used by nostalgic tour guides in the former East Berlin and deemed a lovable car at classic car gatherings. This transformation of what had been intended as a ‘rational’ car, a car of the mobility subsistence level, into a nostalgic item is a common occurrence with people’s cars in late or ‘supersloanistic’ mobility cultures (with a flexible and diversified mass production of cars, adapting models to the tastes and purchasing power of consumers): they change their meaning, their usage and their user groups (Möser 2002). But in this case the Trabant acquired a specific nostalgic meaning: it became an element of ‘Ostalgie’, a longing for the old stability and nest-like warmth of the perished socialist past. Within this context it acquired a new degree of attention and a specific political significance. Despite its shortcomings, its cramped accommodation and high service demands, the Trabant was a desired object, promising individual mobility in a collective but increasingly i­ndividualistic

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society (Wolle 2016). The mood of ‘not everything was bad under real socialism’ found in the desired Trabant a symbol especially amongst groups who perceived themselves to be losers in the unification process. But its reappearance in the nostalgic historic car culture (Möser 2013) had, alongside this meaning, another dimension: within a youth-dominated sector of classic cars which could be termed ‘fun classics’, the ‘Trabbi’ became depoliticized and decontextualized. In reunited Germany it was collected, restored and displayed on a par with other fun classics such as the Beetle, the Mini or the 2 CV. It was transformed into an arbitrary car floating weightlessly outside any remembrance culture.

Image 8: A Non-Picture – the Dream of Mobility Roads became much more than just spaces for peaceful demonstrations and self-displays of ‘das Volk’. We saw that beyond the ‘Spaziergänge’ (the demonstrations, literary ‘strolls’), citizens motorized themselves as fast as possible and celebrated yet another freedom: the ‘Trabbi’ represented the stage of a newly acquired availability for the desired car culture. A mobility dream was turned into reality. What to make of it? Of course, the long wait for one’s mobility dream to come true was frustrating. But it increased the longing for the vehicle, and the waiting for the ordered car fostered further dreaming and fantasizing about the possibilities of driving. ‘Pre-ownership’ and fantasizing about future mobility is an important part of private car culture, of expectations of mobility. Generally, dreaming and imagining are underestimated fields of technology (Möser 2018). Even before one uses technology, one’s ‘non-usage’ – preparing for ownership and imagining future use – are powerful factors in the acceptance of a technology. Thus, the postsocialist street became, when seen in this perspective, something of a ‘dreamscape’, a mental playing field for unfulfilled yet persistent dreams of easy, modern Western mobility. This imagination was curbed until reunification by boring, technologically backward cars which, on top of such limitations, were not even readily available. Prospective drivers had to wait for up to twelve years for Trabants in 1989. In turn, this starving of cars became a symbolic field for curbed participation in the Western consumer culture as a whole. Dreams of cars and driving thus had a decidedly political dimension – a feature typical of developed automobile cultures in industrial societies.

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Some Questions This leads to an obvious question: if the transition of car cultures was closely related to, as well as highly symbolic of, political transition as a whole, was unsatisfied individual mobility instrumental in the transition process (Zeller 1996)? I think yes, but the complex aspects of the political process and thus the transformation of the postsocialist street has to be tackled within the context of a complex multidimensional field encompassing the breakdown of the Eastern Bloc, where the actors were not only the people demonstrating in the streets but also the Soviet government and foremost Mikhail Gorbachev. The role of the desire for cars and the dissatisfaction with the unsatisfactory fulfilment of individual mobility has been addressed here, but the matter is, I assume, far from settled. To resolve the issue, we must consider the context of a general question: the connection of transport politics and general politics (Möser 2009). Furthermore, we must tackle the question of whether the transformation of socialist mobility in the GDR followed some form of German ‘Sonderweg’ (national exceptionalism). Was the actual transition process specific to the GDR, especially in the field of traffic and mobility culture, or was this process in tune with the transformation in other Eastern Bloc countries? The GDR obviously had a special place within the COMECON states, politically as well as economically. It was the border state in close contact with the class enemy, its media and its citizens; and since the FRG did not regard East Germany as a foreign country, the latter virtually enjoyed the benefits of being an unofficial member of the EEC. Equally obvious is the fact that reunification offered an extremely favourable starting point for East Germany in terms of economic help, investment and much more, which Poland or Romania did not enjoy to nearly such an extent. A survey of what East German ‘exceptionalism’ consisted of, and on what the results of its differences from other countries of the former Eastern Bloc in fact were, would be fruitful. Were transitional processes of mobility cultures after 1990 wider apart or did they have more in common with, say, Poland? Addressing this question would entail an economic comparison between the investments in the transformation of traffic infrastructure after reunification with similar efforts in other former Eastern Bloc countries, comparatively measuring the results. Also, were there possibly alternative futures of transformation? Was the future of ‘Zusammenwachsen’ (merging or growing closer together) in the field of traffic and mobility inevitable, with no possible alternatives? Were there ideas that might have led down different

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paths? A ‘what if’ future, now regarded by serious historians as a fruitful intellectual game (e.g. Ferguson 2011), could be useful in providing a counterpart to a deterministic view, an alternative to the trajectory aiming at the ‘blühende Landschaften’ (blossoming landscapes) which FRG Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised would be possible via heavy investment. A final remark: we were witnesses of the collapse of a specific ‘socialist modernity’, in conception and in reality. A badly aging socialist utopia was wrecked and replaced by quite another type of modernity, ‘our’ modernity, apparently more successful, that is closer to Western experiences and approaches. I want to put forward that what we have to understand is not just a matter of a necessary replacement of an obsolete world, overrun by the merciless forces of history. As to the agents and processes, I think we have to come to terms with several important, not necessarily interconnected fields of transformation. For these questions we have to develop useful methods; and we have to look for adequate sources. Understanding transitional processes between different forms of ‘modernity’ presents cultural historians of technology with quite a few problems. And when trying to understand the politics, economics, cultures and aesthetics of modernization processes and their different and seldom equal speeds and fields of penetration, it may be useful not only to concentrate on systematic, top-down, state-induced, ‘rational’ processes, but also to look into subversive, unplanned and/or hedonistic driving forces on the road to modernization. I deem it advisable to take rather contingent historical forces into account, too. Kurt Möser is retired Professor of History of Technology. From 2006 to 2021 he taught at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He graduated from Konstanz University (1979) studying History and Literature, achieving a doctorate in 1982. He was DAAD lecturer at the University of Oxford (1984–1986) and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi ­(1991–1993). For twenty years he was curator for the history of mobility at the Museum of Technology and Labour (now Technoseum) in Mannheim. He is the author of numerous publications in the fields of mobility and military history, and of two literary works.

Notes 1. Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für die Neuen Bundesländer – ­Gleichwertige Lebensverhältnisse schaffen [The Federal Government Commissioner for the New Federal States – Creating Equitable Living Conditions],

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see: https://web.archive.org/web/20180212084145/http://www.beauftra​gte-​ne​ ue-laen​der.de/BNL/Navigation/DE/Themen/Gleichwertige_Leb​ensve​ rh​aeltn​ isse_schaffen/gle​ichwertige_lebensverhaeltnisse_schaffen.html (accessed 31 January 2023). 2. Slogan of the third Deutsche Straßentag [German Road Day], 1957 (see Kuhm 1997: 15). 3. See the Sachstandsbericht Verkehrsprojekte Deutsche Einheit [Status Report on the German Unity Transport Projects], 2015: https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/ DE/Anlage/G/sachstandsbericht-vde.pdf?__blob=publicationFile (accessed on 31 January 2023). 4. See Heidl 2011: ‘Obwohl sich laut einer Umfrage der Bundesanstalt für Straßenwesen im Jahr 1990 89 Prozent der Ostdeutschen für eine Beibehaltung des Limits ausgesprochen hatten, gilt seit 1. Januar 1992 auch auf ostdeutschen Straßen nunmehr die Richtgeschwindigkeit von 130km/h’ [Although according to a 1990 Federal Highway Research Institute survey 89 per cent of East Germans were in favor of maintaining the [speed] limit, the recommended speed of 130km/h has been in effect on East German roads since 1 January 1992]. 5. In 1991 there were 11,300 fatal traffic accidents in the united Federal Republic. See the casualties statistics at http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/185/ umfrage/todesfaelle-im-strassenverkehr, and https://www.destatis.de/DE/Zah​len​ Fakten/Wirtschaftsbereiche/TransportVerkehr/Verkehrsunfaelle/Tabellen_/Stras​ senverkehrsunfaelle.html (accessed on 31 January 2023). 6. On such ‘garage culture’, see Siegelbaum 2006.

References Bauer, Reinhold. 1999. ‘PKW-Bau in der DDR: Zur Innovationsschwäche von Zentralverwaltungswirtschaften’. Dissertation, Frankfurt am Main. Doßmann, Axel. 2003. Begrenzte Mobilität: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Autobahnen in der DDR. Essen: Klartext. Edgerton, David. 2006. The Shock of the Old. London: Profile Books. ‘Fast doppelt soviel Verkehrstote’. 1990. Neues Deutschland, 22 December. Available online at: https://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/289464.fast-doppelt-so​ vi​ el-ve​rkehrstote.html (accessed on 8 November 2020). Ferguson, Niall. 2011. Virtual History: Counterfactuals and Alternatives. Harmondsworth: Hachette UK. ‘Der große Auto-Rausch’. 2014. Tagesspiegel, 11 September. Heidl, Hudith. 2011. ‘Erinnerungsort “Das Tempolimit”’. Available online at: https:// www.umweltunderinnerung.de/index.php/kapitelseiten/aufbrueche/​86-dastemp​olimit (accessed on 8 November 2020). Hirschman, Albert O. 1958. The Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kirchberg, Peter. 1999. ‘Der automobile Mangel – Anmerkungen zu den Grundlagen der Autokultur in der DDR’, in Gert Schmidt (ed.), Technik und Gesellschaft: Jahrbuch 10: Automobil und Automobilismus. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, pp. 237–50. ____. 2005. Plaste, Blech und Planwirtschaft: Die Geschichte des Automobilbaus in der DDR. Berlin: Nicolai Verlag.

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‘Kontakte geknüpft’. 1990. Spiegel, 1 August. Kuhm, Klaus. 1997. Moderne und Asphalt: Die Automobilisierung als Prozeß technologischer Integration und sozialer Vernetzung. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus. Möser, Kurt. 2002. Geschichte des Autos. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag. ____. 2004. ‘Prinzipielles zur Transportgeschichte’, in Rolf Peter Sieferle and Helga Breuninger (eds), Transportgeschichte im internationalen Vergleich: Europa – China – Naher Osten. Stuttgart: Breuninger-Stiftung, pp. 45–86 (Der Europäische Sonderweg, vol. 12). ____. 2009. ‘Motorization of German Societies in East and West’, in Corinna KuhrKorolev and Dirk Schlinkert (eds), Towards Mobility: Varieties of Automobilism in East and West. Wolfsburg (Schriften zur Unternehmensgeschichte von Volkswagen, vol. 3), pp. 55–72. ____. 2011. ‘Autobasteln: Modifying, Maintaining and Repairing Private Cars in the GDR, 1970–1990’, in Lewis H. Siegelbaum (ed.), The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, pp. 157–69. ____. 2013. ‘Faszination durch historische Automobile’, in Wachgeküsst: Aus der Samm­lung der Südwestdeutschen Kunststiftung und der Collection Schlumpf. Exhibition catalogue, Singen / Hohentwiel, pp. 130–35. ____. 2018. ‘Bemerkungen zur Technikgeschichte imaginärer Objekte’. Karlsruhe: Institut für Technikzukünfte, discussion paper 6. ‘Münchberger Senke’. Wikipedia entry, available online at: https://de.wikipedia.org/ wiki/M%C3%BCnchberger_Senke#cite_ref-ZDF_1-1; (accessed on 8 November 2020). Shell, Jacob. 2015. Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Siegelbaum, Lewis. 2006. Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres in Soviet Russia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Wildwest auf den Straßen der DDR’. 1990. Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, 16 August. Available online at: https://www.mz-web.de/mitteldeutschland/mz-artikel-vom16-august-1990-wildwest-auf-den-strassen-der-ddr-22600818 (accessed on 18 September 2020). Wolle, Stefan. 2013. Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Herrschaft und Alltag in der DDR 1971–1989. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag. ____. 2016. Die DDR: Eine Geschichte von der Gründung bis zum Untergang. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung. Zeilmann, Kathrin. 2015. ‘Als die Münchberger Senke zur Todesfalle wurde’, Welt, 14 October. Available online at: https://www.welt.de/geschichte/arti​ cle147583 ​ 3 64/Als-die-Muenchberger-Senke-zur-Todesfalle-wurde.html (accessed on 18 ­September 2020). Zeller, Thomas. 1996. ‘Weichenstellung: Verkehr als Ordnung und Ausdruck von ­Freiheit. Verkehrspolitik in der Bundesrepublik und der DDR’, Sowi 25(4): 243–49.

CHAPTER 2

5 Liberated or Lawless?

Social Life on Prishtina’s Postwar Streets Rita Gagica and Ger Duijzings

Since the end of the war in Kosovo (1999) and the country’s declaration of independence (2008), Kosovo’s capital Prishtina has experienced an unprecedented construction boom, which has launched a wave of new, postsocialist architectural interventions in a city that had mainly been built (around the old Ottoman core) under socialism. The exuberance of these interventions prompted the German architect Kai Vöckler to cast the city’s new architectural landscape as a prime example of ‘turbo urbanism’ in Southeastern Europe (2008). After years of heavy-handed Yugoslav and Serbian rule, Albanians celebrated Prishtina’s ‘liberation’ by moving to the city, either from abroad (out of the large Albanian diaspora in countries such as Switzerland, Germany and Austria) or the countryside. Construction was ubiquitous. Sharp demographic growth ensued, as in other major cities in Albanian-inhabited regions. Return and repatriation played a role in this trend but the chief factor seems to have been rural-urban migration, leading to sprawl and informal neighbourhoods mushrooming at the urban fringe (Pula 2013: 64–67). In addition, cross-border movement has become far easier: not only has the Kosovo-Albania border opened (after decades of near-­complete closure) but the A1 motorway – the Nation’s Highway (Rruga e Kombit) – now connects the capitals of Prishtina and Tirana, reducing the travel time between them to a mere three hours. For Kosovo’s Albanian population, these political changes represent a long-awaited ‘liberation’ from Serbian occupation. Public spaces have not only been ‘privatized’, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, but have also been freed from ‘colonial’ rule. Streets are now more ‘public’ and alive, enabling mobility, encounters, exchanges, communication, the sharing of messages and performative action. Up until the end of the 1990s, the streets had a markedly different feel: Serbian security forces dominated public spaces, heavily armed policemen were posted on the main roads out of the city and at street corners, and paramilitaries controlled the key high-rises in the city centre, their threatening presence ­regularly

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underscored by low-flying jets intended to intimidate the Albanian population. Since the Serbs have gone, opportunities have arisen for social life to unfold in public spaces, going beyond what has happened in other postsocialist cities: the Albanian majority has taken ‘control’ of the city, which they feel ‘belongs’ to them. Public spaces have been transformed into stages for public deliberation and the expression of their newly acquired freedoms, which help to dispel memories of an oppressive past. But inevitably this long-anticipated ‘liberation’, as we intend to show in this chapter, has a darker side and its effects have not necessarily always led to the greatest possible happiness for the city’s residents. In the subjective experience of its Albanian inhabitants, Prishtina’s public spaces have indeed become far less threatening. The explosion of traffic and a more animated, hectic and less regulated street life are among the new phenomena regarded as necessary evils well worth tolerating: on Prishtina’s streets people can now communicate without fearing repercussions and crackdowns by the police, and they can traverse the city without having to take precautions, using a new, unfettered repertoire of signals and gestures – hailing, saluting, bad language, curses, the flashing of headlights or taillights and honking. The current look of the streets, replete with various new signs such as the ubiquitous MOS PARKO (DON’T PARK) warnings mounted by residents in front of their gates and garages, reflects the new era of increased car mobility. This chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out during the spring of 2018 (by RG) and complemented with memories and impressions from the 1990s (added by GD). Mobile, walking and ‘go-along’ methods were used to explore Prishtina’s street life (Kusenbach 2003; Lee and Ingold 2006; Duijzings 2012), along with on-site participant observation and brief conversations with people taking part in traffic interactions, such as pedestrians, car drivers, taxi drivers, bus passengers and policemen. As well as constantly engaging in ‘small talk’ (Driessen and Jansen 2013), with passers-by, shopkeepers, street vendors and men sitting on the pavements, informal interviews were carried out while travelling on public transport. These conversations with unknown and anonymous passengers tended to be longer, more personal and informative. The most salient information was gathered while walking, hanging out on the streets and in public spaces while observing (and capturing in photographs or on video) micro-­ interactions and situations, and entering into random conversations in particular street situations. The pedestrian perspective was indeed the most revealing, quintessentially on-the-ground and ‘horizontal’ view, emerging from encounters ‘at eye level’, unlike the bird’s-eye view of

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city planners or drivers’ rushed glances (Krusche 2012: 10; Lee and Ingold 2006). One has time to look around, think in peace, and pan one’s gaze (or camera) in various directions (Lee and Ingold 2006: 70f). Streets are, in Lynch’s terms, channels for navigation strewn with landmarks that help the city to be traversed and that facilitate movement; in this way the city can be ‘known’ by its inhabitants (1960: 60f). Here, our focus is on streets in inner-city areas, which not only facilitate movement but also provide opportunities for interaction, allowing the urban social fabric to be ‘woven’, as it were (Duijzings 2012). Thus we take the entire spatial set-up of a street, including the pavements, into account, for here is where social life – not excluding moments of privacy and intimacy – unfolds, exposed to the public gaze of others (Ebertz 1997: 7). Three zones can be distinguished: the road or lanes facilitating the transit of motorized transport; the side strips used for parking and waiting; and the pavements, pedestrian zones and (increasingly) bicycle paths that form the infrastructure for all remaining non-motorized traffic. Other public, private and commercial spaces and buildings, such as schools, shops and apartment blocks, are connected to these areas (Hohm 1997: 10). Streets are, in other words, multifunctional spaces that cannot be reduced solely to traffic. As shared spaces, they are just as important as the ‘stopping points’ which the urban anthropologist Roger Sanjek has identified as the primary sites where ‘the social’ takes place (Sanjek 2000; Duijzings 2012). Our aim is indeed to describe the sociality of Prishtina’s streets, but in doing so we do not wish to exclude (motorized) traffic from our analysis, as traffic flows cannot be properly negotiated without interaction and communicative exchanges happening ‘at a glance’ or ‘at a distance’ (Vanderbilt 2008). In a crowded city like Prishtina, street life also manifests friction and conflict, fomenting a multitude of ‘creative’ coping strategies for residents to navigate the city and get around easily, amongst them the breaching of formal rules and the development of informal ‘vernacular’ codes of conduct (Scott 2012: 30–56). Social hierarchies emerge which are expressed in traffic (Yazıcı 2013). Theoretically, we are indebted to Jane Jacobs’ critique of car-­centred urban planning paradigms in the US in an era of rising automotive traffic in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), as well as to Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘production of space’, distinguishing between ‘espace perçu’ (the material and physical space), ‘espace conçu’ (the mental space), and ‘espace vecu’ (the lived space) (Schmid 2010). We also draw inspiration from the work of Joe Moran, who in his Reading the Everyday (2005) explores the ‘invisible’ but ubiquitous power

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­ ifferentials inscribed in street design and furniture (such as at bus d stops). Finally, we use insights from lesser-known German publications in this field, such as Gisela Welz’s monograph Street Life: Alltag in einem New Yorker Slum (1991), which explores cultural orders inscribed in public space, and Sandra Geschke’s edited volume Straße als kultureller Aktionsraum (2009), which conceptualizes streets as spaces for performative action in line with Erving Goffman’s work (1990 [1956]). We will show that streets can indeed be seen as a stage where urbanites show off or are there to be seen.

A Brief Urban History: From Ottoman to Socialist to ‘Turbo’ Postmodernist Prishtina was a small Ottoman town when it was incorporated first into the Kingdom of Serbia in 1912 and after the First World War into the Serb-dominated Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia from 1929). After the Second World War, under socialist Yugoslavia, Prishtina became the capital of the autonomous province of Kosovo and was transformed from an Ottoman town into a socialist city with new modernist buildings in its centre and socialist neighbourhoods emerging on its outskirts. The bazaar was partly preserved, but as for the rest the street patterns in the city’s central areas were thoroughly modernized: the narrow Ottoman streets and courtyards, abounding in flowers during the summer and creating the conditions for (parochial) closure, neighbourliness and privacy (Hoti 2009: 108), were replaced by boulevards lined with socialist apartment blocks (Maletić et al. 1973; Hoxha 2013a: 40–42; Pula 2013: 63–64). During late socialism and the 1990s, the built environment remained largely unchanged. The war’s end in 1999 triggered a sudden and unregulated construction boom, leading to an expansion of the city (Gollopeni 2016: 88–90). In his abundantly illustrated Prishtina is Everywhere (2008), Vöckler documented this genuine explosion of informal (illegal) construction, driven by rural-urban migrants and diaspora Albanians who started to invest in such projects as soon as the war ended and the situation had begun to stabilize. It shows the broad variety not only of new self-standing constructions but also of the numerous adaptations and extensions of the existing (socialist) building stock. The end of Serbian rule heralded a period of ‘free’ and eclectic turbo-architecture that combined local and international styles without regard for context or regulations. During this frenzy of construction, there was little effort to improve public spaces and streets.

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Most of what was built – real estate investments without predefined functions feeding a booming property market of exploding demand – was speculative. The city’s (rental) prices went through the roof because of a large expatriate population that had settled in the city after the war working for the UN and other international (aid) organizations and NGOs, who, together with the numerous (temporarily) repatriated members of the diaspora, returning refugees and rural-urban migrants, had swelled Prishtina’s population (Vöckler 2008: 37). The expatriate community and their upscale preferences gave rise to a flourishing service and leisure industry, consisting of cafés, expensive restaurants and luxury apartments which were often constructed illegally, without the necessary building permits (Vöckler 2008: 39). The local authorities (in tandem with UNMIK, the United Nations Mission) were not successful in regulating urban development and controlling the explosive growth of illegal constructions, particularly after the director of Prishtina’s city planning agency was murdered (in 2000) by unidentified gunmen, most likely because his department was in the process of demolishing an illegally constructed hotel complex (Vöckler 2008: 43; Luci 2013: 5; Pula 2013: 64). Local institutions possessed limited leverage, as Kosovo’s status remained unresolved; the ground was especially fertile for the shadow economy (controlled by Albanian clans) to hold sway over the informal construction sector (Vöckler 2008: 53–54). Besides giving rise to nepotism and corruption, the situation created a phenomenal ‘free-for-all’ and ‘anything-goes’ dynamic with regard to architectural projects, which sprouted up in a melange of international postmodernist styles inspired by American TV series. An example is today’s ‘Pejton’ district which, once part of the old town, is now named after the famous 1960s US soap opera Peyton Place (broadcast in Yugoslavia, see Vučetić 2018: 13). It is a district with an eclectic and exuberant architecture des nouveaux riches, best characterized as a random ‘freestyle’ mixture of Victorian, Classicist, Oriental and American elements (Vöckler 2008: 51–52).

Evolving Street Life in Prishtina The weakness of municipal institutions in Prishtina has meant that not much effort has been devoted to improving the city’s streets, roads and public spaces, many of which were damaged during the war. Late to start, road improvement has not been completed. Prishtina, too, is a city where ‘streets have no names’, another persistent legacy of the recent past (Hoxha 2013a: 83–85). During Serbian rule, street names

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were S ­ erbianized while maps were unavailable, so that the Albanian population stopped using street names altogether. In a fashion similar to the orientiry mentioned in Olma’s contribution to this volume, navigation and orientation take place via landmarks: eye-catching buildings, the homes of famous politicians and celebrities, or features in the urban landscape such as ‘the blue wall’ (no longer blue but red) (Hoxha 2013a: 83).1 What has changed is the general ‘feel’ of street life. Before the war, streets felt ‘unsafe’ and ‘uncanny’ because of the Serbian (para)military presence and the ubiquitous police checkpoints. At night, one had to cautiously navigate the city to avoid being stopped and searched by the police, and often gunfire could be heard, causing people to avoid going out. Now the city’s street life – as well as nightlife (see Hoxha 2013a: 146–48) – has ‘normalized’, the perils of the past traded for the ‘ordinary’ dangers of busy traffic and increased car mobility. The elderly nevertheless sometimes express nostalgia for the socialist past, i.e. the ‘golden age’ before Serbia abolished Kosovo’s autonomy, remembering how they, as children or teenagers, used the far less congested streets and public spaces as venues to play, meet or hang out. Mothers told off their kids for spending too much time outside (‘has the street become your new home … ?!’), instructing them to come home. Today’s kids can no longer use the streets as playgrounds and meeting places, as these thoroughfares are dominated by car traffic or are used for parking. Yet, in terms of the public sphere, the streets have ‘opened up’ and enable protests and forms of public deliberation which had been more ‘dangerous’ under the previous regime. Freedom of movement and expression have been restored: people can get around town freely, given a greater availability of cars and motorized vehicles, which are representative of a new, ‘liberated’ urbanity. The streets may now be unsafe for kids but they do provide ample opportunities for people to meet and talk – with friends, acquaintances and anonymous strangers. Such interactions had been impossible because of the political tensions and perceived ‘occupation’ that dominated everyday life. Streets were just for transit, with the exception perhaps of the (ethnically separated) evening ‘corso’ when young people and families went for strolls on the central promenade in the city centre. Comparing street life before and after the war, people point to the new freedoms they have gained. Whereas it had formerly not been prudent to dwell in public spaces to discuss politics, people can do that now ‘without having to be afraid of the police or spies’, as one person said. This ‘liberation’ also manifests gendered aspects, as argued by men

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whom were spoken with: women have gained the once-unacceptable freedom to walk alone. By contrast, feminists point out that the city remains ‘male-dominated’: the image of the ‘liberated Albanian woman’ in post-war Prishtina seems to have been reduced to the sexualized, seductive female figures dominating public billboards and advertising (Hoxha 2013b: 24). Whatever the case may be, street spaces now facilitate forms of exchange that had not been possible before, and it may be interesting in this context to reflect on how the change of political regimes has transformed the ‘urban’ habitat, as described by Simmel, through a recalibration of ‘typical’ urban features such as physical proximity and mental distance (1995: 126). As in other postsocialist cities, one of the most conspicuous transformations in Prishtina is the explosive rise in car ownership and automotive mobility. Cars are indeed a symbol of change: not only has generalized car ownership heralded the new era of freedom and independence, cars have also turned into ‘vehicles of social distinction’, through which owners can signal their wealth and success, even if locals make subtle distinctions that differentiate between the expensive indigenous ‘mafia’ limousines, the cars of Albanians living in Germany that ‘smell of credit’, and those from Switzerland which are believed to have been paid for with ready cash. In this new era, after the passing of a very oppressive regime, car drivers seem to be taking full advantage of their newly acquired freedoms. They hardly adhere to the traffic rules because police checks are no longer as intimidating as in the pre-­‘liberation’ era when one could always be stopped, searched and fined (or worse) by a (Serbian) policeman. Inhabitants of Prishtina argue that traffic behaviour has become far worse, as the ‘peasants’ who have invaded the city regularly disrespect the rules and codes of proper conduct in public space. A key issue may be the lack of respect for traffic policemen, who are seen as pathetic figures not to be taken seriously. Civic initiatives are trying to change the general lawlessness on Prishtina’s streets, but with limited success. As automobiles now dominate the street, new hierarchies have emerged amongst traffic participants, especially distinguishing the poor from the wealthy: cars – the bigger the better – receive priority while pedestrians (the elderly, or mothers with prams and children) are expected to yield to them. These social hierarchies, though they lead to conflicts and friction at intersections or during traffic jams, are also the basis for forms of ‘redistribution’ to occur. The poor and less well-off attempt to earn a bit of money: street children wash car windshields, and others engage in street hawking, selling to affluent but immobilized traffic participants stuck in traffic jams.

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The Street as Communicative Space For a first-time visitor, the streets in Prishtina look vibrant and crowded: there is no avoiding other people, whether traversing the city as a pedestrian or in a bus, taxi or car. Pedestrians carry out cursory ‘scans’ of other participants in traffic and objects that they find as they make their way so as to avoid collisions (Conley 2012: 220–26). Beyond that, pedestrians may greet or smile at each other, while car drivers use hand gestures to give other road users the right of way. Communication indeed occurs mainly through gestures and facial expressions, although pedestrians may bump into somebody they know and start a brief conversation out of courtesy, exchanging pleasantries and asking a few polite questions about the other’s family and work. They may set a date to have a bit more time and a coffee together soon. As the street is a ‘neutral’ social space, one is not bound to follow a strict protocol or fulfil certain obligations, as is the case with arranged or invited visits. Conversations can more easily be cut short than at home or at another private place (Herlyn 1997: 239; see also Bahrdt 1989). In addition to chance meetings and accidental conversations, meetings in public spaces may be planned or prearranged. Public spaces continue to be the preferred sites for private chats of a certain kind, for example between lovers or young people dating, as was the case under socialism. One can stay relatively ‘anonymous’ and unobserved by colleagues, friends, immediate family and other relatives. Yet another type of meeting in public spaces are the ‘unplanned-planned’ ones, when people go to a particular spot in the city knowing they will encounter people they know. These spontaneous encounters happen ‘deliberately’, without an advance appointment. Such ‘unplanned-planned’ meetings occur especially in those streets that are filled with cafés and restaurants, as well as shopping streets. One can consciously decide to walk on such streets out of a desire to meet friends and acquaintances; conversely, such thoroughfares can be actively avoided if one does not want to bump into someone, is in a hurry or is not ‘super-styled’, as one female informant explained. ‘But if you are bored and want to have company, all you have to do is go there’. Encounters are facilitated by the informal street and pavement layout. Public space is appropriated by cafés and restaurants which put tables out on the pavements, allowing their customers to spot others walking or driving by. Shopkeepers place small chairs and tables in front of their shops to kill time and to make conversation with a neighbour, the pair drinking tea or coffee and smoking cigarettes together. Small groups of middle-aged and elderly men hang out on pavements chatting and

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observing street interaction, a pastime ‘far less boring than staying at home’, particularly when the weather is good. They discuss private matters and politics, commenting on Prishtina’s chaotic traffic and what is unfolding in front of them. While entertaining one another and observing the space around them, they constitute ‘the eyes’ which make the street ‘safer’, as Jacobs described (Jacobs 1961: 38 and 50). As one argued: ‘we are employed as eyewitnesses’ of incidents and accidents, observing disputes between drivers when they arise and testifying to the police. Some drivers indeed seem to ‘drive here without a head or without a license’, as one man explained. Sitting on a pavement has the advantage that there is no need to spend money in an expensive café, as young people tend to do. As two men explained: ‘as children we used to play here on the street and now we talk’. Another category of street dwellers are the taxi drivers, who avail themselves of dedicated spots where they wait for customers, sit down and discuss current events. They prefer not to spend their breaks waiting in their taxis, as one sees in Germany, but rather install themselves on pavements next to small shops. They set up a table surrounded by a few chairs and talk about politics, football and accidents. Although it has become more acceptable for women to walk alone, there are still important gender differences in the way the streets are used. As a recreational meeting ground the street is extremely gendered, as it is usually elderly men who use the pavement for social gatherings. Young female professionals in their twenties or thirties can be seen passing by during lunch breaks, when they go for walks with colleagues or friends, discussing private matters. They never ‘hang out’ on streets the way elderly men do, and they prefer to meet in an agreed-upon location, usually a café or restaurant. As one woman explained: ‘I meet up with my girlfriends at the agreed location and each of us goes there by car, even if it is sometimes easier and faster to walk’. While some use the streets for distraction, others go there to earn some money. Beggars hang out at the busy locations where many people reliably pass by. They may beg on pavements, make money by playing music or position themselves at large intersections in the middle of busy traffic, hawking – selling items such as chocolate bananas – or cleaning the windows of cars. They tend not to approach pedestrians, but knock on the windows of cars and buses and ask whether one can spare some change. All this activity primarily occurs while traffic is at a standstill, because then it is easy for beggars, hawkers and others to communicate with other users of the road. The rush hours in particular are optimal times to provide these unsolicited ‘services’, since traffic jams offer prime opportunities to impose oneself as a hawker or

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windshield cleaner. Here, in these situations, more than any other time or place in the city, is when and where the poor and the wealthy and individuals from different walks of life meet (for a similar analysis of traffic situations in Istanbul see Yazıcı 2013). Similar encounters and forms of communication occur on public transport. As Vazyanau observes in his contribution to this volume, buses and taxis, as well as transit stops, allow there to be plenty of conversations, which are triggered far more easily than if someone were traversing the city as a pedestrian. In buses or taxis, elderly persons are the most talkative, whereas young people usually stare into their mobile phones or talk to a friend or acquaintance over the phone. Sitting down next to an elderly person means that one can easily launch a conversation about the chaos on Prishtina’s streets or the unbearable heat on the bus. These conversation starters usually lead to other topics, such as the female interviewer’s (RG) ‘diaspora’ Albanian accent and life in Germany. The elderly often tell how regulated and strict road traffic used to be. In the ‘mobile’ public spaces afforded by buses, one can converse with strangers on all sorts of topics. Taxis, too: any ride might give rise to an interesting conversation similar to those common on buses, such as the unruliness of traffic. The personal life of the taxi driver might come up as well. Sometimes dramatic personal stories are shared, thus transforming the mobile, semi-public space into a private ‘confessional’ zone that offers the opportunity, as if in a kind of informal ‘therapy session’, of unburdening oneself of the smaller disturbances or stresses in one’s life. As one driver pointed out, regular customers may become friends and come to offer each other mutual assistance in personal matters: ‘of course I am a taxi driver by profession, but for many of my customers I am also a good person to talk to, like a psychologist. And for tourists I am a city guide’. The taxi drivers in particular emphasize that the street is a place of communication, as they spend far more time behind the wheel in the city than other people do (see also Mikoleit and Pürckhauer 2011: 54). Some exchanges are far less pleasant. Interesting conversations in buses and taxis may be disrupted by horn exchanges or outbursts of verbal abuse outside. The horn provides the communicative means of choice between car drivers, especially during peak hours of congestion. Drivers honk when they are denied the right of way, when somebody drives too fast or too slowly, or when people are getting in or out of a taxi in the middle of traffic. Horn honking aside, people also roll the car windows down to communicate verbally or to yell at each other, or they use nonverbal forms of communication such as flashing their headlights or using hand signals to indicate that they are yielding to

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another road user, be it another driver or pedestrian. Much like pedestrians, who obey certain rules while on pavements, drivers have their own informal codes of conduct. Sign language such ​​ as blinking or flashing lights are important tools for communication amongst motorists, as is the case elsewhere across the globe (Rosenfeld 1998: 148). Pedestrians also interact with motorists through nonverbal exchanges and brief eye contact. They may thank drivers through hand gestures when giving the right of way or, alternatively, they might argue and gesticulate when motorized traffic speeds through narrow streets without paying them any attention. As the pavements are often packed with cars, pedestrians are forced to walk in the street, which contributes to this kind of ­(conflict-laden) street communication. Body language is used at bus stops by the informal taxi drivers who have converted their cars into rideshare service vehicles. They make extra money by taxiing, driving the same routes as buses do (see also Vazyanau in this volume). At bus stops, the official vehicles may turn up every 10–15 minutes at best, whereas private taxis drive by every few minutes. They use their fingers to indicate which ‘bus line’ they are driving on, and one can either get in or wave the vehicle off. A similar sort of nonverbal communication transpires via particular objects and street furniture. Since cars are parked wherever there is a bit of space, residents put up ‘no parking’ signs or place various objects such as ­flowerpots in the potential parking spot, which will be discussed below. The Street as a Performative Space: The Place to Be Seen and to Show off Streets are performative spaces, for people to show off and to be seen, as Erving Goffman famously demonstrated in his study of informal street ‘dramaturgy’, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956). In Prishtina, streets are indeed stages for self-expression, for example through fashion statements (for young women) or cars (for young men), and this performative self-fashioning is mirrored in virtual space, on street-style blogs and on social media. As street life consists essentially of fleeting encounters, first impressions are important: they are made in a split-second, without the observer becoming acquainted with the stranger; everything else is left unknown. On the basis of these first impressions, people cast ‘judgements’ about other people’s social status and background. At certain times of the day, especially in the evening, people use the central city streets – in particular the Mother Teresa Boulevard, colloquially called ‘Sheshi’ – to present oneself, triggering responses and experiences of how others judge one’s presentation of self. Hence arises a kind of reflexive experience (Zehelein 2004: 29).

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For men, cars play a key role in the impression made and the signalling of (enviable) social status to others (Hoxha 2013a: 208–10). As with clothes, the car’s brand and price play important roles (Thrift 2004: 48). What we observe is ‘superficial’, because the ‘façade’ may conceal a different reality: a man driving an expensive car may not, in actual fact, earn a lot of money. The audience, of course, knows full well that these ‘performances’ can be make-believe and that less auspicious realities may lurk behind them. This awareness is discernible in the common ‘ironic’ clichés that people use for those who show off. Albanians living in the diaspora are particularly sensitive to these issues when it comes to their annual holiday visits to Kosovo. They tease one another, making remarks like ‘Don’t forget your brand-name clothes for Prishtina!’ or ‘Which car are you driving this summer?’ Most people going back ‘home’, acutely aware of the scrutiny they may trigger, are keen to make the best possible impression aimed at signalling the status and economic success one has achieved abroad. This ‘self-advertising’ is particularly vital for young people between the ages of 18 to 35, whereas members of the older generations, now beyond the need to impress others so readily, are inclined not to care so much. In fact, it is seen as embarrassing to engage in this sort of self-presentation at an older age. Popular street-style blogs are important platforms for self-­promotion. Young women make themselves pretty in the hopes of being ‘spotted’ by photographers for blogs such as the Street Style Prishtina blog, a website that, as its name suggests, presents the fashionable clothing styles one sees on the streets of Prishtina.2 They feel flattered to be on the website pictured in their outfit; there one sees not only fashionable women but also men, posing in front of the camera and sharing their names, happy to give up their anonymity. The street has become, for these fashion-conscious young people at least, a kind of catwalk, governed by subtle and unspoken ‘street’ dress codes, depending on the day of the week or the time of day. One dresses ‘chic’ during weekdays, when going to work or to university, while on weekends, especially on Sundays, the style is ‘sportier’, indicative of a day-off spent running or engaged in other fitness activities. The point is brought home by people running ‘performatively’, as it were – moving slowly, appearing focused and looking straight ahead – thus ensuring that they will be observed. Another trend is to brandish as an accessory some kind of pet, usually a dog, which is perceived as a prerequisite of a ‘Western’ lifestyle. ‘In the past, people laughed at you if you went out on the street with a dog. Dogs were either strays or watchdogs, never pets’, one informant said. Men, wanting to look strong and imposing, show off large dogs or fighting dogs; women bring out smaller dogs

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such as Maltese. There is always the impression that these dogs are accessories rather than genuine pets. As mentioned earlier, the stage-like character of Prishtina’s streets is amplified during the summer, when diaspora Albanians travel ‘home’ to display their acquired wealth, above all through the cars they drive. This is a moment of truth, the occasion for them to prove themselves, as is (in turn) expected from them by the city’s inhabitants. Ironic comments are allowed, for example remarks about how these cars have been financed, as pointed out above: ‘locals’ differentiate between expensive indigenous ‘mafia’ cars, diaspora Albanians’ German cars ‘that smell of credit’, and Swiss cars that they believe have been paid with ready cash. Number plates invite such cursory ‘assessments’. As a local driver explained, expensive cars with registration plates from Kosovo, Albania or Macedonia are associated with crime, as a ‘Porsche, Mercedes, Jaguar, or Audi, cannot be purchased through honest work’. Similar cars with German plates, being associated with leasing or credit, subtly undermine the owner’s status. The cars not ‘tainted’ by crime or credit are those with a Swiss registration, for good money can be earned in that country. Of course, these clichés are not specific to Prishtina and indeed can be observed anywhere (Moran 2005: 67), but what is different here is the transnational context. The clichés, shaped and shared by a public that enjoys watching exhibitionist behaviour, are a universal aspect of street life (Jacobs 1961: 37; Mikoleit and Pürckhauer 2011: 81), but in the case of Prishtina it is also a seasonal phenomenon, connected with the return of diaspora ­Albanians to their hometown. The Street as Site to Transmit Commercial and Other Messages Streets in Prishtina help to spread ‘news’ through the posting of various messages of a political or commercial (graffiti, billboards and advertising) or personal or family nature (particularly death announcements). In socialist times, political messages were either suppressed or relegated to private spaces, but since the end of the war they have entered the public sphere. In ways that were impossible in Prishtina until the end of the 1990s, when Albanian resistance to Serbian rule and the shadow government was organizing itself underground in private homes, cafés and informal (cultural) venues (Zhegrova 2013), the streets now provide the spaces and venues for the expression of different political viewpoints in the form of posters, graffiti and slogans on the walls of buildings. These messages have multiplied and are now widespread, including at bus stops and on lamp-posts, traffic lights and walls.

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Shops, cafés and restaurants advertise on pavements, blocking passage through the use of outdoor display boards or ‘customer stoppers’. Other shops refrain from appropriating public space and attract attention by dressing up shop windows and handing out conspicuous shopping bags which customers then display as they navigate the streets. Bags are an important tool of advertising, transforming shoppers into walking billboards. Potential customers are made aware of the existence of particular stores by the fashion bags carried around by others. Large, well-known brands have stores located in the central streets, which is the most effective form of advertising (see also Mikoleit and Pürckhauer 2011). Private individuals may hang up smaller notes on traffic lights, lampposts or trees, and at intersections or bus stops, for instance offering apartments for rent. One usually finds death notices grouped together at certain dedicated spots (for example at bus stops), so as not to be ‘mixing’ with commercial messages, a common practice in the Balkans. They are colour-coded and include a symbol indicating the religion of the deceased, and provide information about where and when the funeral is to take place. The Street as Zone of Conflict and Friction Last but not least, streets are places of conflict and occasional fights. We have already mentioned the friction between drivers and pedestrians, a recurring problem. Because pedestrians are at the bottom of the traffic hierarchy – lowest except perhaps for cyclists, who are even more vulnerable (Hoxha 2013a: 267–70) – they have no other choice than to approach motorized road users calmly and indifferently. Pedestrians navigate the busy streets cautiously, yielding to cars without paying much heed to the rules. Jaywalking is common, as it hardly makes a difference in terms of risks. Many accidents happen at zebra crossings, so there people wait for others until there is a critical mass of individuals who are prepared to cross the zebra as a group. This ‘mob’ principle is often used by the elderly, who may ask others to assist them while crossing, not because they are too weak to walk but because the crossing is much safer if you are not alone. Pedestrians thus establish a kind of spontaneous solidarity and auxiliary communication across age groups, which also expresses itself in the event of an accident (see also Hohm 1997: 10). Open (even violent) conflict arises first and foremost between car drivers, an inevitable outgrowth of the new realities of congestion and the lack of parking spaces. Like all other cities in the former socialist world, Prishtina has seen exponential growth in car ownership and

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automobility: families often own more than one car, up to three cars in a family of five or six when parents and grown-up children work in different parts of the city. Although Kosovo’s traffic code was tightened (in 2016),3 the problems have not been resolved: parking problems have got worse, as have the traffic jams during rush hours, and traffic regulations are widely and systematically ignored. People use different tactics to cope with these almost ‘apocalyptic’ traffic conditions, trying and testing various ‘creative’ solutions, often disregarding thereby the codes of proper conduct. Parking problems normally start at one’s own front door. The ubiquitous ‘No parking’ signs notwithstanding, other people park their cars in front of a house or garage and thus prevent someone from getting in or out, in order to go to work for example. Some inhabitants have given up on using their garage to park their car and have transformed it into storage space. They prefer to park two streets away in a (paid and monitored) parking area. Inhabitants of apartment blocks, often unable to find parking spots in front of their homes, may observe from their balconies how other drivers fight over an empty space; these belligerents, usually men, may become violent in such heated exchanges. As one female interviewee explained emphatically: ‘you see the car doors go open and then “Bam, Bam” [strikes with her hands]’. The police may end up arriving, or one of the disputants winds up dropping the matter and leaving. People have developed various tactics to cope with the parking issue. Apart from putting up a ‘MOS PARKO’ (no parking) sign (usually in vain), they place objects in ‘their’ parking place in order to prevent others from parking there: one can see broken or empty flowerpots, boxes, piles of stuff, drying racks, coat-stands and other items that are not part of the usual street furniture. These first two methods can be seen as ‘passive’ forms of communication, clearly signalling to others not to park at a marked spot. The third stratagem is to double- or triple-park one’s car in front of other parked cars, with a piece of paper on the dashboard behind the window placed providing a mobile number. The driver of the trapped car can call the driver obstructing his or her exit so that the latter can come and move the car. The fourth method is to simply park on the pavement: a prohibited but very common practice since the police do not enforce the regulation against it. This ‘solution’ obviously causes problems for pedestrians. Since pavements are narrow and are just wide enough to allow pedestrian traffic, those on foot are then forced to navigate a way forward between the cars parked on the pavements: they must use the narrow remaining space or walk in the middle of the street. In some of the city’s central

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Figure 2.1. Cars parked on the pavement, 2007. © Ger Duijzings.

areas, solid traffic poles have been installed so as to prevent parking on pavements, but on most streets this is not the case. Not only are smaller streets and alleys far too narrow, they have been poorly constructed as well, making them hazardous to pedestrians and people walking with prams or using wheelchairs, as Rozafa Basha (2015) observes, because the pavement may be loose or full of holes. If drivers park their cars on the too-narrow pavements, conflicts are inevitable. Not only does parking usurp space from pedestrians, the inert vehicles also restrict the flow of traffic, as there is often not enough space for two cars moving in opposite directions to pass each other. Pedestrians are forced to use the street, obstructing traffic flow and exposing themselves to the perils of passing cars and impatient drivers who may not be paying sufficient attention. Clearly the drivers, as the ‘stronger’ party, scarcely need to worry much. Like so many cities, designed as they are by traffic engineers who prioritize car traffic, Prishtina is largely impervious and hostile to pedestrians, although if looking at the situation optimistically one may discern (unplanned and unintended) a ‘shared’ space blending the car and pedestrian realms, as has been proposed by the acclaimed Dutch traffic engineer Hans ­Monderman (Vanderbilt 2008: 192–96).

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Figure 2.2. Mother with children walking in the middle of the street, 2018. © Rita Gagica.

Besides cars, numerous obstacles make it hazardous for pedestrians to walk or run, as the French expatriate Fabien Techene describes in an entertaining article on the many hurdles and stumbling blocks he encounters while jogging (2016). Yet the problem is more serious for women with prams (it is usually not men) and children who try to traverse the city as pedestrians. Forced to walk in the street, they have to pause and wait as cars are passing (or speeding) by. The only strategies left to a parent are to eschew the stroller and carry the child or to avoid walking completely. Walking with children and prams is not for the faint-hearted. A group of local activists have launched an online platform documenting the usurpation of pavements (see also Lajqi, Lajqi and Doçi 2017). Wanting to liberate pavements from obstacles, they distinguish amongst various ‘road blockers’ such as cars, trash cans or electricity pylons, and mark the precise locations of these obstacles on an online map, including a photo and description of each item. Citizens are welcome to send in and add their own obstacles.4 Since pavements determine how safe people feel in a city environment, as Jane Jacobs has argued (1961: 30), Prishtina can be considered an unsafe place indeed.

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Traffic rules are widely ignored, not only with respect to parking but also due to congestion and traffic jams during the rush hours: how bad the situation gets can be monitored in real time on Google Maps, which drivers use as a tool and a source of ‘live’ information to help them get where they’re going more quickly. In the past, one’s life-worlds were mostly concentrated in one’s own neighbourhood, but now, due to urban sprawl, distances have increased. At present, one may live in the south of Prishtina while working in the east and sending one’s children to school in the north. Hence people spend far more time in traffic, using various means of public transportation, private cars, official or informal taxis, or bicycles; others choose to walk. All this movement has contributed to the current high density of urban traffic in the city. It is interesting to observe what drivers do while waiting in traffic jams: many, including bus drivers, kill time on their mobile phones, checking social media, taking videos of traffic jams or writing messages. Children are often not buckled up and sometimes jump around in the car, releasing their pent-up energy. Some drivers turn up the music or talk to others through the window. A common pass-the-time activity is to honk until something moves. The traffic rules, which are already only sporadically respected in ‘normal’ traffic conditions, lose all relevance in a traffic jam, where everybody seems to want to get ahead at the expense of others, even if this means you are blocking the road, taking somebody else’s right of way, provoking an angry reaction or risking a quarrel with someone who will get out of his car to beat you up. The non-observance of traffic rules can be observed at any time, for example at pedestrian crossings: cars ‘slalom’ around pedestrians trying to cross and do not stop or slow down, even when the zebra crossings are signalling drivers to stop. The non-compliance of traffic rules leads to frictions between ‘diaspora’ Albanians (from Germany, Austria or Switzerland) who tend to obey the rules and ‘locals’ who believe they have the prerogative to disregard them. Ignoring the rules can have dire consequences: accidents happen on a daily basis, but people seem not to want to learn from them. In larger roundabouts in Prishtina, for example, traffic rules are completely ignored at peak times. All drivers do as they wish without blinking when leaving the roundabout or giving way. As one informant from the diaspora said, local drivers do not blend in smoothly at the roundabout as in a circle, but enter and exit as if they were making a triangle, according to the principle of ‘straight line in and straight line out’. One important precondition for the violation of traffic rules is lack of respect for the traffic police, an effect it seems of Prishtina’s post-war

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‘liberation’: people appear to relish the fact that the police can no longer harass them, even if the Serbs of yore have been replaced by Albanians. The police are still seen as a source of external power rather than as a necessary instrument of collective and public governance. At intersections, traffic policemen urging people to abide by the rules are ignored or deemed very ‘annoying’ by drivers, who signal their irritation by honking in the policeman’s ears. One policeman interviewed for this text complained that people do not take his warnings and fines seriously. Drivers do not acknowledge their mistakes, or perhaps they know a policeman or someone with a connection to the police who will manage to ‘solve’ their problem. Traffic police have difficulties doing their job because of the verbal abuse and physical attacks directed at them: any situation can escalate, as road-raged individuals use insults, threaten violence or actually resort to such violence even against a person in uniform. These difficulties get worse at night and during the weekend, when people may also have had a drink or two. Young men in particular make the streets unsafe when they speed with fast cars or organize street races, ending in what would have been avoidable accidents, usually involving pedestrians at zebra crossings. As for traffic jams, drivers use various strategies to avoid them. Four can be distinguished. The first is to avoid certain streets and use alternative routes, which has also been described by Olle Hagmann in relation to Swedish cities (2006: 68). The detours, though longer in terms of kilometres, make the trip faster. A second method is to use narrower (parallel) streets that are not longer but are usually slower if traffic were to flow freely. The risk here is that one would end up in a cul-de-sac or on a street that is blocked for some reason or other. The third option is to walk even long distances, which may still be faster than driving or using public transport. Many interview partners said they prefer to walk to work or to an important appointment because that way it is easier to be on time.5 If one wants not to be on time, one should use the car; as one interviewee joked: ‘I only use the car if I don’t feel like arriving on time or have to go to my mother-in-law’. Some individuals would prefer to use a bicycle if there were designated bicycle paths, but since that is not the case, many consider cycling in the city to be too dangerous. The last method is to adopt a strategy of sheer audacity: some drivers bypass traffic jams by driving on pavements, while others park on the very spot where they have been immobilized and continue the trip on foot. Some people have developed styles that they themselves or others characterize as ‘flying’, namely the taking of adventurous shortcuts to escape the traffic jams during rush hours without resorting to

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lengthy detours. As one female informant argued, her father-in-law starts to drive or ‘fly’ his car like a ‘pilot’. This usually implies blatantly ignoring the traffic rules, as was also observed in the case of a woman driving her car against traffic on a one-way street, blocking all traffic and refusing to back out as she insisted that other drivers just move to the side to let her through. When the police arrived, the woman argued that she could not afford to get stuck in traffic jams on the main streets, as she had an important appointment. After thus chatting with the police, she finally drove away in the correct direction. In sum, to avoid excessive frustration one has to drive and navigate the city ‘creatively’; to do so is adventurous and requires cunning and the finding of various ‘shortcuts’, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word. Streets are never used without a conscious strategy: routes are contemplated and chosen, conflicts faced and resolved.

Conclusion As Jane Jacobs argued at the start of the 1960s, streets are not just for traffic: the facilitation of movement is complemented by other functions, as has been shown in this chapter. Prishtina may be representative of many postsocialist cities, but it is also special, having this added dimension of being a city that, in a not-so-distant past, had ‘unpublic’ streets in a rather untypical manner, controlled as they were by a ‘colonial’ regime that suppressed the political ambitions of the Albanian majority, including using extreme forms of terror and ethnic cleansing. It was only after 1999 that this space truly opened up, allowing its other functions, such as communication, political deliberation and public exchange, to emerge. Streets have become more public and performative, making urban space more alive than before, facilitating mobility, encounters, exchanges, communication, the sharing of messages and performative action. Now these ‘liberated’ spaces are more genuinely ’public’ and political repression has receded. Yet many new problems have emerged in this postsocialist, postwar city. Due to the lack of planning, changes have occurred in ‘turbo’ fashion, spawned by unbridled construction. Car mobility has exploded, and the emphasis, if anything, has been on facilitating this development, leading to various problems such as pervasive traffic jams and an ongoing lack of parking spaces. The inhabitants of Prishtina, whether traversing the city as a pedestrian or by car, have creatively adapted to these issues through various coping strategies. Prishtina may suffer from a blatant lack of regulation and planning, but at the same time, in spite of these numerous

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problems, the street has also become a space of productive friction, where, as Hans Paul Bahrdt formulated it (1974: 35), ‘society meets itself’. In this case, it is a transformed society, not without its own problems to be sure, that now can ‘meet itself’ in greater freedom, with many new challenges ahead. Rita Gagica did a BA in Southeast European Studies at the Universität Regensburg (2015) and continued with an MA in the Elite Graduate Programme for East European Studies (Universität Regensburg and LMU München), with a focus on Balkan history and social anthropology. She carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Prishtina (Kosovo) and wrote her MA thesis on postwar street life in this city (2018). Ger Duijzings is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universität Regensburg. Until 2014, he taught anthropology at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He did extensive research on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and is currently studying urban transformations in postsocialist cities. He has published widely on these topics, amongst others, the edited volume Global Villages: Rural and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Bulgaria (Anthem, 2013), and the coedited volume (together with Ben Campkin) Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (I.B. Tauris, 2016).

Notes This chapter is an abbreviated version of Rita Gagica’s MA thesis Die postsozialistische Straße und ihre vielfältige Funktion in der urbanen Öffentlichkeit am Beispiel von Pristina (2018). It was supervised by Ger Duijzings, who has translated and adapted it for publication, adding impressions from his own fieldwork during the early 1990s. 1. See also the documentary film Blue Wall Red Door, by the artist Alban Muja and the filmmaker Yll Çitaku (2009), accessible at: https://vimeo.com/162688337: see also the brief film description by the artist himself at: https://albanmuja.blogspot. com/2009/10/blue-wall-red-door.html (accessed on 31 January 2023). 2. See the Prishtina Street Style website, at: https://web.archive.org/web/20181​ 017052347/http://prishtinastreetstyle.com/category/categories/all-posts/ (accessed on 31 January 2023). 3. See the Law on Road Traffic Provisions 05/L-088 adopted on 5 August 2016 (in English): http://old.kuvendikosoves.org/common/docs/ligjet/05-L-088%20a.pdf (accessed on 7 May 2021). 4. See the online anti-corruption platform Kallxo, at: https://api.kallxo.com/en/kem​ besoret-per-ne (accessed on 31 January 2023). 5. I (RG) tested myself what mode of transport is the cheapest and fastest. For my daily route from Tophane to Bregu i Diellit, a distance of 2.63 km, it took me

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32 minutes on foot. The bus cost 40 cents and took about 35 minutes. The taxi cost around three euros for a 30-minute trip. Hence walking was not only cheap but was as fast and sometimes faster than motorized transport. If I had not been forced to circumvent the numerous obstacles on my walk, walking would have been the fastest means at my disposal.

References Bahrdt, Hans-Paul. 1974. Umwelterfahrung: Soziologische Betrachtungen über den Beitrag des Subjekts zur Konstitution von Umwelt. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlag. ____. 1989. ‘Die Stadtstraße als Kommunikationsfeld’, Die alte Stadt: Zeitschrift für Zeitgeschichte, Stadtsoziologie und Denkmalpflege 23: 197–207. Basha, Rozafa. 2015. ‘Disability and Public Space: Case Studies of Prishtina and Prizren’, International Journal of Contemporary Architecture ‘The New ARCH’ 2(3): 54–66. Conley, Jim. 2012. ‘A Sociology of Traffic: Driving, Cycling, Walking’, in Phillip Vannini, Lucy Budd, Ole B. Jensen, Christian Fisker and Paola Jirón (eds), Technologies of Mobility in the Americas. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 219–36. Driessen, Henk and Willy Jansen. 2013. ‘The Hard Work of Small Talk in Ethnographic Fieldwork’, Journal of Anthropological Research 69(2): 249–63. Duijzings, Ger. 2012. ‘Miejskie trajektorie: Tworzenie antropologii ruchu’, Kultura Współczesna (Warsaw) 72(2): 19–24. Ebertz, Michael. 1997. ‘Vorwort’, in Hans-Jürgen Hohm (ed.), Straße und Straßenkultur: Interdisziplinäre Beobachtungen eines öffentlichen Sozialraumes in der fortgeschrittenen Moderne. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, pp. 7–8. Gagica, Rita. 2018. Die postsozialistische Straße und ihre vielfältige Funktion in der urbanen Öffentlichkeit am Beispiel von Pristina. Master’s thesis (unpublished). Universität Regensburg. Geschke, Sandra Maria (ed.). 2009. Straße als kultureller Aktionsraum: Interdisziplinäre Betrachtungen des Straßenraumes an der Schnittstelle zwischen Theorie und Praxis. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Goffman, Erving. 1990 [1956]. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books. Gollopeni, Besim. 2016. ‘Socio-Urban Developments in Kosovo: Study Case Prishtina’, MMM Geo Information 3: 81–93. Hagman, Olle. 2006. ‘Morning Queues and Parking Problems: on the Broken Promise of the Automobile’, Mobilities 1(1): 63–74. Herlyn, Ulfert. 1997. ‘Die Stadtstraße als Lernort für verschiedene soziale Gruppen’, in Hans-Jürgen Hohm (ed.), Straße und Straßenkultur: Interdisziplinäre Beobachtungen eines öffentlichen Sozialraumes in der fortgeschrittenen Moderne. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, pp. 233–48. Hohm, Hans-Jürgen. 1997. ‘Einleitung’, in Hans-Jürgen Hohm (ed.), Straße und Straßenkultur: Interdisziplinäre Beobachtungen eines öffentlichen Sozialraumes in der fortgeschrittenen Moderne. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, pp. 9–19. Hoti, Izber. 2009. Prishtina dhe rrethina (1918–1941). Prishtina: Shtëpia Botuese Faik Konica. Hoxha, Eliza. 2013a. Qyteti dhe dashuria: Ditar urban. Prishtina: Qendra për Studime Humanistikë ‘Gani Bobi’ / Urbaniak.

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____. 2013b. ‘Women: Lifting the Veil’, Public Space. Issue #5 (Spring - Summer 2013) of Kosovo 2.0, 24–26. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Krusche, Jürgen. 2012. ‘Von der Stadt zum Bild’. Available online: https://architekturtage.at/2012/data/media/aaf_binary/original/1336373770.pdf (accessed on 30 July 2021). Kusenbach, Margarethe. 2003. ‘Street Phenomenology: The Go-along as Ethnographic Research Tool’, Ethnography 4(3): 449–79. Lajqi, Naser, Shpetim Lajqi and Ilir Doçi. 2017. ‘The Methodology for Vehicles Parking Analysis: Case study – City Prishtina’, International Scientific Journal ‘Machines, Technologies, Materials’ 11(10): 499–503. Lee, Jo and Tim Ingold. 2006. ‘Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing’, in Peter Collins and Simon Coleman (eds), Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg Publishers, pp. 67–86. Luci, Besa. 2013. ‘Letter from the Editor’, Public Space. Issue #5 (Spring – Summer 2013) of Kosovo 2.0, 4–5. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Maletić, Mihailo et al. 1973. ‘Priština’ / ‘Prishtina’, Kosovo, nekad i danas / Kosova, dikur e sot. Belgrade: Ekonomska Politika, pp. 853–79. Mikoleit, Anne and Moritz Pürckhauer. 2011. Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding the City. Zurich: gta Verlag. Moran, Joe. 2005. Reading the Everyday. London: Routledge. Pula, Besnik. 2013. ‘Dissecting Prishtina’, Public space. Issue #5 (Spring – Summer 2013) of Kosovo 2.0, 54–67. Rosenfeld, Uta. 1998. ‘Auto, Leben und mehr: Alltäglichkeit und Genuss von Automobilität’, in Thomas Hengartner and Johanna Rolshoven (eds), Technik – Kultur: Formen der Veralltäglichung von Technik - Technisches als Alltag. Zurich: Chronos, pp. 143–81. Sanjek, Roger. 2000. ‘Keeping Ethnography Alive in an Urbanizing World’, Human Organization – Journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology 59(3): 280–88. Schmid, Christian. 2010. Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre und die Theorie der Produktion des Raumes. Stuttgart: Steiner. Scott, James. 2012. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1995. ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’, in Georg Simmel, Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908. Band 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 116–31. Techene, Fabien. 2016. ‘Welcome to Prishtina’s Daily Obstacle Course’, Prishtina Insight, 9 September 2016. Available online at: https://prishtinainsight.com/wel​ come-prishtinas-daily-obstacle-course/ (accessed on 30 July 2021). Thrift, Nigel. 2004. ‘Driving in the City’, Theory, Culture and Society 21(4/5): 41–59. Vanderbilt, Tom. 2008. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says about Us). London: Penguin. Vöckler, Kai. 2008. Prishtina is Everywhere: Turbo Urbanism – the Aftermath of a Crisis. Amsterdam: Stichting Archis. Vučetić, Radina. 2018. Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties. Budapest: Central European University Press.

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Welz, Gisela. 1991. Street Life: Alltag in einem New Yorker Slum. Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie der Universität Frankfurt. Yazıcı, Berna. 2013. ‘Towards an Anthropology of Traffic: A Ride through Class Hierarchies on Istanbul’s Roadways’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 78(4): 515–42. Zehelein, Kai. 2004. Kommunikativer Straßenverkehr. Frankfurt am Main: Doctoral dissertation. Zhegrova, Dardan. 2013. ‘The Geography of Public Debate in Prishtina’, Public Space. Issue #5 (Spring - Summer 2013) of Kosovo 2.0, 20–22.

CHAPTER 3

5 ‘Changing Everything Fast’? Young Men in the Streets of Tbilisi Costanza Curro

I really like things turning around … . In Georgia ­everything should be in motion. —Mikheil Saak’ashvili, president of Georgia, 2004–2013, Full Speed Westward

Mobility as Modernity: Georgia after the Rose Revolution Speaking in the aftermath of the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the country’s newly elected president, Mikheil Saak’ashvili, declared that the nation’s ‘transition’ from socialism was now over; having exited an intermediate stage, Georgia was ready to become a ­Western-style democracy (Dunn and Frederiksen 2014). From the perspective of Saak’ashvili and his entourage, this turn consisted in ‘changing everything, and changing everything fast’ (Full Speed Westward 2013) through relentless movement from the ‘before’ to the ‘now’ and the ‘after’. The revolution and its aftermath rested on narratives which classified citizens via clear-cut oppositions. The postrevolutionary government emphasized cleavages separating the ‘future’ from the ‘past’ in the development of Georgian society. This opposition delineated people’s moral, cultural and social attributes as either compatible or incompatible with postrevolutionary projects of radical renovation. In a 2012 interview with the German filmmaker Stefan Tolz, Saak’ashvili reiterated these divisions: I think that once Georgians have tasted it … . Some of them didn’t like the taste initially. But eventually I think they will miss it and no matter who tries to stop it, it will come back, the longing for this something that they have already tasted: modernity, fast development, openness. And also part of it: democratization. (Full Speed Westward 2013)

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The binary split of past and future aligned precisely with the opposition between the Soviet system and Western civilization as two mutually exclusive moral, cultural, social, political and economic orders (Gotfredsen 2014). Postrevolutionary narratives opposed the backwardness, authoritarianism and murkiness attributed to the socialist ‘past’ – whose evil influence had persisted beyond the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 up until the events of 2003 – to values of progress, freedom and transparency, which were deemed distinctive features of Western democracies. The past/future dichotomy also reflected the tension between immobility and mobility, which were linked in modernization narratives to the stagnation of the Soviet years, as opposed to the dynamic society which the Rose Revolution would build. Following Lefebvre’s concept of space as a social product (1991), social relationships attain a concrete form only when placed in a material and symbolic space. In this way, ‘the use of space serves to shape thought and action – as well as provide a means of social control via the re/production of accepted practice within place per se’ (Parkin and Coomber 2011: 718). Shaping citizens’ ‘thought and action’ implies shaping the physical and social space that people inhabit. Conversely, a modern space is populated by modern citizens. The postrevolutionary government intervened to restyle the cityscape of Tbilisi (as well as those of other, smaller cities and towns) to make the city look ‘Western’: tidier, cleaner and safer. Renovation aimed first and foremost to eradicate negative images of the prerevolutionary past, with its legacy of poverty, war, ethnic unrest, corruption and crime. The initial step was to erase the marks most evident of years of decay and negligence, such as potholed roads and crumbling buildings (Dunn 2008; Manning 2007). Highways connecting the country’s main cities and towns were refurbished or built from scratch. The focus on infrastructure and roads in particular points to the strong link in postrevolutionary political narratives between (hectic) mobility across the urban landscape and modernization (see Masquelier 2002 on the road in perceptions and narratives of modernity). This thorough plan stigmatized people and practices identified in postrevolutionary Georgia as belonging to the past – immobile and backward. The following sections will analyse the type of young men’s street hangout known as birzha in relation to the social, political and spatial landscape of postrevolutionary Georgia and its particular paradigm of mobility. First, I will present birzha as an object of research and will situate the street community within the social and spatial fabric of the ubani, the neighbourhood. Second, I will contextualize birzha in its place at the intersection of masculinity and mobility, making ­particular reference

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to the postsocialist context. Subsequently, I will explore the tension between birzha’s mobility and immobility across the urban landscape and the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, marginalization and security that are intertwined with this tension, encapsulated by the notion of ‘im-mobility’. This concept expresses the ambivalences and asymmetries of a condition in which forms of mobility and immobility coexist, at different levels, in the lives of young men who embrace their predicament through a consciously ‘chosen’ im-mobility that celebrates particular norms and values regulating local street life. Finally, I will discuss the implications of research on mobility and masculinity for the understanding of complex and contradictory images of modernization in the postsocialist urban space.

Young Men in the Neighbourhood Birzha refers to a group of male teenagers or young men who meet regularly in open spaces such as squares, courtyards and playgrounds. Birzha shares some features with ‘street corner societies’ in ethnically defined urban areas in North America and in Mediterranean countries (Marchi 2014; Anderson 1999; Whyte 1943). Social class and ethnic belonging are less salient in the Georgian case, since access to birzha cuts across different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. While in North America and in Europe these street hangouts are more commonly found in marginalized communities located in poorer neighbourhoods, the street culture and the norms embodied by birzha are entrenched in society at all levels. Similarly, while many American and European ‘street corner societies’ are organized around members’ common ethnic identity, in birzha ethnic diversity is subordinated to the collective respect for street norms (gageba in Georgian and ponyatie in Russian or ‘what is understood’, Zakharova 2017). Especially in the multicultural and multiethnic areas of Tbilisi, one often comes across birzhas made up of ethnic Georgians, Armenians, Russians and so on. As the Russian word for ‘stock exchange’, birzha is colloquial in the Georgian language. In the Dictionary of Georgian Slang (Bregadze 2005), the term indicates an ‘open-pit gathering of idle youth’. The reference to the financial world is ironic, since participants in birzha, as a norm, are economically inactive (they are students or are unemployed). However, a valuable exchange of social capital and also of material goods takes place in birzha. Another extension from Russian slang to the meaning of birzha casts it as a place where people wait for a temporary job (Dal’ 1955, in Zakharova 2010). Ethnographic research on post-Soviet

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Lithuania reports that a group of men waiting on the street for informal short-term employment is called darbo birzha – the formal term for ‘unemployment agency’ (Harboe Knudsen 2015). According to what little literature is available on the topic (Curro 2017, 2015; Zakharova 2017, 2015, 2010; Frederiksen 2013, 2012; Koehler 1999a, 1999b), birzha is pervasive among the male youth of Georgian urban areas. It is an essential phenomenon in the process of male socialization and identification within local communities, but also serves as a potential initial step in the path towards a criminal career. My initial encounter with birzha was random. When I first visited Georgia in 2008–2009, I became acquainted with people who, although they did not consider themselves to be fully-fledged birzha members, were familiar with the phenomenon in general and with young men who took an active part in street communities. Birzha was visible in the open public spaces of the two neighbourhoods (ubani, or kvartaly) where I lived and was a matter of shared knowledge among these neighbourhoods’ residents. Regardless of their varying degrees of involvement in street life, people were acquainted with norms regulating these practices (see also Zakharova 2017, 2010). Moreover, stories and gossip about events concerning the local birzha circulated widely among locals. Ordinary residents’ familiarity with birzha was essential for the outcome of my research. Thanks to information provided by people who were detached from birzha in time and space (older men recalling their youth experiences, mothers and wives worried about men wasting time in the street), I could partially overcome the limits entailed by the almost exclusively male access to birzha. Those limits were, however, ambivalent. On the one hand, a female foreign researcher’s interest in birzha looked puzzling to many members of the neighbourhood and was possibly worrying (certain older women in particular found my fondness for the subject inappropriate). On the other hand, I was not expected to abide by social and cultural norms defining a Georgian woman’s behaviour, and I did not appear as suspicious as a foreign man could have looked (see also Zakharova 2017). For these reasons, most of the people who took part in my research met and interacted with me in an open and friendly way. Birzha’s status among the neighbourhood’s residents was also ambivalent. People who were not birzha members felt that young men hanging out in the street, with their conspicuous idleness, their unhealthy habits and their proneness to illegality and violence, offered a despicable model for the local youth. The anthropologist Tinatin Khomerik’i reports that, in her research, a similar contempt for birzha members’ inactivity

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was expressed by people belonging to the criminal world, who believed that, in contrast with the dull uselessness of youngsters standing in the street, a man is supposed to ‘do something’ (personal communication with the author).1 At the same time, birzha was seen by many as part of the landscape. These young men and their families were integrated into the community of the ubani, which, while generally disapproving of birzha, also saw the street hangouts as something familiar and harmless, and respected its members as insiders. In some cases, birzha provided ‘useful service’ to the local community. In Khomerik’i’s research, a woman praised birzha members for being always polite and respectful, and even for helping her carry bags and other heavy loads on her way home. Other residents appreciated birzha’s role as ‘eyes on the street’ (Jacobs 1992) which spotted, monitored and, if necessary, removed suspicious outsiders (personal communication with the author). Overall, people from the ubani considered birzha members to be ‘decent guys’ who made mistakes and bad choices but also acted out of honesty and a sense of mutual responsibility towards their peers. Also, its young men were seen as victims of an unjust system which marginalized them. The residents’ ambivalent feelings towards birzha recall Herzfeld’s ‘cultural intimacy’ at the neighbourhood level, that is, ‘the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered as a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality’ (2004: 3). Inclusion in birzha depends on compliance with street norms, whose pivotal points are honour, honesty, manly attitudes and respect for the elderly. These norms are upheld by a hierarchy of identities and roles. Dzveli bich’i (‘old boy’), a young man who wants a career in the criminal world, is the highest authority in the street. A dzveli bich’i stands out for his disregard for official rules and authorities, mastery of street norms, proneness to resolve conflicts through violence and his prison experience. The status of dzveli bich’i is considered that of the first rung in a criminal hierarchy that ultimately culminates in the ‘thief-in-law’, k’anonieri kurdi (in Russian vor-v-zakone), a figure who has exerted considerable – though it is arguably declining – normative and imaginative power on generations of Georgians (K’ek’oshvili and Slade 2019). Birzha is also a stage on which dzmak’atsoba is displayed (Frederiksen 2013, 2012). Dzmak’atsoba refers to close ties between two or more dzmak’atsi (derived from dzma, ‘brother’, and k’atsi, ‘man’) and indicates a stronger, manlier relationship than the neutral megobari, ‘friend’. The tension between mobility and immobility is pivotal to relationships

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between dzmak’atsebi (plural of dzmak’atsi) and to birzha’s connection with the neighbourhood, the exterior space and the spatial and social fabric.

Im-Mobility and Masculinity in the Postsocialist Street This chapter builds on contributions from anthropology, human geography and sociology which consider mobility in its relational and socially embedded dimension, and see mobility and immobility as tightly intertwined (Lelièvre and Marshall 2015; Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012; Kaufmann and Montulet 2008; Adey 2006; Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006; James 1975; for work with a postsocialist focus see: Rekhviashvili and Sgibnev 2018; Burrell and Hörschelmann 2014). Accordingly, I focus on immobility not as the opposite – and, as it is often deemed, negative – side of mobility but rather as another practice of mobility which, rather than being a permanent, passively accepted condition, is instead the product of people’s agency and creativity. Bringing together these considerations, I look at young men in the streets of Tbilisi from the perspective of ‘im-mobility’. I believe that this hyphenated word – as compared with the commonly used ‘(im)mobility’ – expresses more strongly the tensions and ambivalences of a condition in which mobility and immobility are copresent and somehow imply and enable, but also prevent, each other. While political narratives and popular perceptions emphasize the immobility of birzha, the notion of im-mobility problematizes this perspective and brings forward young men’s understandings and agency within this ascribed condition of immobility. As the chapter will discuss, birzha young men are at the same time mobile and immobile within multiple spaces and dimensions (the neighbourhood, the city, the political discourse, their communities and the wider society); their everyday experiences of im-mobility are grounded in relationships, practices and politics which are historically and geographically specific but also fluid and multifaceted (see also Vannini 2011). Scholarship has approached the intersection of masculinity – of which birzha is a prominent ‘institution’ – mobility and urban landscape from the perspective of social and economic marginalization (possibly linked to ethnic discrimination), which has resulted in empirical analyses of young men’s lives in disadvantaged urban areas (O’Neill 2014; Marchi 2014; Wacquant 2009; Wilkinson 2001; Anderson 1999; Whyte 1943). In Georgia and other postsocialist countries, this perspective has been crucial in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise. Local narratives and accounts of external observers alike have described young

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men ‘in transition’ as members of a failed generation, deprived of the status and security which they had somehow enjoyed under the Soviet regime, and struggling with poverty, unemployment and involvement in criminality, along with alcohol and drug addiction (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2013; Dudwick et al. 2002; Kiblitskaya 2000). Although the end of socialist regimes brought about high expectations for increasing spatial and social mobility, this generation of men was ‘immobile’ inasmuch as it was still living in a superseded past and was, at the same time, denied access to the future. Political narratives and practices underpinning the Rose Revolution and its aftermath emphasized that a real social and political change was taking place, representing a new beginning which would leave behind the legacies of communism and the troubled 1990s. Young men were expected to be an engine of this change. The government aimed to educate young citizens as Western-oriented but also patriotic, law-abiding and hard-working individuals (Zakharova 2010; Slade 2007). However, persistent social and economic inequality hampered many young people’s empowerment (World Bank 2012; Jones 2012; Roberts and Pollock 2009; for a recent update see, e.g. Bastianon 2019). Political institutions promoted in only a limited fashion the sorts of public policies that would support poorer citizens. Instead, policymakers often approached the social and economic problems of youth populations through moral and cultural stigmatization, social marginalization and sometimes repression against the individuals who failed to adapt to neoliberal ideologies and practices (Curro 2015; Frederiksen 2013). The social, political and economic exclusion of people who did not fit postrevolutionary modernization narratives has been analysed by anthropologists, sociologists and scholars of public policy and cultural studies (Frederiksen and Gotfredsen 2017; Rekhviashvili 2015; Curro 2015; Gugushvili 2013; Frederiksen 2013). Yet the works with a focus on young men have conceptualized the making of masculine identities, narratives and practices in the urban landscape mainly in terms of a negative condition of immobility: namely, ‘being stuck’, a conception which, in turn, implies disillusionment, loss, boredom, absence and nothingness (Dunn and Frederiksen 2014; O’Neill 2014; Frederiksen 2013; Blank 2004). This chapter investigates the perspectives of the young men themselves on their experienced im-mobilities, focusing on narratives and practices that are generated by birzha members’ creativity and agency. The study provides a nuanced picture which challenges, on one hand, local and international narratives depicting Georgian youth as being clearly oriented towards Western models and lifestyle as well as, on the other hand, approaches which describe these young

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men’s lives as unavoidably haunted by social and physical immobility vis-à-vis society’s hectic – although often hollow – transformations. This perspective supports understandings of young masculinities in the postsocialist city grounded not in dichotomies of modernization vs. backwardness – which, despite widespread criticism, still inform much of the debate on ‘postsocialism’ (Puttkamer 2014) – but in local narratives and lived experiences.

Between Routine-Breaking and Exposure to Risk The neighbourhood that provides the basis for this study is part of a Tbilisi microrayon (a residential area developed through Soviet planning) mainly by low- and middle-income families living in housing which had been provided by the Soviet state and was then privatized (Asabashvili 2009). A big four-lane avenue runs along the residential area, which is made up of smaller roads and unpaved streets going around fiveor six-floor apartment blocks (commonly referred to as Khrushchyovki, or Khrushchyoby, low-cost, concrete-panel apartment buildings from the early 1960s, when Nikita Khrushchev was General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party). This web of open and semi-open spaces – streets, paths, playgrounds, block gates and basements – is the territory of birzha. Neither public nor private, this space recalls Lofland’s ‘parochial realm’, a space ‘characterised by a sense of commonality among acquaintances and neighbours who are involved in interpersonal networks which are located within “communities”’ (2017: 10). The territory across which birzha spreads can also be understood as liminal space or ‘interstices’ (Brighenti 2013: xv): zones that ‘are essentially away from a “public gaze” [sic] whilst simultaneously situated within a public space’ (Parkin and Coomber 2011: 717). Liminal spaces are allocated a ‘minoritarian’ position with respect to other spaces that are ‘either more institutionalized, and therefore economically and legally powerful, or endowed with a stronger identity, and therefore more recognisable or typical’ (Brighenti 2013: xvi). Yet, liminality produces identities, narratives, practices and power relations in its own right. The moral, cultural and social features of birzha are interwoven with the physical landscape of the ubani. Birzha is an ambivalent phenomenon situated between the public and the private (Curro 2015). It is a private practice, since it stems from everyday ties of peer solidarity and spreads across the neighbourhood’s households; it is alien and often opposite to public institutions such as the state (Curro 2017). But it is also a public phenomenon which extends beyond the social and

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physical boundaries of the house and the family and belongs to the community’s shared knowledge. Also, particularly during the 1990s, birzha and the criminal world to which it is related appropriated part of the public sphere of politics and economics, often outweighing official institutions (Curro 2017; Zakharova 2015; Slade 2007). Sitting at birzha (birzhaobs, Bregadze 2005) does not necessarily amount to participation in criminal activities, and it is commonly associated with harmless – although despicable – idleness. However, the circle of informal exchanges which inform relationships within birzha and the more or less explicit links between birzha and the criminal subculture of the ‘thieves’ world’ (kurduli samqaro) place birzha in an external position vis-à-vis formal rules, a placement meeting with suspicion (at least) from the official authorities. The ambivalent nature of birzha is intertwined with the spatial makeup of the neighbourhood and its surroundings, which, in turn, affects young men’s im-mobility within and outside the ubani. Birzha members move around a lot inside the neighbourhood. It might seem that young men are standing still on a street corner, a playground or a block gate, but in fact their movements are hectic and continuous. They go to shops to buy cigarettes, beer and snacks, pick up friends at their place, pop in at home to have a meal and then go back to the street, negotiate various deals with neighbourhood residents or visitors from other areas. The narrow, patchy spaces inside the ubani act as a familiar and protective environment for birzha. Young men are kept ‘away from the public gaze’ but are also able to move beyond the strictly private space of the house and the family. Possibilities of moving outside the neighbourhood, by contrast, are limited. The boundary between the neighbourhood and the outer world is represented by the large avenue (gamziri) which runs alongside the residential area. Young men in the neighbourhood perceive this gateway to the outside in ambivalent ways: presenting an opportunity to get away, it also represents a dangerous connection with an alien and hostile world. Such contradictory feelings are related to two main reasons accounting for the reduced possibility of moving outside the ubani: lack of money, and police control and repression. Reciprocal exchanges abound at birzha, but these transactions are rarely monetary. Since they are unemployed or are students enduring constant financial hardship, birzha members trade whatever they receive or collect from relatives and friends in an ongoing circulation of items. These exchanges guarantee that even in the absence of a proper monetary income, birzha members can enjoy things that they fancy, such as clothes, CDs and sunglasses. One’s belongings are

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continuously exchanged, satisfying young men’s need for new items that they can show off to friends and neighbours. The circulation of this material capital is the tangible token of the exchange of social capital, which is pivotal to the ties of trust and mutual responsibility underpinning birzha. However, the lack of ‘real’ money frustrates these young men. Money offers the means to break away from the everyday routine of the neighbourhood, an exciting prospect for young residents. Money becomes temporarily available when birzha members find short-term jobs, get involved in deals of various kinds, receive monetary gifts from family or borrow sums from better-off friends or relatives. These resources are usually shared with mates and used to purchase drinks and food (and, in certain cases, drugs), to pay for a taxi for a trip out of town, to feast in a restaurant or to go out to clubs or bars. At the time of my fieldwork in Tbilisi, young men would buy fresh beer (usually accompanied with dry smoked fish and rye bread) dispensed directly from the local Qazbegi brewery on the left bank of the river Mt´k´vari. Groups of men consumed beer on the brewery’s premises or, bringing big plastic bottles of beer back to the neighbourhood, drank in the street with their mates. The lack of money is not the only reason for birzha’s reduced mobility outside the neighbourhood. The postrevolutionary government’s zero-tolerance approach envisaged the obliteration of birzha and other undesired practices across the cityscape (such as informal vending, see Rekhviashvili 2015). Reforms of the Georgian Criminal Code included harsh sanctions against petty theft, minor drug-related offences, and anti-social behaviour (Glonti 2012). During fieldwork undertaken at the time of Saak’ashvili’s rule (2008–2009), many young men in the neighbourhood were worried about the increased police patrols (p’at’ruli) in the streets. Dato (22, unemployed) explained: It doesn’t matter if you are a clean guy, who has never had any problems with the law. Police stop guys who are out on their own or with other guys. If you go out with a girl, then probably they are not going to stop you, they don’t think that you’re going to birzha or that you’re a dzveli bich’i if you hang out with girls.

The big avenue was considered a particularly dangerous place, since one was more likely to bump into police patrols on main roads than in the smaller streets of the ubani. Young men avoided leaving the neighbourhood in the evening, whether walking, on public transport or in a friend’s car. They also refrained from gathering in spots which were too close to the junction with the avenue, making them easier targets for the police. Preferred places to hang out after dusk were spots such as

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block gates and house basements, where one could, if the police came around, take refuge. When the situation was perceived to be particularly tense (due to increasing reports, or rumours, of people being stopped or arrested), many young men would refrain from leaving their houses, even for a quick trip to the local shop. At such times even taxis, considered to be a relatively safe way to move around the city, did not provide necessary protection. Vakho (26, then unemployed, sometimes involved in sporadic construction work) recalled a recent misadventure: The other night I was going home in a taxi and a police patrol stopped me. They got me out of the car and started asking what I was doing in the street so late at night. They didn’t believe I was drinking at a friend’s and was going home to sleep. They thought I was a junkie, or a drug dealer. They took me to the police station, and I had to do some tests to check if I was on drugs. I was clean, just a bit drunk. But they locked me up for the night. The morning after, they took me to court. The trial was quick, and then I was free to go but I had to pay a 100 lari fine because I was drunk and had been aggressive to the police, they said. My father is very happy that I didn’t end up in prison, so he said he’s going to pay the fine. I wouldn’t know where to find the money otherwise [failure to pay such fines, which were very high for a vast part of the population, meant more or less automatically a prison sentence – author’s note].

Such episodes were not isolated. With such harsh sanctions in place, the prison population increased by 300 per cent during Saak’ashvili’s presidency and the incarceration rate per capita became one of the highest in the world (K’up’at’adze and Slade 2014).

Confinement or Security? At the end of the Saak’ashvili era (2012–2013), the brand-new city centre, serving as the government’s showcase for international institutions and foreign investors, contrasted starkly with several Tbilisi neighbourhoods where little had changed in terms of building refurbishment and infrastructural improvement. This apparent stagnation mirrors the low spatial and social mobility of the city’s young male residents. Birzha young men appeared to be concerned just with getting through their day, day after day, all too aware that there was no other place to go to and nothing new was ever going to happen. This condition was felt and framed as the impossibility of getting ahead, due to the meagre opportunities available to the youth in general and to young men from

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certain social and local backgrounds in particular. Tato (24, unemployed) told me: I have money for nothing, even for cigarettes. I can find a few tetri to pay for a trip on the marshrutka [minibus] or bus to the city centre, but to do what? There is not much I can do apart from walking around, and chances are I will be stopped by the police. So I spend my days here in the ubani, doing nothing but hanging out at birzha. If I had a job, I could spend some time away from here, doing something different, perhaps even going somewhere in Europe. But I don’t really think that, in Georgia, this is an option for people like me.

From Tato’s perspective, the outer world is a craved-for environment but it is also hostile, moving forward hectically, leaving behind those who cannot cope with its rapid transformations. Social and economic marginalization, together with control and repression, confines young men’s lives within a static spatial and temporal dimension. Yet young men also consider the neighbourhood to be a safe and hospitable place for themselves, along with their dzmak’atsebi and the activities they are engaged in. As noted above, the feeling of safety and familiarity emanating out of birzha’s relationships of trust and reciprocity is shared by many residents of the ubani. While narrowing prospects of a different life elsewhere, immobility – as a lack of spatial, social and economic alternatives – also allows young men to consolidate their identification with the neighbourhood’s physical and social landscape. Temuri (22, unemployed) explained: Look, we have everything we need here! I know it is not very fancy, but I like it. I can hang out with my dzmak’atsebi, and we always manage to have fun. I can borrow money from this and that guy, my mum cooks for me and I have my father’s wine. I don’t see the point of going to the city centre, everything is very expensive and I don’t know anyone there.

In Temuri’s view, immobility, although largely dictated by the lack of money, entails a relatively comfortable life led without much effort, a life made up of familiar people, places and situations. Friend and family networks, a reliable source of material and non-material support, are essential for making immobility a bearable, sometimes even welcomed condition. The strength and importance of these ties, particularly amongst men, was expressed in the following little story by Giorgi (42, salesman), who recalled the relationship amongst his birzha mates in his youth: When you are alone, you are like a big tree. So you have to put a little bird on your tree, and the little bird is that special friend that will never leave

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you. It is a very special friendship for life, but it is your friend, not your partner or spouse. We call true friends beghura, sparrow, because they don’t leave even when it is very cold. We don’t like people like mertskhali, swallows, which are around when the weather is good and go away in winter.

Giorgi depicts immobility as a positive feature which makes places familiar and people reliable. In times of hectic change, mobility represents the opportunity for and ability of people to adapt to, and possibly take advantage of, radical transformations. However, no matter the social and spatial confinement and the lack of prospects, immobility provides a sense of protection against uncertainties brought about by these transformations.

Moving and Staying Many observers have noted that increasing social and spatial ­mobility – connected to Georgia’s general economic development, educational opportunities and the facilitated transnational flows of people, items and ideas in and out of the country – seems to have weakened the prominence of traditional social networks in the neighbourhoods (Curro 2015; Zakharova 2010; Roberts and Pollock 2009). Birzha has partially disappeared from the urban landscape, and not only because of the harsh measures implemented by Saak’ashvili’s government and partially carried on by its successors. The street has lost its centrality as a space for young men’s socialization, and living according to street norms seems to be a less appealing prospect for many young people (K’ek’oshvili and Slade 2019). Normative images of masculinity – which emphasize honour, bravery, respect for community members and norms, and disregard for official institutions – have lost importance in young men’s everyday narratives and practices. Financial independence, travelling abroad, and experiences outside the community of origin appear to be the current priorities. A few years after my first stay in Georgia, some of my participants who used to be involved in birzha had found jobs and wives and had moved outside the neighbourhood. They rarely spent their free time in the ubani, and if they were to be found in the neighbourhood, they would be sitting inside and cooking a meal with friends rather than hanging out in the street. Having a car was crucial to these men’s increased mobility, which, in turn, entailed a spatial and social diversification of their experiences. Tough anti-drug policies, although still in

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place, were perceived as less threatening, also because many of my participants declared that they had adopted a healthier, more responsible lifestyle, cutting down on alcohol consumption and other dangerous fun activities, especially if they were planning to drive. Lasha (28, a chef) told me: It was good to hang out at birzha, but I have had enough. Some of those guys can stay in the street drinking, smoking and doing nothing forever. I am not like that, I am happy to have a job, move out from my neighbourhood and meet other people who do different things – climbing, trekking, going for bike trips. I think it is a better kind of life, which suits me much better at this stage.

Similarly, Vakho (the young man who was arrested while travelling in a taxi, now 34, salesman) explained: Since I have got a job I have no time for birzha. I work six days a week and when I am free I’d rather help my father fix things at home or go out with some new friends. I have a salary now. I can go to clubs, bars, restaurants, that’s better than standing on a street corner, isn’t it? I am still friends with the guys at birzha, we grew up together, but I don’t miss hanging out with them.

However, it would be misleading to consider such perspectives as evidence of young men’s linear and ‘upward’ trajectory from immobility to mobility – that is, from a condition of hopeless confinement within a closed community to a freer, more dynamic life based on one’s own priorities and choices. As it had provided protection and stability against the hostility and unpredictability of the outside world, immobility is now missed as a fading condition which created and supported bonds of trust, honesty and mutual care through shared experiences. Levani (35, a carpenter) told me: ‘I had good time when I was at birzha, hanging out with my dzmak’atsi, drinking, having fights with guys from other neighbourhoods. It was fun, and we knew we could always count on one another. Then, you know, people grow up and everything changes’. The last bit of Levani’s quote indicates that former birzha mates who have moved out of the neighbourhood may be objects of resentment, regarded as people who have betrayed the ties of loyalty and solidarity amongst dzmak’atsebi. Dato (now 31, unemployed) spoke about a guy who had grown up in the ubani and had hung out with him at birhza in the following terms: Do you remember Nik’o, our friend? He got married, his wife’s family has pretty good money, and they now live in a fancy flat closer to the centre,

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they have a daughter and so on. We don’t see him very much, apparently his wife doesn’t like our banda [from Russian, referring to a semi-criminal gang, but here in an ironic way – author’s note]. Of course, when he needs something from us, or when he wants to have some fun and break from family life, he comes back to the ubani.

Conclusion The young men’s narratives and practices analysed in this chapter provide a multifaceted picture of the strategies and trajectories though which spatial and social im-mobility are negotiated across the urban landscape. This picture challenges a perspective of linear movement and of a binary opposition between immobility and mobility associated with backwardness and modernity, pointing out the contradictions inherent in modernization narratives in post–Rose Revolution Georgia. The postrevolutionary government wanted to remove birzha as part of its modernization project. The despised past associated with birzha had been a backwards era of moral, social and political corruption, for which socialism was deemed responsible. However, the Soviet regime stigmatized street communities on very similar grounds. The backwardness evoked by birzha’s inactivity and debauchery contrasted sharply with socialist ideas of healthy, hard-working youth (Curro 2017; Finckenauer and Kelly 1992). Young people, with their enthusiasm for the dominant order (whether it be state socialism or a Western-style market economy and liberal democracy), were supposed to be at the forefront of two – however different – projects of radical modernization. This applies also to the relation linking birzha, the urban landscape and political power. The same buildings and areas which the postrevolutionary government had neglected or destroyed as physical reminders of a despised past (Frederiksen 2013; Muehlfried 2007) were expressions of socialism’s great push towards urban modernization, from public space to housing to infrastructures. While grounded in the specifics of Georgian society and politics and of the landscape of Tbilisi, this study’s analysis of the relation of mobility, masculinity and modernization contributes to an understanding of continuities and ruptures in the narratives, practices and politics of the street across the postsocialist space. Costanza Curro received a PhD in anthropology from the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (2017), with a dissertation on hospitality in Georgia after the Rose Revolution (2003). She has also

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worked on masculinity and mobility in Georgia’s urban public space. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project ‘Gulag Echoes’, based at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on the connections between the street and the prison in Georgia, on prison systems in Soviet ‘peripheries’ in late Soviet times (1970s and 1980s) and on the Soviet and Russian legacies in Georgian carceral worlds.

Note 1. I am very grateful to Tinatin Khomerik’i for sharing information from her doctoral thesis research on the production of social space in Tbilisi.

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at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/gavin-slade-alexander-kupatadze/fail​ ed-mental-rev​olution-georgia-crime-and-criminal-justice (accessed on 28 December 2020). Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lelièvre, Michelle A. and Maureen E. Marshall. 2015. ‘“Because Life Itself is but Motion”: Toward an Anthropology of Mobility’, Anthropological Theory 15(4): 434–71. Lofland, Lyn H. 2017 [1998]. The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory. London and New York: Routledge. Manning, Paul. 2007. ‘Rose-Coloured Glasses? Colour Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia’, Cultural Anthropology 22(2): 171–213. Marchi, Valerio. 2014. Teppa: Storie del conflitto giovanile dal Rinascimento ai giorni nostri. Rome: Red Star Press. Masquelier, Adeline. 2002. ‘Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility, and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger’, American Ethnologist 29(4): 829–56. Muehlfried, Florian. 2007. ‘Celebrating Identities in Post-Soviet Georgia’, in Tsypylma Darieva and Wolfgang Kaschuba (eds), Representations on the Margins of Europe: Politics and Identities in the Baltic and South Caucasian States. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, pp. 282–300. O’Neill, Bruce. 2014. ‘Cast Aside: Boredom, Downward Mobility, and Homelessness in Post- Communist Bucharest’, Cultural Anthropology 29(1): 8–31. Parkin, Stephen and Ross Coomber. 2011. ‘Public Injecting Drug Use and the Social Production of Harmful Practice in High-Rise Tower Blocks (London, UK): A Lefebvrian Analysis’, Health and Place 17(3): 717–26. Puttkamer, Joachim. 2014. ‘Mastery of Spaces and the Crises of Modernity in Central and Eastern Europe’, in Wlodzimierz Borodziej, Stanislav Holubec and Joachim Puttkamer (eds), Mastery and Lost Illusions: Space and Time in the Modernization of Eastern and Central Europe (Vol. 5). Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, pp. 17–30. Rekhviashvili, Lela. 2015. ‘Marketization and the Public-Private Divide’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 35(7/8): 478–96. http://doi.org/10.1108/ IJSSP-10-2014-0091. Rekhviashvili, Lela and Wladimir Sgibnev. 2018. ‘Uber, Marshrutkas and Socially (Dis-) Embedded Mobilities’, The Journal of Transport History 39(1): 72–91. Roberts, Ken and Gary Pollock. 2009. ‘New Class Divisions in the New Market Economies: Evidence from the Careers of Young Adults in Post-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia’, Journal of Youth Studies 12(5): 579–96. Slade, Gavin. 2007. ‘The Threat of the Thief: Who Has Normative Influence in Georgian Society? Dispatches’, Global Crime 8(2): 172–79. Vannini, Phillip. 2011. ‘Constellations of Ferry (Im)mobility: Islandness as the Performance and Politics of Insulation and Isolation’, Cultural Geographies ­ 18(2): 249–71. Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Whyte, William Foote. 1943. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilkinson, Deanna L. 2001. ‘Violent Events and Social Identity: Specifying the Relationship between Respect and Masculinity in Inner-City Youth Violence’, ­Sociological Studies of Children and Youth 8: 235–69.

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World Bank. 2012. Fighting Corruption in Public Services: Chronicling Georgia’s Reforms. Washington DC: World Bank. Zakharova, Evgenia. 2010. ‘Street Life in Tbilisi as a Factor of Male Socialisation’, Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 2(1): 182–204. ____. 2015. ‘The “Tbilisi” Street as a Legal and Political Phenomenon in Georgia’, in Stéphane Voell and Iwona Kaliszewska (eds), State and Legal Practice in the ­Caucasus. London: Ashgate, pp. 69–82. ____. 2017. ‘Black Mats’oni: The Pragmatics of the Tbilisi Street Code’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture 13: 247–79. Zdravomyslova, Elena and Anna Temkina. 2013. ‘The Crisis of Masculinity in Late Soviet Discourse’, Russian Social Science Review 54(1): 40–61.

CHAPTER 4

5 Coproducing the Car and the Stratified Street Automobility and Space in Russia Jeremy Morris

How do Russians interpret and discuss the Russian road? There are the clichés of the poor road quality and maintenance; an abysmal culture of driving where many have obtained a licence with no training; the sense of the ‘wild’ open road populated by untouchable elites, bandits and thugs, along with corrupt highway police viewed as the worst of all. But in many ways driving has become a much better experience in the last ten years, and none of these factors are representative ‘objective’ realities. Nonetheless, such discursive meanings derived from road-talk shared by Russians make up an important part of the ‘real’ stratified Russian street and automobile experience. However, without delving into subjective reality, the discursive street cannot be understood. Thus, to illustrate, I begin with ethnographic conversations between car drivers as well as my own experience as a road-user in Russia over twenty years. This section proposes a provocative conceit: space and roads reveal a state-society nexus that is part of the unfinished business of postsocialist transformation (non-democratic, unequal and typified by an incoherent and coercive state). The recourse to auto-­ethnography is necessary because the qualitative difference in experiencing streets and driving in Russia since 1991 and in the ‘West’ should not be underestimated.

From Precarious Road to Road-Talk In Moscow it was easy in the 1990s – there were simply no rules. Or rather, there was one rule: ‘give way to the fool’. Or, avoid anyone that drove a ‘jeep’-style SUV, as in the event of an accident it was quite possible these drivers would use violence to extort the cost of repairs, even if it wasn’t your fault. Here are two of my formative experiences, both

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from 1996. The first was a walk near the Yauza canal when I came across a crowd viewing two drivers of high-end cars lying in pools of blood in the road after a head-on collision. The police didn’t bother to cover the bodies with tarpaulins. The second was the experience of peering out of my seventeenth-storey window, disturbed by a car alarm early in the morning (an all-too-common event). As I left the apartment for work, I came across a crime scene. A Lada car owner had confronted and shot dead a car thief. Since the 1990s, the risk of dying in a road accident in Russia has nearly halved, but is still three to six times greater than in most European countries.1 Indeed, this major improvement in safety hides a basic reality: the dual stratification of infrastructures and automobile-user statuses, and the accompanying inequality of risks. The first reality is obvious, readily apparent as one drives along divided multilane highways with a ‘hard shoulder’ in Moscow only to have them disappear just a few dozen kilometres away from the capital’s city limits.2 The second is made visible in the starkly different behaviour of those who feel ‘entitled’ to break any traffic law – usually driving high-end foreign cars, particularly SUVs – and of those confined to frugal personal transportation, invariably in cars designed in the Soviet era. In 2015, I drove into Moscow from the provinces and into a typical four-hour, twenty-kilometre traffic jam. I covered my young son’s eyes as we crept past another body – this time a pedestrian, an old woman who had been hit by an SUV as she was trying to cross eight lanes. In 2018, eight people were killed in a minibus crash near my provincial summerhouse on a two-lane highway without a median barrier – a ‘regional-level route’. A laughable denomination: there is no usable hard shoulder and in places the asphalt has come away in ‘chunks’ due to the annual freeze-thaw. Most deadly, though, are the sudden dips, the blind curves, the ever-present ‘kiuvet’ – a kind of drainage ditch it is easy to foul a wheel in, which then will flip a car, at worst into the oncoming traffic, at best on its roof. Then there is the sudden change in usable lane width and the frequent absence of painted lines, let alone lighting. In short there is as much risk from the road as from other drivers. But others are not the only problem. ‘Fools and bad roads’ was Gogol’s famous phrase about Russia. It is as relevant today in describing a risk-taking ‘pofigism’ philosophy that sees fate substituted for judgement and in a culture where drivers’ eyebrows are still routinely raised if a passenger attempts to wear a seatbelt. I’ve personally given up on driving on highways, even as they get safer. ‘But it’s not India’, Nikita, my driving buddy and long-term informant says to me (statistically India is safer than Russia). ‘You still need to get your family from Moscow out to

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here in the back of beyond’ (provincial Kaluga). Instead of using Nikita’s services, I start paying ‘calm’ old Valera, a trusted local taxi-driver, to take my family to Moscow. But then, on my own first trip with him – just twenty kilometres from the little industrial town of my fieldwork to the nearest rail station – he gets distracted telling me that politicians are thieves. He takes a wrong turn and I hesitate, then tell him his error. I regret it immediately as he does a ‘U-ie’ over six lanes of traffic without checking his mirrors, his rear axle making a heart-stopping scraping sound (‘I’ll fix it next year, when I’ve earned enough from taxiing’, he says without irony). I curse inwardly. ‘Can you fish out the seatbelts from behind the backseat? You know, so my kids can wear one?’ His response: ‘I got rid of them because they got in the way [meshali] of passengers.’ Road-talk is what emerged from such incidents. My research participants and I have all been in them. ‘What about that time you had the Audi and the cops pulled us over for speeding? You know, before you were robbed and the thugs took it’. Nikita changed his car a lot more in the old days, before he got into debt – precisely because of his obsession with motoring. He had bought an old Audi 80 injector in 2009, drink-driving on the local roads. But he got cold feet when we drove onto the regional highway and let me take over. I had a go and opened it up just to see a road cop sneak his radar camera at us from behind a bridge pillar (now there are fixed cameras all along the route). Having switched seats just in time, we paid a small bribe and were on our way. Then when we parked outside a shopping mall in Kaluga a uniformed man with a shiny badge approached us. ‘Fifty rubles for the parking’. Nikita was emboldened either from drink or out of a desire for ‘revenge’ after the previous episode. The man showed us a ticket that supposedly required us to pay the fifty rubles. Nikita examined it closely. Then he got out of the car and walked over to the parking sign. ‘Friend’, he addressed the ‘parking attendant’, ‘this ticket and your badge say one “Yalta parking”, but the sign says “Rio-parking” and the symbol is different’. He then motioned me to get out of the car. We locked up and left the vehicle there in the space, the stupefied attendant unable to come up with anything. Nikita looks at me indulgently – ‘You’re spoiled by those European roads, flat and endless’. His more reflective friend Petr chimes in, ‘We just have to deal with risks more, it’s not about the roads themselves … it’s something in us. If everything is upside-down since, say, the ’90s, then we just get used to it’. I have the last word, however: ‘Hang on, don’t paint me as this “European” driver – I drive more than both of you put together. Tell me one thing – which of you will drive me to Moscow

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tomorrow for my work meeting. I’ll give you eighty Euros’. Nikita thinks, then answers: ‘I can take you to the Oilbase [colloquial name for the next town], 10km, but no further’. Petr: ‘I can drive you to Kaluga 2 [a station outside the city limits], but no further, where the cameras start and the GIBDD control post is.3 You know they changed the law back to allow them to stop and inspect at will again. I don’t like the toll roads anyway, giving money to the already rich’. As if to compensate, Nikita says: ‘But come over to the garage tonight, we’re having a barbeque, and we can do what we like there’. Road-talk dramatizes the precarious and ‘risky’ existence of the average road user. However, it spills over into more general understandings about the ‘stratified street’, a result of the incoherence of state-society relations, along with widespread mistrust and wariness towards others. Road-talk discursively sees people coproduce some kind of order from disorder: a form of making habitable automobility in an environment marked by ambivalence. Road-talk makes a virtue of marginality, in that it is similar to those forms of infrapolitics explored by James C. Scott (1990). Moreover, road-talk itself is generated and performed in the stratified street, to which it bears witness. Talk about cars amongst men takes place in the ‘refuge’ of garage blocks, beyond the gaze of the state.

Overview: Performing Gender and Class to Coproduce the Car In Russia, masculinity and class relate to automobility through norms of consumption and DIY (car ownership, mechanical repair and tinkering) as well as a discourse of classed spaces that have been made either interstitially habitable or are uninhabitable. Car ownership in Russia remains highly inflected by class and gender identity, as does mobility and the experience of the street. Those without means remain highly dependent upon access to DIY skills in repairing old, mechanically simple Russian cars. Thus a stratified meaning of road and automobile spaces is articulated: for example, the peri-urban domains consisting of large garage blocks, where repair and male socialization occur, are propertized as working-class spaces, while the ‘Federal’ highway is interpreted as other. To bring out these nuances I employ the two ethnographic composites4 I mentioned earlier. They represent different conceptualizations of the (male, working-class) car driver. Nikita is typical of the men who buy a ‘banger’ and spend much time maintaining it with support from others who share such self-positioning: the car and garage spaces come first, and work second; there is a general reluctance to remould oneself according to the new neoliberal ­imperatives of self-discipline.

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In addition, Nikita’s automobility is grounded in non-utility, nomadism, exuberance even. In contrast Petr, as owner and car user, is supremely practical, instrumentalist and more individualistic. He carefully moulds himself to the rigorous demands of the German car plant where he works on the assembly conveyor. The car, and driving more generally, reflect a form of methodological individualism and of governmentality in a Foucauldian sense. Historically, this marks a particularly significant rupture in postsocialist spaces. Individuals encounter the imperative to ‘assume market-based values in all of their judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient quantities of “human capital” and thereby become “entrepreneurs of themselves”’ (Hamann 2009: 38). Automobility, stratified streets and the road-talk that emerges in these realms mark how particular forms of masculinity intersect both with aspirational fantasies of ownership (that largely remain inaccessible) and with stubborn retrenchments of more traditional classed identities. Authoritarian state-society relations that produce and are in turn maintained by severe inequality based on a more or less rigid cementing of social hierarchy are expressed in stratified streets. Just as there is an uneasy relationship between the ‘desired’ automobile as status symbol and the actually existing object of labour and coproduction – the perennially repaired Soviet-era car – the ‘public’ road is where the subaltern yet resourceful automobile Russian meets the coercive and uncaring, yet inept state, and the ‘other’, putatively middle-class. The stratification of streets and drivingscapes is the result. The ‘almost’ European highways near Moscow are full of Mercs or Meriny (colloquially ‘mares’), Bumery (BMWs) and high-end SUVs (Dzhipy) playing ‘checkers’, ‘shashechki’ (flitting from lane to lane at high relative speed, undertaking and overtaking at will). These are dangerous places for the marginalized, whose old Russian cars stick out, slow, rusty and smoky. They are ‘pressed’ [prizhimaiutsia] on every side, physically ‘cut up’ on every manoeuvre, stopped at will by emboldened traffic police looking to score a fine or bribe, risking breakdown (effectively stranding, given the cost of recovery) far from familiar territory. And of course there is also the prosaic risk of accidental death, due not to the decrepitude of their cars but mainly to the reckless driving of the untouchable elites who, Petr stresses, are ‘too proud to obey even common-sense traffic laws’. Petr’s cousin Anton had worked in Moscow as an ambulance driver for some years: ‘the reason there is no central barrier is that it suits the kortezh, so they can overtake the ordinary people by driving on the wrong side of the road’. Kortezh refers to the motorcade of blue-light government cars, though the English-language funereal connotations

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of this word are apt. Anton: ‘You get out of the way of the kortezh, but not everyone manages it. That’s why there has to be an ambulance accompanying the kortezh at the rear, to pick up the pieces’. Whether this last observation is true or not, it emphasizes an understanding of the street as reflecting the incoherent, if not downright dangerously callous state. Injury and death pale in comparison with the experience of surviving a shunt only to discover that your life has been ruined by the ‘connected’ owner of the offending SUV, who will ensure that the road traffic incident, or ‘DTP’, is written up as your fault, resulting in life-changing extortion for the cost of repair (often inflated and running into multiples of annual income). Nikita once reflected on his experience of a DTP between his little old Lada and a BMW: ‘I’d rather die than have another accident’. In contrast, people like Nikita, a lathe operator in a provincial factory, say they feel ‘at home’ on the still high-risk local highways and local urban roads where the poor infrastructure means that low absolute speeds and speed differentials favour the older car. In addition, the state has not only abdicated responsibility for road repair, it polices these spaces only symbolically and one can ‘drive how you like’ without risking arrest, unafraid of breakdown because ‘reinforcements’ (one’s dense horizontal social network of driver buddies) are close by. Particular forms of drink-driving (not in urban areas but in the empty spaces between them) should be partly understood as much a subaltern response to this stratification as an ‘anti-social’ activity. Finally, the safest space of all, the vast garage blocks on the edge of town, is a truly interstitial sphere where hidden transcripts of the mobility I have just summarized are rehearsed. Since the end of communism, private ownership of cars in Russia has exploded. Russian automobility, however, uniquely involves labouring and networking subjects who must coproduce the car – forever breaking down, requiring constant care, improvisation, attention and alertness, and moreover, the careful cultivation of social networks made up of mechanically proficient confrères who can fix the vehicle. Coproduction extends to driving and navigating the dangerous, poorly repaired roads – one needs to ‘attune oneself’ to the ‘good will’ of the car (cf. Dant 2004 on the assemblage of the ‘driver-car’). The car aids the driver in avoiding a ditch, snowdrift, a broken axle or an encounter with a ‘bandit’ or, worse, a road cop. More prosaically, one cannot rely on one’s skill as a driver, as the risks are too great in the pockmarked reality of any Russian roadscape. If not reifying the car to consciousness, then automobility is coproduced because of the overwhelmingness of risk, which can be reduced only through ‘pooling’ – of knowledge, resources, skills,

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luck even. As Nikita puts it, a driver remains lucky by knowing his limits and learning from others, directly or indirectly.

Stratified Streets and Garage Interstices The urban landscape accentuates automobility as achieved through labour, as a masculine preserve and as crossing over into domains of social ambivalence. These emphases are due to the isolation of most garages and parking lots, which come to serve as hidden masculine enclaves of autonomy and sociality. Indeed, the ‘garage’ has come to stand for any activity seen as seeking refuge from Russia’s corrupt, overbearing state (Medvedev 2015; Seleev and Pavlov 2016). The garage as a metaphor evokes a murky, dodgy, possibly dangerous place. But as an urban interstice, a no-place, it is also a hive of activity beyond the purview of the authorities, whether it be 5,000 steel box garages in nameless rows off nameless streets in the Moscow suburbs or the unplanned, unregulated developments of hundreds of hand-built brick garages with improvised utilities, just beyond the municipal limits of countless towns and cities. As ‘moorings’ where immobility and fixity are as important as mobility (Tuvikene 2014), these reproduce automobility in a characteristically postsocialist fashion. Due to their ‘relative scarcity’ in twentieth-century Eastern Europe and Russia, automobiles were invested with particular symbolic value ‘because of the lengths to which aspirant and real owners would go to obtain and maintain them’ (Siegelbaum 2011: 2). More than any other consumer object, the car came to represent the particular forms of socialist consumption (Siegelbaum 2008). There is a long history of unspoken and guilty desire associated with foreign cars in Russia (Siegelbaum 2011: 4) which continues in the present. And high-status vehicles remain linked to those who have seemingly undeservedly gained access to material riches (ibid.: 5). High-value motoring remains a notorious reminder of the rapid changes in fortune and the confusing similarity of ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ status granted to the winners of postsocialist transformation (Patico 2005; Kruglova 2019). Security-service functionaries and mafiosi are difficult to tell apart as they glide by in Mercedes while ‘the people’ make do with 1960s-technology Ladas. Car ownership remains as much a political and class-ridden issue as a gendered one. While Russians have increasingly come to experience the automobile as a status consumption object, car access, the use of urban space and the symbolic meanings of mobility remain inflected both by socialist-era forms of modernity and by the peculiarities of p ­ ostsocialism’s urban

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and spatial networks. The latter is particularly related to contingencies such as risk, collectivity and closeness/distance from the state as spatial ‘arbiter’, which in turn transforms the postsocialist street into a series of stratified places. The specifically postsocialist meanings of mobility notwithstanding, automobility and masculinity are as closely linked symbolically in Russia as in any other post-industrial society. The connection is perhaps even stronger for working-class men than for others due to the historical scarcity of automobiles and an unfulfillable desire associated with ownership. Most workers can realistically aim to own a basic Soviet-era AvtoVAZ Lada model (a low-tech vehicle based on the 1960s Fiat 124, produced in large numbers until the early 2010s) or to buy a ‘Western-style’ car on rather crippling credit terms. Technical skills in DIY maintenance have long been desiderata for long-term ownership for three reasons: a) very poor road maintenance and severe climatic conditions; b) poor general automobile network infrastructure – a preponderance of low-grade roads and poor distribution of vehicle maintenance businesses; c) the simple construction of most Russian cars. ‘Tinkering’ in garage blocks with acquaintances also has a long history and is a significant part of working-class homosociality – among young and old alike (Morris 2016). Whether to commute to better blue-collar jobs in the regional capital of Kaluga (an hour away by car and served by only one slow public bus per hour), or more locally to enable informal work as an unregistered taxi driver or to provide transport for moonlighting jobs in trades and construction, or just to be a marker of appropriate adult, breadwinning masculinity, the car is seen as a symbolic and practical necessity for most men in the aggregates-extracting, cement-mixing town of Izluchino.5 As most people own 1990s-built Ladas, with ownership comes the necessity of skills and a sufficient social network of other workers so that repairs can be made without resorting to paying a workshop. Most men have access to a brick garage space on the edge of town. The garage in Izluchino has been built by its owner (also requiring ‘membership’ in a mutual aid network) side-by-side with similar constructions, forming long rows of often spacious workshops-cum-­ garages. There are two five-hectare garage territories at either end of the town. Like the use of ‘sheds’ in Anglophone culture, the garage is mainly a masculine reserve devoted to practical activity, often for its own sake; a car may never get completely ‘fixed’, but a lot of talk and drinking ensure that homosocial ties are cemented and broadened. While Anglophone culture promotes the individualistic notion of the lone tinkerer (Cavanagh, Southcombe and Bartram 2014), in Russia

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garage use is predicated on men coming together to reinforce bonds of competent masculinity. The garage can be a cosy shared space, whether used as a bar or mechanic’s shop. Some have glass-brick windows and heating; all have electricity and ventilation pipes sticking out of their roofs. Opposite Petr’s garage another owner has not only added a summer ‘terrace’ of sorts (a room made from steel sheeting and polycarbide glass) but has also installed a pigeon coop on the roof. The garage context serves as a perfect private society in microcosm for men to debate and express differences in attitudes towards cars, now increasingly linked to changing ideas about time value and adaptability to ‘new’ production contexts requiring ‘self’ discipline (such as conveyor work at the TNCs – transnational corporations like Volkswagen). In addition, there is the ever-present symbolization in car ownership of more and less worthy forms of masculinity and the dilemma of foregoing consumption in the present so that one might own ‘better’ forms of vehicle transport in the future. This is best illustrated by two positions within the social circle of informants. Nikita represents the first position: men who avoid having to ‘adapt’ to neoliberal production regimes. Nikita has purchased an unreliable, rusty if racy Lada ‘banger’ necessitating long periods of maintenance and mutual aid, a vehicle which cannot reliably be used for commuting but is ‘fun’ and a source of socialization. The second group, represented by Petr, sees Nikita’s frequent change of cars (as owner) as part of his inability to remain permanently employed. For Petr’s group, the physical mobility of ownership is linked to ‘mobility’ more widely and is valued positively (e.g. as showing a willingness to adapt to the Western demands of the TNC production lines). In contrast, Nikita’s mobility is seen as negative: he is a ‘flyer’ – a person who cannot knuckle down and accept his place. One day, when Petr has gone to Kaluga to work his conveyor shift, his mother, Masha, talks about the garage spaces of her children and husband. For some wives it is a problem – if the blokes leave for the garage that’s it. You don’t know when you’ll see them again. But on the other hand, it is a blessing and you can get some peace. When he goes on a bender (zapoi) it’s good that he can go to the garage nearby as I know he’ll be safe and even in the winter he won’t freeze to death there.

The ‘garage’ expresses a complicated set of relationships related to networking, leisure, skills-building, the informal economy and masculine reciprocity more generally. Later I visit Zhenya’s garage. Clean and spacious, it has two old sofas and a plastic table as well as an old computer and a speaker system through which the latest pop hits blare out,

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accompanied by music videos. Zhenya has salvaged a metal display rack for flavoured powdered milk that now serves as storage for CDs. They hold forth about ‘garage work’: It’s not about getting away from women, from the flat. No, why do you say that? How many hours have we spent hanging around here? Here in our company we’ve spent so much time here that we call the garage not just a garage but a café-club garage. ’Cos you can have a beer here. Or some vodka … . You can watch a film, have a tinker with the car and everything else. So it is a café-club garage. We phone up Zhenya and say – come on, open up the café-club … . There’s only one table for the clientele though – a ‘night café-club’ … so this is where we live. (Sergei, 31)

Because public masculine sociality – always closely linked with drinking alcohol – remains pathologized, the garage looms large, occupying an important real and symbolic space in the lives of men. The very marginality of the garage space makes for a vibrant sense of the possibilities of masculine sociality. Garage spaces are worthy of attention not only in terms of gender relations. The garage block is ‘beyond the pale’, or at least beyond ordinary and, more importantly, state-surveilled town life. Police rarely if ever visit such places. Similarly, the sorts of modifications to buildings outlined above would not be tolerated in the housing blocks. Reduced in complexity to a basic social meaning, the garage exemplifies the fraught search for the ‘propertizing’ of marginal spaces so as to allow the maintenance and expansion of the network of automobile-minded persons of a similar class (Morris 2016).6 Here such men can encounter others and build both weak and strong ties of confraternity, partly through road-talk. In a literal and a metaphorical sense, the garage performs the dialectical relationship between public and hidden transcripts, as defined by Scott (1990: 27). As spaces where marginalized men discuss their subaltern position, the garage is a form of gendered subculture – indeed, it is produced by the severe disparities in wealth and power in Russia. If the garage can be seen as defensive refuge, site of infrapolitics or, more prosaically, a lay attempt to propertize the postsocialist street in the name of class, what of the spaces of mobility themselves that lie beyond? The use of space enabled by the garage (a self-sufficient automobility that is unsurveilled) can also be understood metaphorically as a hidden transcript or infrapolitics. I have already hinted at this in the affordances of the garage that link to wider practices – the keeping of self-repaired, partially unroadworthy cars, the use of cars for shadow economy activities like trade, but particularly unlicensed taxi-driving (almost universally experienced by working-class men). Drink-driving and what could

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be interpreted as an ‘anti-social’ use of roads are also part of how such infrapolitics in general have leaked from backstage (the garage space) to centre stage – the public highway. The stratification of this understanding of streets explains much about interlocutors’ shared discourse of the road. So cruising for pleasure, which may involve drink-driving, the aimless navigation of rural roads, the playing of loud music, car modification7 and speeding are restricted to certain places and times, as are shadow economy activities such as taxi-driving. Unlike in the garage spaces, where some of these practices can be found at any time, this is not a propertization but a kind of negotiated nomadism where the state’s sovereignty remains incomplete. Thus understood, the street, particularly the local rural roads beyond the built-up urban space or Federal highways, serve as a space where drivers’ literal and figurative nomadism gains expression.8 Here is an example of a typical recreational night drive, on a rural asphalted road with a car full of people drinking beer, driving sedately at around 50 km/h. Passenger 1: Where are we headed? Nikita: What difference does it make? We can stop where we like, because we are nowhere. We can carry on. It’s not just up to you or me, it also depends on what the car wants to do and what the road allows. The most important thing is that there is nothing here. We might as well be on the moon. No one gives a damn for this backwater. Passenger 2: Yes, but last time we were here, about a year ago, the road was much worse, almost all potholes. Now they’ve put enough patches [zaplatki] on for us to make 80km an hour. There must be some cash in the regional road budget this time. Nikita: It’s just because the Regional Governor’s nephew has a summer house in one of the villages. Don’t make the mistake of thinking there’s another reason for it. There’s no power [vlast’] out here, thank goodness! How would people work as informal cabbies [bombili] if there was?

Workhorse Cars Reflecting Owners’ Identities ‘She’s my friend, but she’s a workhorse; she’s no beauty, unlike the Škodas we assemble! But that’s the way I like her’. Petr strokes the bonnet of his 2009 Lada Priora sedan as he says these words. The Priora is one of the first Russian cars to have been built to ‘Western’ standards of design, safety and reliability. Petr took out a bank loan to buy it – bigger than

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a mortgage and crippling for the next two years. Painstakingly careful with his new purchase, Petr won’t be using it for taxi-driving or moonlighting. Nonetheless, the fickle highway catches him out and we inspect some significant road damage to the front wing that occurred as he was driving home from his new job at the car factory, an hour away along treacherous roads. A rotten exhaust fell off the car in front of him and hit his car. Petr works on the conveyor – assembling shiny German cars that he himself is unlikely ever to afford. He had organized a recovery truck home – an expensive operation. He remarks: ‘I can afford little misfortunes like that. Not like Nikita and his rust bucket. His “Qashqai” breaks down all the time. It’s a real lemon that he was tricked over. But because of that he knows all the recovery truckers around here’. Petr’s critical attitude towards Nikita, who maintains a rust-bucket Lada ‘banger’, is reflected in his ironic mention of Nikita’s car as a ‘Qashqai’. British-built Nissan Qashqai jeeps were heavily advertised on television in Russia as a status car, an indication that social mobility had been achieved. Informants use such language play to articulate their genuine desires for the status associated with a ‘Western’ car as well as to register their suspicion of such aspirations (showing someone more liable to ‘get above his station’ – to be somehow less manly: the Qashqai has a reputation as a ‘woman’s’ car). By contrast, Nikita’s history of car ownership and his approach to mobility is strikingly different, as we have seen. For a short time Nikita had owned a Korean-built jeep but had soon sold it on, partly due to the cost of upkeep but also because of social opprobrium from family, friends and confrères. His previous car, the Audi, had been extorted from him, partly due to an unpaid debt. As his father had said, shaking his head: ‘A foreign car like that is a cap that doesn’t fit him. Why is he trying to be something that he isn’t?’ The jeep was inseparable from Nikita’s self-interpretation, and from others’ interpretation of him, as a suitably masculine, working-class, self-resourcing person. However, it quickly became evident that, unlike what Petr’s cautious and parsimonious perspective on car ownership said about him, Nikita’s car marked him out as a miscalculating risk-taker – a gambler who does not know when to quit. It was one thing cruising at night, but on the Federal highway you didn’t take the kinds of risks you could locally. After a series of costly repairs, Nikita sold the car on for a loss, confirming his father’s opinion. For those around him, Nikita’s ‘extravagant’, abortive ownership of the jeep mirrored his lack of self-discipline when it came to staying the course in formal work. ‘He’s fine until the first misfortune and then it seems like he can never get over it’, said one person. ‘His work history is

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like his car history – he is enthusiastic until it “breaks” and then he gives up and gets another one’. A friend commented: ‘Instead of dealing with the conflict he’ll leave. Like with his car. In seven years he’s changed his car many times. You need to look after it. It’s hard and you need to sort out the faults, and instead of changing himself he tries to change his environment’. By 2014 these criticisms seemed vindicated in the minds of some of Nikita’s friends and relatives: he seemed to have completely given up on formal work in favour of informal taxi-driving, but now he drove a humble, rusty 1990s Lada. However, Nikita maintains his masculine working-class status, prestige even, in the garages – he certainly has no shortage of passengers for his cruising or his taxi-driving. He does not experience the same ‘burden’ as felt by Petr in ‘consuming himself into being’ through automobility (Croghan et al. 2006, in Griffin 2011: 255); the question of ‘lack’ versus ‘possession’ is problematized (ibid.).

Discussion Discourses around cars and streets in working-class communities in Russia produce a particular stratified understanding of automobility, one that stresses socialized, coproduction of the automobile subject (owner-driver) and object (car) alike. Two visions of automobile performative masculinity emerge, the first of which, represented by Petr, is broadly understood as accepting of the neoliberal challenge that people work on themselves to become flexible subjects of Russia’s harsh neocapitalist order. Aspiring to ownership of a Western car goes hand in hand with (and is the reward for) becoming a flexible neoliberal subject, taking on consumer credit, yet also delaying gratification. Members of the second group, here represented by Nikita, remain in lower-paid traditional industrial employment or even in semi-legal informal work. They are wary of the new order, seeing it as restrictive of autonomy and presenting an unequal compact. To them the ‘contract’ offered by new work and new cars is ‘unmasculine’ – to be automobile for them means a socialized use of cars in the ‘now’ for pleasure, regardless of ‘risk’. Beyond a focus on class and masculinity, plural meanings of automobility emerge in the use and significance of space and sociality. These meanings can be represented by two recurring tropes: the ‘garage’ as an ambivalent, coproducing space of practically achieved automobility, and the owner-driver as part of a living, social unit rather than as the lone, individual navigator, cut off in his isolated metal suit of road armour.

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The garage is an ambivalent refuge: an immobile, compressed, marginalized space of ‘small agency’ (Honkasalo 2009; Morris 2016) and meagre solidarity in the face of a hostile society manifested in streets more generally. The social self-organization of men through the shared experience of automobility is visible in the garages. Here, men articulate and perform practices of homosociality and car-dom that articulate, if not enact, automobile personhoods that strive to keep them at wheel’s-length from the state, the nuclear family and other ‘ties’, yet are embedded within confraternities of like-thinking drivers, tinkerers and menders. This is not without risks – of theft, of ‘dud’ cars, of being forced into Sisyphean performances of repair that are ultimately burdensome. However, the garage remains a ‘good-enough’ site of autonomy, socially embedded meaning-making and coproduced automobility. In the wider context of automobility it expresses a general ‘grammar of (in)security’ (Prozorov 2014, as quoted in Kruglova 2019) where the agents of the state (in the guise of the Road Police), mobile bandits and nouveaux riches’ armour-plated SUVs are all equal dangers in the symbolic and real road network of Russia’s car culture. Garages are habitable spaces (Morris 2016), in an uncertain landscape of stratified streets. Roads, cars, streets and automobility gain further significance in an analysis of state-society relations. Anna Kruglova’s research (2019) on drivers and passengers in the Urals shows how road spaces between towns exemplify the stretched-out and contingent rule of the Russian state. Similarly, my research participants emphasize their interstitial understanding of the road, street and highway. Beyond the safety of the garage, they encounter a number of ‘others’ who exemplify their understanding of the incoherent yet mainly coercive state. As Tauri Tuvikene (2016: 133) points out, urban theorization of postsocialism should be alert to differences as much as similarities. Thus a ‘deterritorialized’ understanding of postsocialism focuses on the urban, including streets, as a conceptual construct of observers, rather than on in situ objective conditions. Characteristic here is a shared discourse of the state as incoherent other (sometimes coercive, sometimes weak or absent), with the need for subalterns to rely only on those socially close, and to beware the spaces of others. This picture helps us to move away from a simplistic view of Russian streets as ‘lawless’ or ‘dangerous’. It requires us to inquire into the active involvement of drivers and passengers to coproduce some kind of order from disorder, particularly through road-talk. Regardless, any order remains contingent and relative; almost by state design, it is informalized and deregulated (Morris 2019). Automobilities in postsocialist contexts are coproduced and negotiated assemblages. Drivers and owners

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not only ‘gear’9 themselves to the unreliability of machine or road, they coproduce the car in a particular social, spatial and legal-political environment marked by ambivalence, nomadic interstice and risk, but also other-regarding cosociality. Automobility is therefore phenomenologically distinct from the normative vision of its affordances. This approach may be useful in arguing for a gender-, class- and space-­ inflected notion of automobility that is not neatly reducible to a normative, privileged Western model, where the accent is inevitably on ‘private’ ownership, status consumption, individualism, freedom and hegemonic forms of class and gender identity. Jeremy Morris is Professor in Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. His most recent book is Everyday Postsocialism: Working-class Communities in the Russian Margins (Springer, 2016).

Notes 1. For an overview (2018) see the article on the Russian news portal Gazeta.ru: https://www.gazeta.ru/auto/2018/07/17_a_11855059.shtml?updated (accessed 2 February 2023). 2. A short article about Abkhazia (a breakaway region of Georgia) underlines the disparity in real safety and infrastructure across the former Soviet Union. In many places, safety and public attitudes to risk are more akin to those in countries with some of the most deadly roads on Earth. The text was published in the London Review of Books Blog (25 September 2018): https://www.lrb.co.uk/ blog/2018/09/25/valeria-costa-kostritsky/the-policemen-waved-back/ (accessed on 2 February 2023). By any measure, Russia is an outlier amongst highly industrialized countries in road deaths. 3. GIBDD stands for ‘State Inspectorate of Road Transport Safety’. A major source of anxiety and anger amongst drivers was the discretion available to traffic police in deciding whom to stop and where. In 2009 the road police lost a major source of power, and of bribes, when a law was passed restricting their stopping of motorists to a fixed police post. However, this law was replaced in 2017 with another that restored significant roving powers to the police. Over the same period, stationary cameras had become ubiquitous on Federal highways, making such stops relatively unnecessary. Elsewhere, however, there was a marked absence of regular traffic police in the interim – and because unmarked traffic policing was prohibited, the period became something of a free-for-all away from the Federal highways. 4. Ethnographic composites involve the responses and words of multiple, comparable informants being collapsed into one ‘person’. Here Nikita ‘represents’ a group of informants with similar perspectives. Their exact words and ideas are retained. Overall, about fifty people make up the group with whom interviews and interactions were conducted to form the basis of this chapter. 5. The town, as with all the informants, is a composite of several industrial spaces in the Kaluga region.

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6. I have adopted the term ‘propertizing’ from Beverly Skeggs, who uses it to propose the potentiality of autonomist working-class values (1997: 32). 7. On cultural capital through car modification, see Bengry-Howell and Griffin 2007. In Russia, such modification was less about consumption and individualism. 8. Cf. Tauri Tuvikene (2016) on the term ‘deterritorialized’, which adopts a similarly Deleuzian understanding of space. 9. ‘Gearing’ of the driver-owner to the machine and the environment is an adoption of Tim Dant’s (2004: 71) reading of Merleau-Ponty (1962). For Dant, the driver is ‘geared’ to the world via the body and represents a phenomenological approach: an ‘embodied orientation to the world that human beings carry into each moment’ (ibid.: 72).

References Bengry-Howell, Andrew and Christine Griffin. 2007. ‘Self-Made Motormen: The Material Construction of Working-Class Masculine Identities through Car Modification’, Journal of Youth Studies 10(4): 439–58. Cavanagh, Jillian, Amie Southcombe and Tim Bartram. 2014. ‘The Role of Collaborative Learning on Training and Development Practices Within the Australian Men’s Shed Movement: A Study of Five Men’s Sheds’, Journal of Vocational Education and Training 66(3): 365–85. Dant, Tim. 2004. ‘The Driver-Car’, Theory, Culture and Society – special issue on Automobilities, 21(4–5): 61–79. Griffin, Christine. 2011. ‘The Trouble with Class: Researching Youth, Class and Culture beyond the “Birmingham School”’, Journal of Youth Studies 14(3): 245–59. Hamann, Trent. 2009. ‘Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics’, Foucault Studies 6: 37–59. Honkasalo, Marja-Liisa. 2009. ‘Grips and Ties – Agency, Uncertainty, and the Problem of Suffering in North Karelia’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 23(1): 51–69. Kruglova, Anna. 2019. ‘(Road) Driving in Terrain: Automobility, Modernity, and the Politics of Statelessness in Russia’, American Ethnologist 46(4): 457–69. Medvedev, Sergei. 2015. ‘Garazhnaia ekonomika’, Radio Svoboda, 4 November 2015. Available online at: https://www.svoboda.org/a/27345653.html (accessed on 9 April 2018). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962 (1945). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Morris, Jeremy. 2016. Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ____. 2019. ‘The Informal Economy and Post-Socialism: Relational Perspectives on Labor, the State, and Social Embeddedness’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 27(1): 9–30. Patico, Jennifer. 2005. ‘To Be Happy in a Mercedes: Tropes of Value and Ambivalent Visions of Marketization’, American Ethnologist 32(3): 479–96. Prozorov, Sergei. 2014. ‘Foucault and Soviet Biopolitics’, History of the Human Sciences 27(5): 6–25. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

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Seleev S. and A. Pavlov. 2016. Garazhniki (Fond Podderzhki Sotsial’nykh Issledovanii). A summary and review in Russian available online at https://khamovniky. ru/recenziya-valeriya-fyodorova-na-knigu-sergeya-seleeva-i-aleksandra-pav​ lova-garazhniki/ (accessed 2 February 2023). Siegelbaum, Lewis H. 2008. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ____. 2011. ‘Introduction’, in Lewis H. Siegelbaum (ed.), The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 1–16. Skeggs, Beverley. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Tuvikene, Tauri. 2014. ‘Mooring in Socialist Automobility: Garage Areas’, in Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Hörschelmann (eds), Mobilities in Socialist and Post-Socialist States: Societies on the Move. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, pp. 105–21. ____. 2016. ‘Strategies for Comparative Urbanism: Post-socialism as a De-­territorialized Concept’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(1): 132–46.

CHAPTER 5

5 Bucharest’s Centura

Encircling a City in Transformation Ger Duijzings

Looking at Bucharest’s urban fringe, one of its most conspicuous ­features is the centura (‘belt’), the seventy-kilometre ring road encircling the Romanian capital (called Drumul Național Centura Bucureștiului or DNCB). It forms an almost perfect circle, as the city’s irregular and asymmetrical administrative borders do not. Some peripheral neighbourhoods virtually touch the ring road but, for most of its length, the centura circles the city at a distance, like a satellite orbiting an inhabited planet. Nowadays the circular road forms the centura’s main infrastructure, but at the end of the nineteenth century, when it was initially built, the centura consisted of a military defence ring with fortifications and a railway connecting its thirty-six military strongholds (Scafeş and Scafeş 2008). A road, built for horse-driven vehicles and later used for automobiles, was added alongside the railway track (Scafeş and Scafeş 2008: 44). It became the key feature of Bucharest’s belt; nowadays, when the city’s inhabitants talk about the centura, they mean the ring road. This chapter provides an ethnographic account of Bucharest’s ring road, describing the transformations that have occurred at the city’s periphery. It is based on intermittent fieldwork carried out since 2011. This portrait of the ring constitutes one of several ethnographic vignettes of particular urban sites which I have singled out to analyse the city’s postsocialist dynamics. In this case, I experimented with mobile and time-based methods, moving around the centura at different times of day and night and also during the various seasons, driving by and stopping at gated communities, shopping malls, military sites, cemeteries, waste dumps, motels, restaurants and petrol stations. Artists, architects and landscape designers joined me on these ‘centours’, as I half-­jokingly call them sometimes.1 While they were mostly interested in the visual, material and spatial aspects of the ring – looking at land use, natural and man-made infrastructures, architecture and urbanistic trends – I was focusing on its social aspects, in order to find out what the periphery can tell us about the city as a whole, turning my key

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Figure 5.1. Map of the centura. Image created by Anu Printsmann with open-source data.

object of investigation, Bucharest as a large postsocialist city, inside out, as it were. As I will show, the urban rim indeed provides a fascinating mirror of the city. Above all, the centura can be considered a palimpsest, a zone that is continuously being inscribed with new features emerging across time, which tend to overwrite the previous ones: one sees its multi-layered nature expressed, for example, in the built environment and the signs, banners and inscriptions dating from different periods, some clearly fading, others recently hung or freshly painted. Circling around the centura, one drives by factories from the communist period; amongst the abandoned facilities are others still in use. Many suburban ‘islands’ form an ‘archipelago’ of self-contained sites and enclaves, epitomizing the fragmented quality and contradictions of Bucharest as a city. Postsocialist trends are magnified here: as in the city centre, the inequality between the wealthy and the poor is evident, but here the contrasts are starker and less smoothed out. Former socialist assets and state-owned land have now been privatized, urban sprawl and retail development have transformed the landscape, and residential areas have sprung up

Figure 5.2. Cemetery in Leordeni with Glina landfill in the background, 2018. © Ger Duijzings.

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next to informal settlements and slums, to list only a few conspicuous features of the urban edge. The centura is thus a fine example of what Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin have called ‘splintering’ urbanism (2001): disparate fragments and functions that bite one another are thrown together at the city’s periphery, existing uneasily, lacking coordination or harmonization. The periphery is home to various ‘displacements’: for example, of ethnic minorities living in the city, such as Roma, Chinese and Turks. Evicted from squats in the centre, the poor meet at the city’s fringes, as protagonists in the story of rural-urban migration, these ‘post-peasants’ (Kearney 1996) who have come to the city in search of a better future. The periphery also harbours various urban facilities for the discarding of human and non-human remains and various types of waste: cemeteries (including for pets), junkyards, landfills, waste dumps, incinerators, archives, as well as prisons. Here the ‘rejects’ of city life are stored, disposed of or destroyed. The urban fringe, serviced by the ring road, is thus a residual space, a ‘dumpsite’ for various inconveniences. It had already been so under socialism: Bucharest’s periphery had been the designated area for cemeteries, morgues, psychiatric asylums, penitentiaries for political prisoners, churches and monasteries, all of which were perceived to be incompatible with the progressive, modern and secular life of the socialist city (Duţescu, Cristea and Ilie 2018: 114). Socialist urbanism cared mainly about the city centre, and especially the capital city’s centre, which was transformed into a representative space that had to look clean and orderly. The inverse symbolic importance allotted to the periphery has persisted after socialism, evident in the way that the peripheral neighbourhoods’ street names have not changed as much as those in the centre, as the geographer Duncan Light has pointed out (2004). While boulevards, streets and squares in the heart of the city were renamed to celebrate the end of socialism (which partly meant a return to presocialist designations), street names in the outer districts were often retained, bearing their associations with socialist values, as can be seen in names such as Strada Proletarului, Drumul Cooperativei or Bulevardul Constructorilor. These names have not been changed. Even as the symbolic geography of the city centre was reconfigured, the periphery remained more ‘socialist’, at least in terms of street names (Light 2004: 167). Yet the urban periphery, because of its symbolic irrelevance (except in the inverted sense mentioned above), is also a zone of relative freedom: the social fabric is not so dense and social control and surveillance seem to be lacking. These peri-urban spaces are less regimented and regulated (‘neoliberalized’), providing niches for informal

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­ ctivities and opportunities, forms of ‘traffic’ (and ‘trafficking’) and fleeta ing encounters, including paid sex. For the city’s inhabitants, the centura triggers associations with prostitution, of young women selling sex along the ring: in the popular imagination, the centura is seen as cheap and seamy, a stereotype reinforced in the media. Researchers carrying out fieldwork find themselves at the receiving end of sexual innuendos, as if they, in actual fact, are ‘checking out’ these aspects of social life at the centura. At busy intersections and bottlenecks, where traffic comes to a standstill, hawkers offer (stolen) mobile phones and (counterfeit) perfumes, while others make a more respectable living by selling various other items such as umbrellas, tin funnels or charging devices for mobile phones. Usually the people here are in transit. Some may argue that the centura is a prototypical ‘non-place’ (Augé 1995), but I would still say that a certain degree of place-making and socializing transpires here, even if social norms, legal frameworks and codes of conduct are suspended. All the same, although the centura is a zone of relative freedom, it is also a zone of heightened security, because of the presence of critical infrastructure nodes and networks (the city’s gas and electricity supply, for example); were this infrastructure left unprotected, the city would be made highly vulnerable. Hence the centura possesses, paradoxically, an aura of securitization and operational secrecy, evoked by the continued army and state security presence at certain fortifications around it.2 Because of these military facilities, hidden behind walls and barbed wire, the centura remains very much unpublic, concealed from

Figure 5.3. Hawker selling counterfeit perfumes, 2011. © Iosif Király.

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the public eye and not open to public scrutiny. It is sometimes hard, for example, to find out who owns certain tracts of land, as these areas often appear as blank spaces in the (online) public cadastral register.3 In spite of the army and state security presence, the periphery remains a relatively unsafe place for citizens. As their personal safety is under possible threat, the people who live here construct walls around their houses and villas, transforming them into walled compounds. In the ethnographic literature on postsocialist cities, the urban edge remains a relatively unexplored habitat, although geographers have written extensively about suburbanization and urban sprawl in Central and Eastern Europe (see Hirt 2012; Stanilov and Sýkora 2014; Keil 2013). I would like to help fill this gap, at least for the Romanian capital, starting from the idea that the periphery may tell us something about the city as a whole. I will look at how the fringe reflects and enables urban transformations, assuming as a point of departure that a piece of infrastructure (a defence ring that has morphed into a ring road) may be repurposed and see its functions transformed. Bucharest’s centura is an example of such incremental transformations exerting a compound effect. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it consisted of fortifications, connected by a railway and complemented by a road, that were meant to provide military protection for the city. After the ring’s defence function became obsolete during the First World War, it retained its boundary function. It had internal relevance during socialism, as the regime tried to control migration to the city. After 1989, it was intended to facilitate circulation, although despite this new purpose its military and threshold functions have never been completely erased.

An Infrastructural Archaeology Susan Star has argued that infrastructure is singularly unexciting, mundane to the point of boredom (1999: 377), a view that could be misconstrued as having little to do with politics – a misconception discernible, for example, in the work of Marc Augé. In contrast, Bruno Latour’s (and also Joe Moran’s) work has drawn attention to the fact that the social and political are forcefully inscribed into, or distributed amongst, all existing technologies and infrastructures (Latour 1996, 2005; Moran 2005). It is therefore far more accurate to see infrastructures as topdown interventions that possess an inherently political nature, serving the interests of some more than others, facilitating processes of inclusion and exclusion, as Winner has illustrated in his essay ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ (1980).

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Assuming the imbrication of infrastructure with politics, we may speak, as Star does, of different consecutive infrastructural regimes (1999: 380), which also pertains to Bucharest’s ring. One political and infrastructural regime is followed by another, each recalibrating the functionalities of an inherited infrastructural artefact and putting its stamp on it. In due course, such transformations may take a piece of infrastructure beyond its original purpose and change its role. To describe this process, Star argues, one has to ‘attend ethnographically’ to the nuts and bolts of the existing infrastructure (1999: 379). Infrastructures develop incrementally: the added modules are ‘built on an installed base’, relying on infrastructure already in place. Not created from scratch, they inherit the strengths and limitations of this pre-­existing base. Bucharest’s centura provides one such example: it began as a military defence ring, then morphed into a boundary and finally into a road that facilitates circulation. Before Romanian independence (1878), Bucharest had no fortifications. The Ottoman Empire forbade the erection of city walls, and thus Bucharest had no clear-cut city limits and expanded into the countryside, where rural-urban migrants settled in semi-rural neighbourhoods (mahalas) at the periphery. Bucharest possesses, therefore, a history of unhindered expansion, even if from the eighteenth century onwards the authorities had attempted to fix the city’s outer limits (Vossen 2004: 63). Because of the city’s radial road structure, new arrivals first settled along the exit roads, after which the in-between spaces were filled in (Vossen 2004: 113–14). There developed a pattern of spacious peri-­urban settlements, whose rural population practised subsistence agriculture. Numerous voids or so-called maidane (untended spaces) emerged as part of this open peripheral-urban layout, which communities used in a flexible manner, for example as waste dumps or sites for the disposal of animal carcasses. These communities maintained their autonomy and resisted attempts at modernization, starting in the nineteenth century and accelerating during socialism (Vossen 2004: 126, 294–96). The polarity that emerged between the modernist city and the mahalas pervades the city up through today. Vossen (2004: 294–95) sees this polarity as Bucharest’s genius loci (see also Ogrezeanu 2002). The best-known mahalas are Ferentari and Rahova, both located in the south of the city (Pulay 2017; Ghenciulescu et al. 2018). Others can be found in the northeast, close to the city’s large Chinese market; in the northwest, near Bucharest’s main railway yard; and in the southeast, beyond the largest socialist district, Berceni, occupying the administrative border of the city. Traditionally these mahalas were characterized by a semi-rural lifestyle, crowded living conditions and a resulting lack

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of privacy, pervasive unemployment and a general struggle for survival amongst their inhabitants, along with an ethos of resignation and fatalism (Ogrezeanu 2002: 65–66). The population rarely set foot in the city centre, signalling a poor degree of social and economic integration, although more adventurous individuals were able to blend into urban life because of the city’s proximity; the mahala served as the city’s ‘waiting room’ (Ogrezeanu 2002: 68). After Romania became independent, plans emerged for a defence ring around the capital city to be erected beyond the informal settlements (Vossen 2004: 157–62). From 1884 to 1895, thirty-six strongholds were constructed, comprising eighteen forts and eighteen (smaller) batteries placed roughly two kilometres apart over seventy kilometres (Scafeş and Scafeş 2008: 64). They were built by the army with the help of private contractors and were linked by a railway track, which was used to transport the necessary construction materials, troops, armaments and ammunition. A road was added next to the railway (Scafeş and Scafeş 2008: 44). Forests were planted by the Army’s Fortifications Department and (later) the Forest Service to consolidate and hide the fortifications from the public eye (Scafeş and Scafeş 2008: 44–45, 66). Criticized at the time because of its excessive costs, the centura project became a failed megalomaniacal venture, one amongst others in Bucharest (see Duijzings 2018). Completed at the end of the nineteenth century, the fortifications soon proved useless, unable to withstand the destructive capacities of modern artillery. The forts were disarmed, and the defence ring was no longer operational when troops of the Central Powers approached Bucharest in December 1916 (Scafeş and Scafeş 2008: 56–57). The city was taken without resistance, confirming the pointlessness of the military defence ring. These forts were also plagued by inefficient drainage, with rain and melting snow causing floods during most of the year. The operational issues were not resolved, and as of 1916 the fortifications were in disrepair and used primarily as storehouses for ammunition. After the war, several forts and batteries were blown to bits due to spontaneous combustions of ammunition: the centura thus became a self-erasing conglomeration of military infrastructure, a radical urbanist’s dream. From 1947 onwards, the Communist regime introduced important changes. The city’s peripheral neighbourhoods (including some of those located outside Bucharest’s administrative boundaries) became zones of urbanist intervention: in an attempt to ‘systematize’ these semi-rural settlements, the authorities replaced them with higher density socialist neighbourhoods and prefab apartment blocks and high-rises, leading

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to a vertical expansion of the city around Bucharest’s historical core (Vossen 2004: 219–32; Mihalache 2016: 127–31). The urban hierarchy was now reversed, to the detriment of the centre, producing modern living conditions and concentrating the population at the fringe (Vossen 2004: 249). Unlike other cities in Central and Eastern Europe, Bucharest’s centre remained untouched until the 1980s, when Ceaușescu began to spatially cleanse it – using the damage caused by the 1977 earthquake as pretext – and, to clear out space for the Civic Centre and House of the People, he demolished 20 per cent of the presocialist urban core (Duijzings 2018). During socialism, the centura was repurposed, now facilitating transport and circulation in support of the socialist industrial development occurring at the city’s western and southern fringes (which also saw the emergence of large socialist neighbourhoods). Even if its role as a defence ring became obsolete, it retained its function as a symbolic threshold encircling the capital, with the socialist authorities trying to keep rural-urban migration in check so as to prevent housing shortages in the city (for similar policies in Sofia, see Hirt 2012: 108). It was difficult if not impossible for citizens to move to Bucharest without a special buletin or residence permit. Villages and towns on the outskirts, beyond the administrative boundaries of the city, remained accessible, allowing people without a Bucharest ID to work in the city while living outside its limits (see also Hirt 2012: 108). In recent years, the centura has been upgraded to improve traffic flows, particularly in the north, which economically is by far the most dynamic part of Bucharest. In the wider metropolitan zone, new conurbations have emerged, some becoming extensions of the city, virtually attached to Bucharest although not part of it administratively. They make up the Ilfov district, a special administrative entity enveloping the capital like a vast lopsided territorial ring. Most of the centura indeed runs through Ilfov. Recently, a new motorway ring has been projected extending over 100 kilometres, the construction of which is underway in the south.

Displacements One of my objectives is to show how Bucharest’s rim may tell us something about the city as a whole, from an off-centred perspective, as it were. Turning the (ethnographic) lens to the urban periphery rarely happens, as has been argued by the photographer Petruţ Călinescu who, together with his wife, the anthropologist Ioana Călinescu, has explored

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Bucharest’s periphery in the portfolio and photo-essay P ­eriferia B. (2018). In the book’s introduction, he points out that our gaze tends to turn to the city centre: ‘we are attracted to the city centre like iron filings around a magnet’ (2018: 4, translation mine). Going to the fringe or to a non-place like a ring road is, at least for anthropologists, to step out of the comfort zone of one’s usual fieldwork. Since there are few examples of road ethnography (an exception being Dalakoglou 2017), and as yet no ring road ethnographies, I draw inspiration from non-academic work, in particular Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital (2003), and Nicolò Bassetti and Sapo Matteucci’s Sacro romano GRA (2015). Another source of inspiration is Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary film Sacro GRA (2013), based on the latter book, exploring the ring of Rome.4 Let me first point out that it is a confusing experience to explore the centura; it is difficult to pinpoint its ‘essential’ features. The overarching impression is one of numerous disconnected, contradictory and juxtaposed phenomena, thrown together haphazardly in, along and near the ring road and in close proximity to one another. Bucharest’s road network – a combination of radial roads and the ring road – has facilitated a proliferation of functions and activities at the exit roads and network nodes, with new ‘enclaves’ made possible by and connected through the centura. Unsurprisingly, one can still see traces of the centura’s original military function. Army and Gendarmerie (the special military police protecting key state institutions) own much of the land around the ring and occupy several forts, some of which are used for training purposes. Some fortifications were transferred to civilian institutions (such as the National Film Archive), but others retained a military or security role. One fort in the south is home to a maximum-security prison, while others in the north are used by institutions linked to the Romanian Intelligence Services (formerly the Securitate), such as the National Intelligence Academy. Initially Bucharest’s periphery was a transition zone between the city and the rural hinterland (Pînzaru 2016), evidence of which can still be observed in neighbourhoods such as Giulești-Sârbi or parts of Ferentari. People may have jobs in the city, but they also keep animals and cultivate vegetables and fruits in their gardens, a form of modest agriculture that differs from the industrial farming beyond the city limits. Occasionally, one can see shepherds with flocks roaming the fields close to the centura or fortifications, where land may not have been privatized. The urban-rural interface at Bucharest’s fringe has been transformed: at the centura one now sees offices of pharmaceutical companies which sell bioengineered crop seeds, fertilizers and pharmaceutical products for farming purposes, participants in a lucrative global agro-industrial

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sector (Duijzings 2013: 15; see also Sinclair 2003: 367). Large-scale farming is concentrated along the southern section of the centura, as in the north many agricultural tracts have entered the real estate market (Pînzaru 2016). The centura’s railway is not intensively used and is derelict in some parts, although certain sections have been reopened. The key element of infrastructure is now the road, facilitating vehicular circulation consisting of heavy car and freight traffic, whose needs are serviced by several petrol stations as well as washing and repair services. In the north, various car franchises sell new cars, while used cars can be bought in a large second-hand market located along an exit road in the east. Car wrecks are disassembled in the numerous junkyards along the centura. Most of the services offered at the ring revolve around car traffic, and public transport is almost missing, with the exception of bus line 304, which is used by visitors to a cemetery and the inhabitants of a homeless shelter in the north. Some metro, tram and bus terminals are situated close to the ring road. Other key elements of infrastructure located around the centura are the facilities of the electricity and gas networks that supply Bucharest with energy: the many high-voltage masts make up a striking aspect of the peri-urban landscape. Even though the construction of homes close to electricity masts is prohibited due to the latter’s environmental and health repercussions, one can nevertheless see their effects: flora and fauna are reduced and the people who live here talk about a constant buzz which makes them feel ‘odd’. The gas network can be detected easily because of the above-ground yellow pipes that jump up over bodies of water or other obstacles in the peri-urban landscape. There is little transparency regarding these critical pieces of infrastructure: it is hard to obtain maps and locational data from the network operators, reinforcing the aura of operative secrecy that seems to reign here. Talking about gas and electricity networks, it is better, as one collaborator argued, to speak not of a ring but rather of a network of nodal points, which together form a tentacular armature of coexisting and interdependent urban infrastructures. A key economic activity around the centura is logistics: there are numerous logistics parks, courier services, warehouses and parking lots for lorries and heavy equipment, along with storage facilities like oil depositories and refrigerated storehouses for fruit, vegetables and seafood. Everywhere along the centura small firms buy and sell used pallets. A few hotels and motels offer affordable accommodation for lorry drivers, providing cheap restaurants, canteens and shower facilities. In the north, more exclusive venues offer facilities for parties and

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weddings, which is a lucrative business in Romania; a ring location has its advantages, as it is easy to get to and offers ample parking. Especially in the north and west one finds considerable construction activity, and thus the presence of numerous construction firms, readymixed concrete producers, DIY stores, tile shops, gardening, furniture and kitchen centres and the like. These businesses supply the needs of an ongoing construction boom that has continued unabated in recent years, the 2009 financial crisis notwithstanding. Equally important is the retail sector, with vast shopping malls located close to the ring: Baneasa Shopping City, for example, placed between Bucharest’s two airports, includes a business park, a residential area and a retail park (Cinà 2010: 292–96). Last but not least, there is the enormous Chinese market in the northeast of the city, close to the centura. The ubiquity of the construction, retail and wholesale sectors is reinforced and multiplied by the numerous billboards and commercial banners attached to light posts along the road. The ring road is notorious for traffic jams and regular traffic disruptions at its numerous intersections, in particular where radial roads (or railway tracks) cross the centura. At some road junctions, problems have been resolved by underpasses and flyovers, but at others, in the south in particular, traffic driving in and out of the city has priority over traffic circulating around the ring road. This leads to queues, with ring road drivers waiting for an opening to continue their journey; without traffic lights, they depend on the goodwill of those on the radial roads to let them pass through. Intersections are dangerous, as they lack proper signage; large lorries limit the extent of other drivers’ vision, and small vehicles often overtake the lorries and pop up behind them. These perils cause many drivers to find the ring too dangerous, particularly at night or when it is raining or snowing, as one is easily blinded by the headlights of traffic in the opposite direction. Therefore, for many, the centura is an option of last resort. It goes without saying that the ring is not suitable for non-motorized traffic, although one sees (and even at night) the odd bicyclist or horse cart. The northern section of the ring has been modernized and consists of four lanes, although the speed limit of eighty kilometres per hour is often reduced to fifty and thirty because of roundabouts and pedestrian crossings, which are non-existent in the southern sections of the centura. Impatient drivers try to compensate for the time lost at bottlenecks and pedestrian crossings by accelerating as fast as they can, blatantly ignoring – as is common in Romania – the speed restrictions. In order to advance, some drivers violate basic traffic rules, driving contrasens (using the opposite lane) to jump the queue while talking on a

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Figure 5.4. Traffic on the northern section of the centura (modernized), 2018. © Ger Duijzings.

mobile phone, and re-entering the queue when a car approaches from the other side. Bucharest is so notorious for its unruly traffic that intimidated drivers from outside the capital may prefer to leave their cars at the periphery to be picked up or to use public transport. The braver amongst them accept the challenge, driving either too carefully or too recklessly but causing, in any case, headaches for seasoned Bucharest drivers. In 2016, Bucharest was the fifth most congested city in the world, and the first in Europe, according to the Tomtom Traffic Index; a year later it was ranked third in the world in a list of cities with the most severe evening rush hours. In recent years it has dropped slightly in the rankings, after countries such as India were included. Currently it is still the most congested city in the EU, and in the rest of Europe it is surpassed only by the metropolitan areas of Moscow, Istanbul and Kyiv (Tomtom Traffic Index 2019). It is also the EU city with the highest social costs per capita due to air pollution.5 Bucharest has a population of around two million inhabitants, and with the metropolitan area the figure is about 2.3 million. As an administrative entity it has one of the highest population densities within the EU: it is twice as dense as Berlin, for example, with over 8,000 inhabitants per square kilometre. Although this figure is inflated because the territory comprising the Bucharest municipality is cut small compared to most other European cities, many available open and green spaces have indeed been s­ acrificed for construction projects.

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Residential Areas Since the end of socialism, the centura’s primary role as an orbital road, facilitating traffic and circulation, has begun to contend with the growing importance of this peri-urban zone as a zone for suburban residential development. After the 1989 revolution brought socialist urban planning to an end, the periphery saw the return of informal urbanism, albeit of a different kind than before, marked by affluent individuals and developers, no longer hindered by state regulation, constructing whatever suited them. Bucharest experienced a wave of urban sprawl: those who had the means to do so turned their back on collectivist housing, abandoning the socialist block and building American-style family homes on land they had bought when prices were still affordable (Boboc 2016). The first years were crazy, as the architect Vera Marin writes, as Bucharest’s peri-urban zone was flooded with people and firms frantically buying land in a kind of conquest spirit (2005: 126–27). Urban sprawl occurred first in the north, an attractive zone located inside the ring that, since as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century, had appealed to Romanians due to its recreational opportunities (Vossen 2004: 205).6 This area has remained the most expensive part of the periphery because of its forests, lakes and easy access to the Carpathian Mountains and cities in Transylvania (see Matache 2010). The border area with Bulgaria in the south, oriented towards the Danube and the small port of Giurgiu, is far more peripheral and stagnant. In addition, during the socialist period the north was the party elite’s preferred residential zone, whereas most industries and working-class districts were concentrated in the west and south. The south was never well served by public transport, with only one metro line, unlike the north, which had a more efficient and denser public transport network. Ceauşescu’s megalomaniacal urbanist interventions in the 1980s reinforced the city’s north-south division: bulldozering 20 per cent of the old city in an east-west direction, he created a physical barrier between the city’s northern and southern halves, a split that has continued to permeate people’s mental maps and that still contributes to the relative isolation of Bucharest’s less favoured southern side (see Ghenciulescu et al. 2018). The new (lakeside) developments and residential areas in the north were soon urbanized and integrated into the city. They carry soothing exurban names such as Green Paradise or Lakeview Condominium (Rufat 2003). Although detached from the city centre, the term ‘gated communities’ is something of a misnomer, as Rufat argues, since these developments are very well connected and favourably situated for the

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enjoyment of various recreational offerings in the north of Bucharest. Located close to the city’s two airports, they allow ready access to the exit roads to the north (Rufat 2003: 7). Yet they have indeed heralded a new era of segregated living, signalling economic success and social prestige for their residents, providing security and comfort in an environment less ‘urban’ and polluted than elsewhere, and creating opportunities, because of the prohibitive prices, for the wealthy elite to be ‘just amongst ourselves’ (Rufat 2003: 1; see also Hirt 2012). Urban sprawl, after its first wave in the north, has spread to less attractive zones, such as the areas north of the centura (outside the ring) and those to the west, east and south, where land is cheaper. These locations are, however, less appealing in terms of connectivity, urban infrastructure and quality of living. One example of a more recent development tailored to the aspiring middle classes is Cosmopolis, a large gated community located in the northeast, next to the A3 highway to Ploieşti. It has been built in three consecutive stages by a Turkish firm with experience in constructing gated communities in Turkey. On banners and on the internet, Cosmopolis is advertised as ‘The first European city in Romania’, accessible via a road, Strada Europa, running from the centura along a fort (still owned by the army). When I first visited in 2013, it had around 2,000 inhabitants; it is projected to grow to a total population of between 15,000 and 18,000 residents. According to a salesperson I spoke to, people come to live here because they want to escape the city, which is – to paraphrase what she told me – crowded, noisy, dirty and polluted, afflicted with crazy traffic and too many stray dogs and Roma. In Cosmopolis one finds oneself amongst like-minded people; it has fresh air, is quiet and safe, one never has to worry about finding a parking space, and the kids can play safely in and around the streets. It is guarded by BGS, one of the largest private security companies. Its location within the upgraded section of the ring road means that it takes only fifteen to twenty minutes to get to one of the airports, and, via three possible routes, the centre can be reached quickly. Any stray dogs entering Cosmopolis are swiftly removed: immobilized with a tranquilizer, the dog is then transported and released in one of the fields far beyond the city perimeter. In terms of amenities, though, Cosmopolis is not very well served, a matter on which my interlocutor kept silent. Most properties are flats in multi-storey buildings, though there are others that, advertised and sold as ‘villas’, are modest terraced houses. During my visit in 2013, there were no schools or health facilities, and even to see a doctor one had to drive to a nearby village. A small private bus service, not part of the city’s public transport system, ran on weekdays, mostly in the mornings and afternoons.

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Cosmopolis is part of a new suburban ring that has attached itself to the city, dotted with attractively named residential developments that promise exclusive, green and undisturbed living: Confort City [sic], FeliCity, Oxford Gardens. One such booming area is Popești-Leordeni at the southeastern fringe of the city, a part of Ilfov, which the talented young writer Lavinia Braniște has portrayed in her dystopian novel Interior Zero (2016). Another area is Prelungirea Ghencea in the west, again part of Ilfov, which has serious transport issues. Residents struggle with its infernal congestion, as the narrow road to the centre is overwhelmed by the rapidly growing volume of commuter traffic. Despite the area’s rising population, the road was never updated, as it is not the municipality of Bucharest’s responsibility to administer. In brief, the new residential and suburban areas are second-rate compared with prime locations found in the north, a disparity reflected in the prices for land and property. The costs of buying land have spiked in the postsocialist period, and this is not an unimportant consideration for prospective homebuyers, particularly the less affluent, as these costs make up somewhere between 20 and 50 per cent of a residential property’s total price (Patroescu et al. 2009: 767). At Bucharest’s edges, the market has been extremely dynamic and speculative, spurned by a lack of transparency about who actually owns the land, exacerbated by legal uncertainties about the postsocialist restitution process, which has been complex and fraught (Marin 2005: 126; Verdery 2003).7 Hence, to buy a plot is to take a risk; others may contest one’s ownership and assert a claim to the land years after the property is bought (Marin 2005: 133–34). The market’s informality is made tangible when driving around the ring: one sees ubiquitous handwritten notices with offers of land for sale, with only a couple of mobile numbers to call. This informal, unregulated market has led to outlandish developments: isolated and walled compounds reachable only by a dirt road, or rows of houses built on a narrow strip of land, with a private road running alongside them, in the middle of nowhere. All of this activity has yielded the city’s ‘wild’ encroachment into greenfield sites, with illegally built homes being constructed without the necessary planning permissions. Existing villages become ‘citified’ (Mihalache 2016 describes this process for metropolitan Chiajna; see also Sinclair 2003: 151). There is a great variety of residential formats around the ring, ranging from self-standing family homes (usually walled) to groups of self-projected houses (where a couple of friends buy a plot and divide it amongst themselves so each can build their own dream house), to residential parks, ensembles and gated communities constructed by private developers (Mihalache

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2016: 131–35; Matache 2010; Marin and Matache 2010). Whatever their size and scope, they all look like fragments scattered around the peri-urban landscape, ‘“eating up” the once clear-cut edge of the city’ (Hirt 2012: 105). They are disconnected from one another and from the pre-existing context, often an old, traditional village in their vicinity. Within the perimeters of the larger residential and gated developments, public services such as schools and medical facilities are usually absent (and have been substituted, if at all, by expensive private facilities, such as schools charging expensive fees); green space may be limited, the streets narrow and the available parking spaces small, as these uses are seen as a waste of space by certain developers inclined to maximize their profit (Patroescu et al. 2009: 771). The architect Ştefan Ghenciulescu has linked this ‘euphoria of closing and separation’ with the retreat into private spaces under Ceaușescu’s regime (2010a: 180–81). Though suggesting a certain path dependency for such developments in the Romanian case, this does not mean that they cannot be compared with processes of residential segregation elsewhere. They come down to a form of opting out of the city, of ‘spatial secession’ and ‘urban escapism’ (Hirt 2012: 107), in which the values of mutuality and solidarity are abandoned, eroding the public sphere and overall social cohesion. Rufat has called this (in French) ‘desolidarisation’, whereby individuals wish not to pay for the care of vulnerable members of the population and for public services that cater to all (2003). This attitude also means rejecting social and cultural difference, fleeing the city and its nuisances, as well as distancing oneself from ‘others’ with whom one does not want to live. Segregated living can only be assured through various forms of securitization and surveillance – it requires the help of fences and walls, CCTV cameras and watchdogs, panic buttons, bulletproof windows and various other security devices, along with the deployment of private security companies (Rufat 2003: 3–4; Hirt 2012: 140). Bucharest has hundreds of such companies, with resonantly aggressive names such as Swat Force or Tiger Security. Romanian architects have decried the poor quality of the architecture in these residential areas. But little can be done, as wealthy suburban homeowners want it their way – fancy, extravagant and imposing (Marin 2005: 131). Here the users primarily bear the brunt of their own design decisions. Far more consequential, however, is the urban planning chaos entailed by these projects. Developments are thrown together in a shared space without coordination and lacking regard for proper road access, public spaces, parks and playgrounds. The narrow roads (where two cars can barely manage to pass each other) have been exclusively designed for car traffic, with virtually no pavements

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or bicycle lanes, making life hard for pedestrians and cyclists. In most cases, proper road connections with the city centre are lacking, as one sees, for example, in Greenfield Residence in the north, located inside the ring road and surrounded by forests: to enter the city, residents have the option of driving through the forest and using an unpaved road. Otherwise they must take an inconvenient detour. As Petruţ and Ioana Călinescu write, these new neighbourhoods are built and residents move in, and only after they settle there do they start worrying about the appropriate infrastructure (2018: 26–27). Inevitably, residents end up fighting with the authorities and with their neighbours (Călinescu and Călinescu 2018: 5). The irony is that along with their – now realized – desire to escape the city, they also want proper road access, but these two wishes are incompatible (Călinescu and Călinescu 2018: 27). Developers promise that the road infrastructure will improve in time, but such amelioration is ultimately not their responsibility but falls to the local (Ilfov) authorities, who have zero interest in addressing these issues. Residents can only hope for better times (see also ­Ghenciulescu 2010b: 3–4).

Residual Spaces Apart from the old informal neighbourhoods and the new, more affluent residential areas, one can also find pockets of extreme poverty at the periphery – slums, that is, inhabited by people who have been evicted from gentrified sections of the city. These cast-off residents, as it were, are to be found not so much at the ring itself but rather in areas close to it, in urban voids or wastelands in the vicinity of a residential area. These people live in shacks or in derelict industrial sites or run-down blocks, lacking proper sanitary conditions (for one example see Ciorniciuc 2017). There are also the more populous sink estates or ‘ghettos’ which emerged in the 1990s, although some have a long history as dormitory neighbourhoods under socialism, housing unskilled workers, namely young men from the countryside employed in Bucharest’s factories (Mionel 2013: 201–16). There is a tendency for these ghettos to be located at the periphery of the periphery, in these neighbourhoods’ most run-down sections. They are inhabited by the most vulnerable or precarious ‘underclasses’, many of them Roma (but there are also Romanians), who suffer economic deprivation and social marginalization (Mionel 2013: 226–27). One example is the slum settlements adjacent to the railway yard in Giulești-Sârbi, where individuals and families live in shacks, in

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abandoned post-industrial sites, in railway premises and train carriages. At the centura itself they are harder to find, although there are slums next to a cemetery in the north (where Roma make a living providing informal services such as digging and caring for graves) and close to a waste and recycle centre in the west. In addition, there is an official homeless shelter at the centura, not only for people but also for stray dogs, both populations being subjected to eviction from the city centre. Bruce O’Neill has described how governmental and nongovernmental organizations collaborate to remove the homeless from Bucharest’s streets and whisk them away in two directions – off the streets and away from central Bucharest (2010: 254). The poor, thus removed from public spaces in the city centre, are rendered invisible for tourists, visitors, property developers, businesspeople and the middle classes (O’Neill 2010: 259). This process started in earnest in the late 1990s, when the authorities began a series of campaigns to clean up Bucharest’s streets, getting rid of kiosks, stray dogs, street children and homeless people (O’Neill 2010: 260). The peripheral homeless shelter is located on the side of a fort, guarded by private security, with a kennel for stray dogs beside it (O’Neill 2014: 19). From here it takes a ninety-minute bus ride to reach the city centre, making it far more difficult for the individuals housed there to earn some money (by begging or collecting plastic bottles). This spatial proximity of the stray dog and homeless shelters is rather uncanny and sinister if one knows that the official Animal Surveillance and Protection Authority (ASPA) caged (and euthanized) thousands of stray dogs in kennels close to the centura during 2013 and 2014 (Niko 2018: 37). These dogs largely disappeared from Bucharest’s streets, and now their only residual habitat is at the city rim and within certain (industrial) wastelands in Bucharest’s periphery.  As a liminal (or threshold) landscape, the centura also accommodates religious facilities, such as a church and a mosque. Most important, however, are the cemeteries, at least eight located at or close to the ring road. Most are municipal graveyards, which are not administered by the Orthodox Church, even if there is normally a chapel with a priest who can carry out religious duties during funerals. Despite being under public administration, they are mostly run on a commercial basis, as will be explained. Most of these cemeteries had existed during the socialist period, so they have grown into large, dense burial grounds with plenty of older tombs. They are surrounded by walls erected in the past. As Romanians prefer not to live next to the cemeteries, poor and informal Roma settlements have sprung up beside them in the residual spaces that nobody wants to call home. These recent residents earn a living by offering funerary services, as is the case in a large cemetery in the north.

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One is not permitted to film or take photographs in cemeteries, as announced by the obligatory signs indicating that such activities are prohibited. These regulations suggest that cemeteries are not wholly public spaces but rather are privatized zones, or something in between. The ban on image-taking, however, has less to do with piety for the dead and is more of a concern for what is commonly called the ‘cemetery mafia’: a network of (in)formal entrepreneurs making money from funerary services, with the cemetery administrators as spiders in the web. They oversee transactions, authorize service providers and force clients to engage exclusively with licensed parties. Some cemeteries have a strange ‘militarized’ feel, not appropriate for a burial ground but nonetheless fitting, given the centura location. Their perimeter may be securitized, with watchtowers and walls all around, including barbed wire on top. At the exits and on the perimeter security guards sit in white cabins, looking out for people behaving suspiciously. The need for so much security is not immediately clear, as the immediate threats do not seem especially major or, indeed, even threats: people may perhaps steal flowers, candles or metal fences from the tombs. On closer inspection, one realizes that cemeteries are places where a considerable amount of money can be earned. The desirable plots, in cases when they are identified and made available by the administrators through the clearance of an abandoned grave, may be traded for thousands of euros. These transactions are nothing less than real estate deals, where significant sums exchange hands. Because practices like these often cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny, the ‘cemetery mafia’ is, understandably, suspicious of any journalists investigating the situation. Indeed, these sites are rife with corruption, reaching into the highest circles of the city government, as became obvious in 2015, when Bucharest’s General Mayor was arrested by the National Anti-Corruption Agency after he had been caught (and filmed) in a sting operation accepting a solid 25,000 euro bribe from the General Director of the Municipal Administration for Cemeteries and Human Crematoria, in relation to tenders for private security contracts. As I learned after the death of a close relative, many services are offered informally and without receipts. One has to negotiate prices directly with the service providers and pay up front in cash. Others (often Roma) are in charge of digging graves, building tombs and taking care of the day-to-day maintenance against cash payments. The relatives of a deceased person are well advised to stay on good terms with the caretakers by using their services; otherwise tombs may remain unprotected, become damaged or be stripped of valuable materials. At the cemeteries, there is a moral expectation of ‘income redistribution’: one

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usually finds beggars at entrances who whisper devout blessings and wait for alms, especially on important religious holidays like All Souls’ or Easter, consisting of a plate with food and drinks. Corruption in cemeteries existed under socialism, too, as there was always a structural shortage of graveyard plots in a city that was growing fast. Now, however, funerary services have largely been privatized, providing lucrative business opportunities for priests and private entrepreneurs. Apart from the church or parish cemeteries, which are potentially more expensive than their municipal counterparts, there are also ‘commercial’ cemeteries run by entrepreneurs such as the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel Cemetery, situated close to the centura, which can be spotted from the A1 to Pitești as it has WWW.CIMITIR.RO written in capital letters on its perimeter walls. Located amidst a business park, and surrounded by commercial centres and a supermarket, it offers a neat spatial representation of the new capitalist order, as one can choose a burial place from the third to the ‘luxury’ category. The most exclusive plots are close to the entrance and central pathway, and the more distant the plots are from there, the cheaper they become. There are no spaces for the penniless, who are buried in the municipal cemetery in the north. At the periphery of the latter, one finds the ‘poverty corner’ characterized by cheap crosses, handwritten inscriptions and the unmarked (anonymous) graves of unidentified individuals, which may bear only a number and the date of death (the birthdate being unknown). One cemetery not far from the southern section of the centura is called a ‘Cimitirul Uman’, which (ironically) seems to signal the necessity of distinguishing between the human graveyards and non-human junkyards: indeed, the ring road is home to numerous waste and disposal sites for various non-human entities such as car wrecks or animals, which also provide business opportunities. In the east, next to the A2 to Constanța, is a pet cemetery called ‘Animal Heaven’, which also offers the cheaper option of a crematorium (if the pet owner considers a grave too expensive). Indeed, the centura is the zone of choice for the disposal of human and animal remains and other types of waste. In addition, a good deal of illegal dumping takes place at the city’s rim: one can see numerous heaps of rubble from various construction sites, discarded under cover of night (Călinescu and Călinescu 2018: 4).  Large, authorized waste disposal sites or city landfills are also located at the centura, although environmentalists doubt the legality of their activities, regarding them as scams of some sort or another. The two largest facilities, located next to the villages of Glina in the southeast and Rudeni in the northwest, have become notorious for more than

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one reason: they are in the hands of (or managed by) former communist officials with links to the former Securitate and the Italian mafia, which (in the case of Glina) has deposited vast volumes of waste there imported from Italy (Isufi 2018). The Rudeni landfill has triggered protests because of its persistent stench and frequent fires caused by the unauthorized incineration of waste (especially plastics), resulting in high levels of air pollution in the northwestern parts of the city. Right next to the Rudeni landfill, activists have discovered a large illegal waste dump where rubble is being dumped so as to turn a swampland into a site for construction (most probably for another middle-class residential area to be built), thereby avoiding the costs of disposal, all transpiring under the knowing auspices of the local authorities. There are structural similarities between these landfill scams involving illegal waste dumps and cemeteries, controlled as these sites are by corrupt politicians, municipal officials and criminal business networks. While the centura can almost be seen as the service road for the disposal of waste, including illegal and contaminated waste, it is also home to collection and recycle centres, where valuable materials (such as paper, plastics and scrap metal) are sorted and extracted. In the southeast, a recycling firm uses prison inmates as a source of cheap labour, exploiting the labour of ‘human waste’ to extract residual value from material waste (Bauman 2004; Reno 2015).

Final Reflections: ‘Chaos’ and the Structures of Power On the basis of my ethnography, one may conclude that the centura’s main features are fragmentation and disjunction. The urban fringe can indeed be seen as an ‘archipelago’ of self-contained sites or enclaves, amplifying the contradictions of the postsocialist city. Vivid as it is, such a description carries the danger of defamiliarizing or exoticizing the landscape, as it all may look chaotic and strange. Yet I would like to warn against what Joanna Kusiak has called the ‘cunning of chaos’ and wish here to identify patterns behind the ‘chaos’, making explicit those ‘pockets of order’ that may have become obvious to the attentive reader. As my grounded ethnography may read as ‘an urban patchwork, one not yet entirely stitched together’ (Kusiak 2012: 299), I will attempt here at the end to transcend the fragmentary perspective, while at the same time pointing to Bucharest’s family resemblances with other cities such as London and Rome. Writing about Warsaw, Joanna Kusiak has observed the frequent use of ‘chaos’ in the immediate postsocialist years as a descriptive shorthand

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for turbulent changes unfolding in a seemingly uncoordinated manner. Ordinary citizens indeed felt that everything around them was shifting. What Kusiak is critical of, however, is the facile usage of ‘chaos’ in academic discourse, especially amongst Western authors who, fascinated by the rapid transformations, took the widely experienced chaos at face value and adopted it as a descriptive term (2012: 293). This notion does not contribute, however, to the kind of structural analysis Kusiak proposes: ‘I want to show that distinct social phenomena and power relations are hidden beneath the superficial impression of chaos. My claim is that, empirically, urban chaos is never mere randomness but rather a conglomerate of multiple pockets of order, regulated by non-­ transparent power relations that only appear to be arbitrary’ (2012: 294).  Chaos, then, ‘has its cunning’: it helps to conceal and camouflage structures of power (a bit like the Romanian army renaturing and hiding the ring’s fortifications via the planting of forests at the end of the nineteenth century). The notion is indeed consciously invoked to establish cultural hegemony in a Gramscian sense, producing a ‘chaotic mode of dominance’ (Kusiak 2012: 314). It can be used as a pretext for a clean-up or as a marketing tool to make people buy into gated communities to escape the city’s ‘horrible chaos’ (Kusiak 2012: 315–16; see also Hirt 2012: 162). As the Italian architect Renato Nicolini argues, writing about the GRA around Rome, in order to find what is hidden – the real antagonisms that traverse the city – one needs to look at what is actually in plain sight but has been obscured (2015: 237). One key feature of the centura indeed in plain sight is the postsocialist explosion of car ownership and automobility, which has enabled much of what has been described in this chapter: the irrevocable transformation of the centura into a ring of circulation and the rise of upperand middle-class residential areas (which cannot be reached by public transport). Without the universal availability of cars (and SUVs needed to navigate the rough terrain; see Hirt 2012: 115), urban sprawl would have been impossible. The freedom of movement allowed by the automobile is perceived as an essential element of people’s well-being, an assumption that has for decades been dominant in the West (Sinclair 2003: 205). Although Bucharest’s ring has not been up to the task, being desperately slow to travel on and invariably congested, people still project onto it their ideal vision of a bright postsocialist future. In a variety of ways, it is a postsocialist route into previously inaccessible (peri-urban and capitalist) territory, now accessible via the car. As Sonia Hirt argues, burgeoning suburbia is a paradigmatic component of postsocialist spatial restructuring (2012). Agricultural land is converted for residential use, triggering an exodus from the city centre

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facilitated by the dramatic increase in the number of car owners. In the absence of public transport, the daily commute between centre and periphery – however unpleasant or aggravating it may ultimately turn out to be – is made possible by the automobile (Hirt 2012: 106). The newly gained, much appreciated freedom of movement encourages suburbanization and leads to the predominance of the ‘dispersed city model’ (Hirt 2012: 112–13). Just as Nicolini argued for Rome’s Sacro romano GRA, the centura here plays a key role as the multiplier of (sub) urbanization (2015: 235–36). Freedom of movement has also been ‘celebrated’ through the illegal car races I was told now take place around the centura at night, no longer around the House of the People in the centre of Bucharest as they once had been – yet another displacement. Another common theme to be observed in many metropolitan contexts (such as London and Rome) is the dislocation of inconveniences to the urban fringe. That Bucharest is not an exception becomes abundantly clear when reading Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital (2003) and Bassetti and Matteucci’s Sacro romano GRA (2015). The parallels are too numerous to list, so let me just mention from the latter the presence of waste dumps (74–81), migrants and refugees (143–46), social outcasts (168–72) and informal neighbourhoods or ‘favelas’ (187–93). Ian Sinclair writes of London’s perimeter that it is ‘a place to tidy away the casualties of urban life’ (151), used ‘to stack the mentally inadequate, to build golf courses, to board cats and dogs, to hide toxic industries, to dump landfill and to provide bunkers, research stations and safe houses for the Secret State’ (Sinclair 2003: 236). As I have argued, Bucharest’s centura is a zone where many contradictory phenomena, old and new alike, coexist in frictional interaction, similar to what Sinclair writes for London’s M25, where there is no centre, no social cohesion, no memory: ‘A collision of random bits’ (2003: 185). Land-use conflicts abound when sprawl intensifies, and conflicts emerge and intensify between various neighbours (Iojă et al. 2013). The residential areas are thrown together with dirty industries, waste dumps and military facilities, along with other inconveniences such as prisons and cemeteries. The authorities do little to implement zoning regulations, for example with respect to the minimum distances required between residential areas and waste dumps or between private homes and petrol stations, the latter in both instances affecting the air quality and polluting the environment (see Iojă and Tudor 2012). These ecological developments, however, have not been obstacles preventing the growth of residential areas, since people simply expect that the authorities will resolve these issues in the long run. Indeed, attempts to create comfortable exurban zones for the elites is partly undermined

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by the externalization of urban inconveniences and their displacement from the centre to the periphery. Thus the new green residential areas for the more affluent may well be built on illegal (and toxic) waste dumps – nobody knows for sure – an irony akin to what has happened in London, where, as Ian Sinclair has observed, toxic dumps have been converted into idyllic villages (2003: 70). Kusiak’s invitation to transcend the fragmentary perspective is, however, easier said than done. One needs an inquisitive if not a paranoid mindset to discern, behind the ‘chaos’, the patterns and structures of power, the informality, corruption, lack of transparency and absence of public scrutiny. It is the kind of approach that the artist Max Colson developed in his performance project ‘Hide and seek’ (2016), where his paranoid mode of observation reveals the hidden truths as to how ‘security’ is embedded and has been made invisible in urban contexts. The psycho-geographer Ian Sinclair mentioned above, again someone who is not an academic, is equally astute in describing, in his seemingly intuitive paranoid fashion, the sketchy moneymaking projects and illegal schemes unfolding at the periphery. His epic journey around the M25 reveals many unpublic activities, including various scams that allow for lucrative business opportunities precisely because they are undisclosed and illegal. A ruthless, predatory capitalism has taken root at the rim, ‘[w]here ugly things happen unseen’ (Sinclair 2003: 113). Criminals, villains and ‘landfill cowboys’ have migrated to the rim of the city, building their wealth on landfill and other scams (Sinclair 2003: 503–507). As for Bucharest, then, the city is not unique, although here the villains are the bygone communist elites and associates of the former Securitate. These onetime socialist elites benefitted most from the unlimited opportunities at the urban fringe (rampant land speculation, landfills scams, etc.), and they have managed wonderfully well to remain invisible and to camouflage their role. Their habitat being unpublic, the villas and streets in which they live are even more secluded than those of others who have fled the city. The winners of the postsocialist transition drive home in their cars, going ‘through highly securitized gates and garages without ever setting foot in public space’ (Hirt 2012: 121). Hirt writes that illegality has been a kind of ‘quasi-rebellious gesture’ in which people take pride in breaking the rules: ‘[w]hat socialism prohibited, post-socialism propels’ (2012: 117). The urban rim provides the spatial niches for such activity, turning itself into an archipelago of (securitized) islands possessing an unmistakeably military, hidden or secretive feel. Home to stark forms of urban fragmentation and social inequality, the centura appears to be the key lubricant of such

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postsocialist d ­ evelopments. They come at a cost: as Petruţ Călinescu writes, at the periphery people are suspicious, and everybody seems to have something to hide, the proverbial Romanian hospitality is ­missing – from the shepherds who let their sheep graze where it is not allowed, to the workers who hold back construction materials, from the poor and destitute who are afraid that they will be evicted yet again, to the wealthy ‘who will not talk anyway’ (Călinescu and Călinescu 2018: 4). I have tried to argue that while some things are in plain sight, others are insidiously hidden: it may well be extremely hard to put one’s finger on the structures or pockets of power. The ring suggests movement and circulation, and at times a bit of traffic chaos. As long as one does not stop and – literally – get out of one’s car, if one neglects to stand still, dwell for a moment and observe phenomena on-site, attending ethnographically to what is actually there in front of us, one may remain blind to what goes on in these peri-urban places. Ger Duijzings is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universität Regensburg. Until 2014, he taught anthropology at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He did extensive research on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and is currently studying urban transformations in postsocialist cities. He has published widely on these topics, amongst others, the edited volume Global Villages: Rural and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Bulgaria (Anthem, 2013), and the coedited volume (together with Ben Campkin) Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (I.B. Tauris, 2016).

Notes 1. They consisted of at least a dozen full-circle or partial tours around the centura, alone or with other ‘centourists’ or enthusiasts. I also regularly visited cemeteries around the centura where my in-laws are buried. I am grateful to Mihai Culescu, Ioana Pînzaru, Iosif Király, Irina Botea Bucan and Jon Dean for joining me on these trips and sharing my interest. A video of a full circle counterclockwise tour around the centura can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JiZV0YC3VSg (67 min). 2. Here 40 per cent of property still belongs to the military (eight forts and six batteries). Some were ceded to the Ministry of Interior, accommodating, amongst others, the city’s Gendarmery Headquarters and the Jilava penitentiary, while the remaining ones were sold into private hands. Every so often, the abandoned batteries were used as squats by homeless people (Scafeş and Scafeş 2008: 58–59). 3. This lack of transparency has nurtured large-scale corruption at the highest (elite) level, for example involving the selling of army-owned land to a well-known oligarch.

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4. See the film’s website: http://www.sacrogra.it/. The book was first published in Italian (2013) and then in French translation, the latter my source here (Bassetti and Matteucci 2015). 5. For the Tomtom traffic index see: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/ ranking/ (accessed on 1 February 2023). For the air pollution levels see: Health Costs of Air Pollution in European Cities and the Linkage with Transport, report by the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA). Delft: CE Delft, 2020 (for Bucharest’s top ranking in terms of social costs per capita, see page 28). The report is available online at: https://epha.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/final-healthcosts-of-air-pollution-in-european-cities-and-the-linkage-with-transport.pdf (accessed on 1 February 2023). 6. For an analysis of the rise of gated developments in the north of Bucharest during the 1990s, see Rufat 2003. They were modelled on the French Village (Satul Francez), a gated community for expatriates and employees of international firms, which became the template for similar developments catering to Romanians. 7. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the southern parts of what is now Romania lacked proper land registers. Although nowadays the cartea funciară (a public register of property) provides information on ownership, the centura has large blank spots with land that is not included in this registry.

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____. 2018. ‘Transforming a Totalitarian Edifice: Artistic and Ethnographic Engagements with the House of the People in Bucharest’, in Catharina Raudvere (ed.), Nostalgia, Loss and Creativity in South-East Europe: Political and Cultural Representations of the Past. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 11–36. Duţescu, Mihai, Ionela Cristea and Cristina Ilie. 2018. ‘Sudul meu / My South – #3 Berceni’, in Ștefan Ghenciulescu, Mihai Duțescu and Andrei Mărgulescu (eds), Celălalt oraș: Locuri și povești din București-Sud / The Other City: Places and Stories from Bucharest-South. Bucharest: Editura Universitară ‘Ion Mincu’, pp. 112–17. Ghenciulescu, Ştefan. 2010a. ‘Nepublic: Spaţiul urban în Bucureşti după 1989 / Non-Public: Urban Space in Bucharest after 1989’, in Alina Şerban (ed.), Evacuarea fantomei: Arhitecturi ale supravieţuirii / Evicting the Ghost: Architectures of Survival. Bucharest: Centrul de Introspecţie Vizuală, pp. 175–83. ____. 2010b. ‘On the Catastrophes, Potential, and Recent Development of Romanian Peripheries’, in exhibition catalogue Superbia. La Biennale di Venezia, Romanian pavilion. Ghenciulescu, Ştefan, Mihai Duţescu, Andrei Mărgulescu, Cosmina Goagea and Constantin Goagea (eds). 2018. Celălalt oraș: Locuri și povești din București-Sud / The Other City: Places and Stories from Bucharest-South. Bucharest: Editura Universitară ‘Ion Mincu’. Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge. Hirt, Sonia. 2012. Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs, and Privatization of Space in the Post-Socialist City. Chichester: Wiley and Sons. Iojă, Cristian Ioan, Mihai Răzvan Niţă, Gabriel Ovidiu Vânău, Diana Andreea Onose and Athanasios Alexandru Gavrilides. 2013. ‘Using Multi-Criteria Analysis for the Identification of Spatial Land-Use Conflicts in the Bucharest Metropolitan Area’, Ecological Indicators 42: 112–21. Iojă, Cristian Ioan and Constantina Alina Tudor. 2012. ‘Temporal Analysis of Incompatible Land-Use and Land-Cover: The Proximity between Residential Areas and Gas Stations in Bucharest Suburban Area’, Procedia Environmental Sciences 14: 49–58. Isufi, Skermelinda. 2018. On the Trace of Waste: How Italian Waste Ends up in South-Eastern Europe. Unpublished essay in the advanced course ‘Waste and recycling at EU’s periphery: anthropological approaches’ (taught by Ger Duijzings). Universität Regensburg. Kearney, Michael. 1996. Reconceptualizing the Peasantry: Anthropology in Global Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Keil, Roger (ed.). 2013. Suburban Constellations: Governance, Land, and Infrastructure in the 21st Century. Berlin: Jovis. Kusiak, Joanna. 2012. ‘The Cunning of Chaos and Its Orders: A Taxonomy of Urban Chaos in Post-Socialist Warsaw and Beyond’, in Monika Grubbauer and Joanna Kusiak (eds), Chasing Warsaw: Socio-Material Dynamics of Urban Change since 1990. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, pp. 291–320. Latour, Bruno. 1996 (1993). Der Berliner Schlüssel: Erkundungen eines Liebhabers der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. ____. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Light, Duncan. 2004. ‘Street Names in Bucharest, 1990–1997: Exploring the Modern Historical Geographies of Post-Socialist Change’, Journal of Historical G ­ eography 30: 154–72.

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Marin, Vera. 2005. ‘Inhabiting the Outskirts of Bucharest: ‘Old’ Socialist Housing Estates versus ‘New’ Capitalist Suburbia Developments’, in Frank Eckardt (ed.), Paths of Urban Transformation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 121–41. Marin, Vera and Andreea Matache. 2010. ‘Living beyond the City: The Extent of an Urban Phenomenon’, in exhibition catalogue Superbia. La Biennale di Venezia, Romanian pavilion. Matache, Andreea. 2010. Locuirea în ansamblurile rezidenţiale închise: Zona ­Pipera-Voluntari. Doctoral dissertation. Bucharest: Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism. Mihalache, Carmen. 2016. ‘“Metropola” Chiajna: Experienţe ale locuirii într-un spaţiu rural periurban’, in Natalia Negru (ed.), De la stradă la ansambluri rezidenţiale: Opt ipostaze ale locuirii în Bucureştiul contemporan. Bucharest: Pro Universitaria, pp. 111–41. Mionel, Viorel. 2013. România ghetourilor urbane: Spaţiul vicios al marginalizării, sărăciei şi stigmatului. Bucharest: Pro Universitaria. Moran, Joe. 2005. Reading the Everyday. Abingdon: Routledge. Negru, Natalia (ed.). 2016. De la stradă la ansambluri rezidenţiale: Opt ipostaze ale locuirii în Bucureştiul contemporan. Bucharest: Pro Universitaria. Nicolini, Renato. 2015 (2005). ‘Une “machine célibataire”’, in Nicolò Bassetti and Sapo Matteucci, Sacro romano GRA: Êtres, lieux, paysages du Grande Raccordo Anulare. Lyon: La fosse aux ours, pp. 231–37. Niko, Jessica. 2018. Wie viel zählt ein Hundeleben? Rumäniens Umgang mit Straßenhunden im Kontext einer veränderten Mensch-Hund Beziehung. Unpublished Bachelor thesis, submitted at Universität Regensburg. Ogrezeanu, Andreea. 2002. ‘Mahala: The Slums of Bucharest – a Space of Urban Change’, Romanian Journal of Society and Politics 2(1): 62–81. O’Neill, Bruce. 2010. ‘Down and Then Out in Bucharest: Urban Poverty, Governance, and the Politics of Place in the Postsocialist City’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 254–69. ____. 2014. ‘Cast Aside: Boredom, Downward Mobility, and Homelessness in Post-Communist Bucharest’, Cultural Anthropology 29(1): 8–31. Patroescu, Maria, Mihai Niţă, Cristian Iojă and Gabriel Vânău. 2009. ‘New Residential Areas in Bucharest Metropolitan Area – Location, Type and Characteristics’, in Manfred Schrenk et al. (eds), Proceedings of the Conference REAL CORP 2009. Cities 3.0 – Smart, Sustainable, Integrative: Strategies, Concepts and Technologies for Planning the Urban Future, Schwechat: Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning, pp. 767–72. Pînzaru, Ioana. 2016. Peisajul zonei de tranziție. Studiul zonei de tranziție dintre oraș și teritoriul înconjurător: zona centrală a Bucureștiului. Doctoral dissertation. Bucharest: Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urban Planning. Pulay, Gergö. 2017. Street Life, Value and Exchange in a Poor Neighborhood of Bucharest. Doctoral dissertation. Budapest: Central European University. Reno, Joshua. 2015. ‘Waste and Waste Management’, Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 557–72. Rufat, Samuel. 2003. ‘Les “résidences fermées” à Bucarest: De “l’entre-soi” à la fragmentation?’, Arches 6: 83–94. Scafeş, Cornel I. and Ioan Scafeş. 2008. Cetatea Bucureşti: Fortificaţiile din jurul ­capitalei, 1884–1914. Bucharest: Editura Alpha MDN.

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Şerban, Alina (ed.). 2010. Evacuarea fantomei: Arhitecturi ale supravieţuirii / Evicting the Ghost: Architectures of Survival. Bucharest: Centrul de Introspecţie Vizuală. Sinclair, Iain. 2003 (2002). London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. London: Penguin Books. Stanilov, Kiril, and Luděk Sýkora (eds). 2014. Confronting Suburbanization: Urban Decentralization in Postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–91. Verdery, Katherine. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vossen, Joachim. 2004. Bukarest: Die Entwicklung des Stadtraums von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Berlin: Reimer. Winner, Langdon. 1980. ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, Daedalus 109(1): 121–36.

CHAPTER 6

5 Pedestrianizing Moscow

Disparities between the Centre and the Inner Periphery Sabina Maslova and Tauri Tuvikene

Introduction: Automobility and Urban Spatial Structure Privately owned automobiles have become the predominant mode of transportation in many cities. Urban authorities have aimed to maximize vehicle traffic flows (e.g. Šeštokas 1980) by constructing more roads, multilane highways, motorway junctions, roundabouts and ramps. They have also endorsed the status quo in which the automobile is the primary mode of transportation. This process, however, has led to a declining number of pedestrians on the street (Robertson 1993; Southworth 2005) and concomitantly the road space has become less conducive to their mobility. Across much of the developed world in recent decades, increased awareness of the negative impact of automobility has heightened consciousness of the need to develop cities for non-automobile users (Kunstler 1994; Sheller and Urry 2000). No matter how prevalent the role played by cars and public transit, pedestrians still remain the most numerous group amongst citizens using the streets (Lynch 1993). However much such ameliorative trends mark the urban policies of many cities, the car is largely embraced in the cities of the former Soviet Union. Moscow, which provides the case study to be examined here, has experienced an ongoing nightmare of cars – ­avtomobilshchina – characterized by traffic jams and the unorganized parking of cars wherever their drivers can (Argenbright 2008). Nevertheless, this chapter will show that even in Moscow, pedestrians now have a place within the urban policy agenda. But it will also reveal that while such pedestrian-oriented developments are prominent and visible, the problems of pedestrian mobility on a larger scale within the city are not being tackled. As with the development of urban parks, as shown by Zupan and Büdenbender (2019), in which the Moscow authorities’ aim has been not so much the advancement of green spaces in themselves but rather the bolstering of the Russian capital’s image as a global city, it may be the case that pedestrianization policies do not really improve

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most pedestrians’ lives – and thus do not provide a proper basis for sustainable modes of mobility. The quality of the walking environment in cities is crucial: by walking, which immerses them sensorily in their surrounding physical environment, pedestrians experience the place they are in (Brömmelstroet et al. 2017; Middleton 2010). Various strategies and urban policies have been applied to ensure that walking can still exist as a mode of everyday mobility. Two main measures responding to increased automobility in cities are pedestrianization policies and traffic-­calming measures. Recently, discussion of pedestrianization processes has received considerate academic attention in the fields of urban studies, involving research in many urban contexts, mostly in Europe and the United States (e.g. Castillo-Manzano et al. 2014; Gehl 1989; Hass-Klau 1993; Karrholm 2008; Robertson 1993; Zipori and Cohen 2015). More recent research has examined pedestrianization processes in various Asian cities (e.g. Dokmeci et al. 2007; Iranmanesh 2008; Yiu 2011; Yuen and Chor 1998). However, less attention has been paid to mobility practices and pedestrian experiences in postsocialist cities, particularly post-Soviet cities. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, postsocialist cities including Moscow experienced major changes in their economic, social, political and ideological spheres. The transition to a market economy affected public spaces due to privatization and commercialization. Although public space transformations in postsocialist cities have been highlighted in a number of academic works (e.g. Darieva et al. 2011; Hirt 2013; Makarova 2005; Zhelnina 2013; Kalyukin, Boren and Byerley 2015), researchers studying postsocialist cities have not addressed pedestrianization processes in much detail. This chapter aims to close this gap. Along these lines, this chapter presents a case study of the first stage of Moscow’s pedestrianization process in the period from 2011 to 2015. The early post-Soviet period had been characterized by a dramatic spike in automobilization and a subsequent deterioration of ecological and transportation systems. After the new government came to power in 2010, the problems caused by the rapidly growing number of cars and by pervasive traffic congestion became central to an evolving urban agenda. Since that time, new urban planning policies have been instituted that adopted an altered approach, towards a human-scale city, involving a number of pedestrianization and traffic-calming initiatives and efforts of public space redevelopment in Moscow. However, considering the localization of these policies, along with the city’s current transport and spatial structures, the aims and benefits of these policies raise questions. This study argues that pedestrianization in Moscow does not necessarily aim to improve foot-traffic mobility and pedestrian

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practices for the bulk of Moscow’s inhabitants. Rather, it serves other goals, such as making the city more attractive for mobile urban and global ‘elites’, members of the upper-middle classes and other wealthier ‘transients’, such as affluent tourists, businessmen, managers of multilocal enterprises, employees of international organizations, international consultants, performers, sportspeople, and academics (Martinotti 1999: 168). Pedestrianized (and at the same time commercialized) streets in the (historical) city centre generally provide an important selling point in any city branding exercise. As such, the policies carried out might have improved pedestrian life in some parts of the city – but they have also led to the reproduction and intensification of the existing spatial inequalities between the city centre and periphery.1 In what follows we first provide a theoretical framework within which to understand pedestrianization. An introductory account of Moscow follows, along with an outline of the context of the city’s spatial disparities. The case study presented, based on fieldwork conducted at diverse sites in Moscow in 2014, provides a summary description of ­pedestrian-oriented policies in the city centre and in the city periphery. It is followed by a discussion that places these pedestrianization projects within Moscow’s urban agenda and outlines these policies’ consequences for the city’s spatial structure and its socio-spatial disparities.

From Automobile-Oriented Approaches to ‘Livable City’ and Spatial Politics Urban transport planning entails the adoption of different theories and models dealing with the relation between various transportation modes and urban development. Transport policies have shifted from approaches focusing on enhancing car mobility to those centred on livable and sustainable cities (Banister 2008). Nevertheless, one should, instead of simply hailing the success of such policy transitions, regard them in relation to urban politics and the unequal geographies of city planning. Thus, the shift from car-oriented to sustainable mobility policies is only part of the story. At the core of the idea of a ‘car-oriented’ city lies the claim that urban growth is concomitant with increased automobility and requires the construction of new roads and parking in response to growing demand (Tolley and Turton 1995). This approach aligns with the provision of privacy within the public realm and the fostering of individual freedom of movement, and it links automobile infrastructure to economic growth. This approach, also called ‘predict and provide’ for the way it is based on

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predictions of future car capacity and the corresponding construction of road infrastructure, can be seen as the more ‘traditional’ transport planning orientation (Banister 2008). Such car-oriented transport planning approaches have been challenged by a set of transport developments under the heading of what Banister (2008) has called the ‘sustainable mobility paradigm’. Here the car’s role is limited through restrictions and regulations, which are complemented by efforts to stimulate use of other forms of travel. Taken to its logical conclusion, the ultimate manifestation of this approach would be the paradigm of a ‘car-free city’ (Topp and Pharoah 1994; Walljasper 2008; Zipori and Cohen 2015). Relatedly, transport policies have put forward intermodal systems of transportation to harmonize private car and public transit modes while supporting pedestrian and cycling mobility (Vuchic 1999). This set of approaches is enfolded within the ‘livable city’ concept and notions of sustainable development. The ‘livable city’ model has recently attracted interest amongst urban policymakers and has indeed been adopted by many cities. Much of the available literature on livability has addressed the principles and methods whereby cities have transformed themselves into p ­ edestrian-friendly and green sites and has investigated cases involving particular political strategies of transition (see Lowe 1990; Evans 2002; McCann 2008; for the postsocialist city, Kotus and Rzeszewski 2013). Allison and Peters (2010) have reported on the International Making Cities Livable organization, founded in 1985 to assert the principles of ‘true urbanism’, consisting of an idea of a ‘city of short distances’ where ‘balanced transportation planning makes possible commuting via pedestrian networks, bicycle pathways, traffic quiet streets and public transportation’. Enlarging these thoughts, Jan Gehl (1987, 2010) has taken a broader perspective on ‘cities for people’, developing an urban design theory aimed at the creation of human-scale cities. Asserting that most contemporary cities were designed for vehicular movement rather than pedestrian use, this theory argues that pedestrians must be prioritized if we are to possess better public spaces and more livable streets (Gehl 1987). This view is supported by Vuchic (1999), who argues that walking as an urban transport mode has now become recognized as a key component of urban ‘livability’. Several studies have examined the process whereby streets have been transformed from car-centred environments to public spaces, possessing a lively, vibrant atmosphere affording greater opportunity for optional social activities to residents and visitors alike (see, e.g. Yuen and Chor 1998 for Singapore and Yiu 2011 for Hong Kong). The pedestrian’s role on the street has been enhanced mainly through the policies of pedestrianization and traffic calming, both of

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which address safety and environmental issues, improve the physical environment for the pedestrian and foster on-foot mobility practices (Banister 2002). Pedestrianization is an urban policy dedicated to the (complete or partial) removal of vehicle traffic from existing city streets (Hass-Klau 2014). It promotes pedestrian use of a street or an area and restricts vehicle access (Iranmanesh 2008). Generally, this process has as its constituent features the renewal of paving material, street furniture and other design details. Traffic calming prioritizes pedestrians as well, employing road humps (also known as ‘speed bumps’ in the US), lines of trees or speed cushions to reinforce that the primary use of the street is for people (as shoppers and/or residents); the street is not merely a site for car circulation (Slinn et al. 2005). Nevertheless, such spaces are often commercialized through ­public-private partnership developments that provide spaces to dwell for those who can afford it. Moreover, what matters here is not just the policy measures instituted as planning for pedestrians. There is also the question of where such pedestrianization and traffic-calming policies are implemented. All such policies, that is, are positioned within the unequal geographies of cities.

The Urban Politics of Transport Planning The ‘livable cities’ policies drawn from within the sustainable mobility paradigm may well be the product of good intentions; many will benefit from them. But ultimately inequalities – increasing inequalities – remain. For instance, sustainability, though a keyword for many new developments, is invariably tied to pro-growth megaprojects, advancing financial interests rather than social equity (Enright 2016). It is true that cars are associated with wealth, whereas those with more limited financial means cannot afford cars and often walk or cycle. Viewed through this lens it would seem that any support given to the walking environment would benefit the less-well-off. However, this picture tells just half the story. Not only do more people amongst the middle classes walk and cycle (see Transport for London 2018: 85), but to be able not to drive depends on the spatial relations of the area one lives in; it is in fact a kind of luxury. Namely, walking is more prevalent in neighbourhoods where there are more places one could actually walk to: dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods that have often been gentrified. Additionally, one should consider the location of developments enhancing ­pedestrianization and walkability. Studies have mostly focused on pedestrianization initiatives in city centres and downtowns (Topp and

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Pharoah 1994; Gant 2002; Karrholm 2008), with only a few authors discussing the status of pedestrian spaces outside the inner cities (e.g. Castillo-Manzano et al. 2014). While the city centre might reasonably be assumed the logical focus of such pedestrianization policies, as these areas usually possess the highest concentration of pedestrians in the city, the peripheral zones are the areas where the residents living in these neighbourhoods spend most of their time. This is especially true for Moscow, a city with a strong peripheral zone that houses most of the residents of the metropolis. Thus, the discussion of spatial effects on city scale remains relevant. Indeed, transport policies frequently benefit some areas more while putting others at a disadvantage. This imbalance manifests itself in the planning of mass capacity transport infrastructures that usually cater to middle-class commuters rather than serving other residents (Soja 2010; Enright 2019). Transport is not simply a rational question that should be left to engineers; it is a political topic encompassing group interests and unequal outcomes (Kębłowski and Bassens 2017). Transport policies are about more than just transport (Sheller 2017). Such policies are situated within unequal geographies, and can advocate for the right to produce different urban geographies – to grant a right to the city – for those excluded within the present status quo (Enright 2019). Such exclusions, moreover, have embedded themselves in centre-periphery structures, in which the city itself is mostly made up of vast peripheral zones even as economic growth is focused in the centre or develops out of the centre’s point of view – a pattern characterizing cities such as Paris (Enright 2016). Moscow is marked by a similar antagonism between centre and periphery. Although certain wealthier neighbourhoods exist in the periphery as well as in suburban areas, the peripheral territories of Moscow are not a zone of wealth the way they are in certain other cities in Eastern and Central Europe (Argenbright et al. 2020). It is worth stressing again the difference between the inner periphery and the outer periphery (see note 1). This chapter’s focus is on the former, whereas wealthy locales, having a higher prevalence of driving and less interest in pedestrian environments, are located rather in the latter zone and are thus beyond the scope of this study.

Moscow: A Centre-Periphery Dichotomy Moscow, one of the world’s largest, most densely populated cities, is home to 12.3 million people in a territory of 2,511 square kilometres2 (ROSSTAT 2016). In terms of population growth, the Russian capital

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is comparable to the main European metropolitan areas, but its population density makes it more akin to the overcrowded metropolitan centres of developing countries and their aggravated environmental concerns (Kirillov and Makhrova 2013; Shatilo 2015). Despite the city’s large size and high population density, the share of the built-up area occupied by the road infrastructure is only 15% (Atlas of Urban Expansion 2014), compared, for instance, to 20–30% in US cities and 21% on average globally (Atlas of Urban Expansion 2014). The Structural Gap between City Centre and Periphery Like Paris, Vienna, and Brussels, Moscow represents a city characterized by concentric development. Over the course of the twentieth century, its borders gradually expanded beyond its historical core, creating a hierarchy amongst the encircling territories. Thus the super-­concentration of the radial structure of Moscow, instituted in the twentieth century, has defined the small size of the historical centre and its importance for the city and the country as a whole. Moscow’s dominance within the system of Russian cities is supported by the centralization of political, administrative and economic powers there, which proved conducive to centre-periphery antagonism. Moscow’s radial-ring macro-­structure, which gradually developed over a long period of time, was clearly defined by the first General Plan for the restructuring of Moscow in 1935, laying the foundation for regular concentric planning and the systematic dense development of the city (Figure 6.1). The ‘city centre’ generally encompasses Moscow’s historical core up through the Garden Ring, although the administrative borders of the central municipal district extend further, to the borders of the Third Ring Road. This territory is formed by densely built areas dating from before the 1940s, with well-developed transport infrastructure. The city centre covers only 6 per cent of the overall administrative area. Beyond the borders of the city centre lies a zone which can be defined as an ‘inner periphery’ of Moscow. The periphery within this still compact city includes the territory within the city’s administrative borders between the Third Ring Road and MKAD (Moscow Automobile Ring Road). This large periphery includes, along with the vast plots of the formerly industrial zones, transport infrastructure, extensive green areas and massive prefabricated housing blocks of microrayons, which house the majority of Moscow’s citizens. Moscow’s geographically large periphery consists predominantly of residential districts made up of mass high-rise housing which g ­ enerally are nonetheless socio-spatially variegated. Similar programmes of

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­residential microrayons can be found in many former socialist cities. In 1954, in the face of massive migration to Moscow, new legal guidelines for the rigid standardization and industrialization of residential housing were established. The state launched a large-scale housing construction programme that was to use prefabricated materials: factories steadily produced construction components for the housing that later covered Moscow’s periphery with rows of uniform housing blocks. This landscape of vast microrayons defines the dormitory suburbs of Moscow. According to research by the authors of the Archaeology of Periphery – a collection of studies on the Moscow peripheral zone coordinated by the Moscow Urban Forum – about 90 per cent of the city’s residents live in the peripheral zone of microrayons (Grigoryan 2013). Post-1990s, Moscow has witnessed the construction of large-scale high-rise housing developments on the periphery as well (Rudolph and Brade 2005). While there has been some suburbanization beyond the periphery – to the outer suburbs in Moscow Oblast3 – it has been somewhat less significant than in many other parts of Eastern and Central Europe. Moscow is still the central area for new housing construction (Argenbright et al. 2020). Moreover, the suburbanization that has occurred still significantly entails seasonal living in ‘dachas’ in territories beyond Moscow’s periphery (Rusanov 2015). With respect to everyday interurban mobility, much of daily life is concentrated on the peripheral zone of Moscow. Just 40 per cent of the city’s residents go to the city centre once or more per week. Only 10 per cent make such a trip daily. Most Muscovites spend their time in their own neighbourhoods: as high a percentage as 86 per cent of respondents to a large-scale survey noted they do so for more than three hours in an average day (Levinson 2013). Some working-age people visit city-centre sites for work reasons. However, the use of the centre is limited with regard to women with children, the elderly and teenagers; these groups hardly ever use the city centre (unless they live there) and their everyday life is predominantly localized within their neighbourhoods (ibid.). The (inner) periphery of Moscow, composed mainly of self-contained residential microrayons, depends only minimally on the city centre and requires self-sufficient mobility infrastructure of its own. The Transportation System before Pedestrianization Policies From the 1950s to the 1980s the number of registered vehicles in Moscow increased from 81,000 to 560,000. Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow had 917,000 registered cars, but by the 2000s there were 2.6 million and in 2010 there were 3.9 million

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(GIBDD 2010). The explosion in car use was to a certain extent fostered by extensive population growth in Moscow, which had mostly been caused by migration, especially after the 1990s: the city’s population of 8.8 million residents in 1989 became 12.1 million residents in 2014 (Kirillov and Makhrova 2013). These two processes defined the substantial increase in car ownership: in 1970, the car ownership rate was 14.3 private cars per 1,000 people, rising to 53 per 1,000 in 1985 and skyrocketing to 223.8 per 1,000 in 2000 (Tarkhov 2004). Higher rates of car ownership have not abated: 279 cars per 1,000 residents in 2009 (Hatoyama 2011) grew to 370 cars per 1,000 eight years later in 2017 (TASS 2017). Perhaps unsurprisingly, road capacity could not accommodate such growth. The city’s 2010 General Master Plan, designed to regulate the city’s spatial structure, was declared outdated and in need of major revisions after only three years because it did not account for such pronounced automobilization.4 Traffic jams inevitably became a visible feature of Moscow’s mass automobility. Thus the average speed of traffic in 2008 dropped to 22 km/h and during 2009–2010 remained around 23–24 km/h, according to the Institute for Transport and Transportation Policies (Interfax 2009; Blinkin 2014). Furthermore, the 2013 TomTom Traffic Index,5 an annual report detailing the cities around the world with the heaviest traffic congestion, ranked Moscow amongst the top cities (Cox 2014). Unsurprisingly, given this background, the position of pedestrians was gradually weakening. Consequently, to meet the demands of growing automobility, urban policies were instituted to widen the roads, to increase the number of lanes and to build bridges and complex junctions of motorways, in most cases by taking away space previously used by pedestrians. Walking became ever more dangerous: according to data from the Moscow Traffic Police, from 2004 to 2009 the number of traffic collisions had increased by 35.7 per cent (reaching 12,400 accidents in 2009) and road injuries had almost doubled over the same period – a 46 per cent increase (14,200 people were injured in 2009). By then the private car had become a dominant mode of urban mobility.

Pedestrianization Policies in Moscow’s City Centre The principal reforms for pedestrian spaces commenced after 2010, when the newly appointed city mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, and his government set a new urban agenda that shifted the vector of Moscow’s urban development towards the concepts of a ‘livable city’ and a ‘city for

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people’ (Kalyukin, Boren and Byerley 2015). Hence, starting in 2011, the Moscow Municipal Government introduced a range of policies aimed at improving the quality and number of public spaces. With regard to policies, it is important to mention the programme for the development of Moscow (Moscow Government 2014). This programme set the directions of urban policies from 2011 onwards and declared the ‘plans and ideology for the city’s modernization’ to 2025. One of the goals of the ‘Moscow as a livable city’ programme was ‘making the city the safest, healthiest, boundless and comfortable for all categories of people’ (Moscow Government 2014: 5). The first strategic direction listed in the programme is ‘Mobile City’, directed at creating ‘the conditions for free, predictable and comfortable movement around the city for pedestrians, cyclists, passengers of public transit and car drivers’ (Moscow Government 2014: 7). Moreover, the funds for improving urban mobility were multiplied five times from 2010 to 2014. The firm of Gehl Architects was invited to Moscow and worked there from 2011 to 2013, resulting in a set of recommendations on how city space might be made more livable. These proposals included recommendations to pedestrianize streets and to improve the existing pedestrian environments (Gehl Architects 2013). These urbanization trends were aimed at making the city centre more appealing not only for walking but also for Moscow’s branding purposes, directed to (local, national and international) elites and tourists alike. Even as the hiring of Gehl Architects signified a desire to improve the urban environment for pedestrians, it was also significantly driven by a desire to boost the city’s image, as broadcast by the commissioning of such a world-famous architectural firm. Following the announcement of the ‘livable city’ agenda to renovate Moscow’s public spaces, the pilot project directed at reconstructing Gorky Park for cultural and leisure purposes was launched in 2011. The Gorky Park redevelopment transformed the park into an attractive commercialized public space, graced with a distinctive design and fostering appealing activities (Kalyukin, Boren and Byerley 2015; Zupan and Büdenbender 2019).6 The redevelopment of thirteen other public parks and squares followed. In general, emphasis was placed on the redevelopment and reorientation of public spaces, with urban and transport policies meant to accord with European practices (from the interview with a representative of Moscow Department of Transport, April 2014). An additional major step taken in the public policies regarding mobility was the advancement of public transit and road regulations. Initially included was the creation of separate bus lanes, modern parking spaces and paid parking in the city centre. The second

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wave of policies in this direction focused on public transit: a significant number of new buses and trolleybuses were ordered, electronic tickets were introduced and several routes of night trolleybuses were launched. Moreover, the development of bicycle infrastructure started in 2011; a network of bicycle paths and bicycle parking lots, with more than 146 km of bike lanes, was completed by 2014 (770 km by 2018) and a system of bicycle sharing was established. Thus a number of policies and initiatives improved the everyday life of non-automobile users. Two main policy directions may be identified from the set of initiatives targeting the improvement of walking conditions: an increased number of pedestrian-only streets and the widening of pavements and refurbishment of streets. The policy increased the number of pedestrian-only streets (Figure 6.1). With the rampant growth of cars on the streets of Moscow, the idea of a territorial separation between pedestrians and motorized vehicles became more relevant. Additionally, pedestrian zones were created primarily not to improve on-foot mobility but to make public spaces suited to leisure activities to be enjoyed by locals but,

Figure 6.1. The map of pedestrianized streets in the Moscow city centre (in 2020). Image created by Anu Printsmann with OpenStreetMap.

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significantly, for tourists, business elites and other wealthy ‘transients’ as well (Martinotti 1999; Trubina 2020). The decision to convert some of the city streets to exclusive pedestrian use emerged rather late: before 2010 the city had only two pedestrian-only streets – Arbat, since 1986, with Kamergersky pereulok becoming pedestrianized twelve years later. But over the past ten years, their number has exceeded fifteen: Rozhdestvenka, Kuznetsky Most, Stoleshnikov pereulok, Nikolskaya, Krymskaya embankment, Ordynsky tupik, Shkolnaya and other walking routes, which are particularly popular amongst tourists. Some of these thoroughfares experienced basic cosmetic repairs along with vehicle restrictions; however, for the most part, the renovations involved complex remaking processes in order to create a comfortable and attractive environment replete with commercial activities, and in some cases artistic and sports activities (Figure 6.2). An interesting example illustrating the transformation of a busy traffic artery into an area regeneration project for public space is the case of Krymskaya embankment. Before the reform, it had been one of Moscow’s busiest roads, its multiple car lanes the site of regular rush-hour traffic jams; it was graced with only a narrow pavement alongside the water (with a width less than 70 cm). After the removal of vehicle traffic, the closure of the street and the addition of greenery, it was merged with the nearby Muzeon park and converted into a fully furnished, vibrant public space. Moreover, accompanying the Krymskaya embankment project, a 12-km-long pedestrian promenade was constructed that connected several parks and embankments in the southeastern part of the city centre, which has made walking along the river a pleasant experience. In most cases, the transformation of the traffic roads into ­pedestrian-only streets followed certain patterns marked by at least several, if not all, of the following particular elements: a high density of people; shops and cafés on the ground floors; the use of high-priced paving materials; comfortable and abundant seating spots; high-­quality lighting; greenery and landscaping elements; a favourable width of the walking paths for pedestrians; and conspicuous points of attraction such as public squares with fountains, skating rinks or art objects. Every renovated pedestrian street took on a special character as created via thoughtful urban design, providing entertainment and diversity for the walkers. Second, in addition to pedestrian-only streets as a measure to advance the quality of life for non-automobile users, another direction taken by the pedestrianization process involved the widening of pavements and the refurbishment of streets. These measures involved ­targeting the streets that were intensively used by pedestrians but could

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Figure 6.2. Examples of renovated pedestrian streets in the centre of Moscow, 2014. © Sabina Maslova.

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not be converted into car-free zones in the near future because they were crucial elements of the transport system. In these cases, the suitable solution was to reduce the number of car lanes and widen the pavements to create better conditions for pedestrian circulation, adding perhaps some greenery and flowerbeds (examples include Myasnickaya, Maroseyka, Pokrovka, Pyatnickaya and several others). Since Moscow has a radial concentric structure, the composition and functioning of the major roads and streets show similarities regardless of the direction taken. For the purposes of this study, two streets in the northern direction were chosen for on-site observations: refurbished and pedestrianized Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street in the city centre and its continuation, a section of Dmitrovskoe Shosse in the city periphery. These examples illustrate the contrasts between the centre and the periphery to be found in the road structure of Moscow regardless of direction. After the 2014 renovation, Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street took on various new features: a widened pavement with ample space for walking; a one-direction low-speed traffic lane; closure to cars on weekends; new high-quality paving material (covered with paving slabs); frequent zebra crossings and a lowered mandated speed limit for traffic, making crossing the street convenient at nearly every spot; benches located every hundred metres; flowerbeds and other decorations; low levels of noise and air pollution. The same sort of refurbishment, however, was not extended to the Dmitrovskoe Shosse in the city periphery. For the most part, the urban policies employed to create, advance and promote pedestrian spaces in the city centre were recognized to be effective once they began to attract larger pedestrian flows. As follows from the statement of Maxim Liksutov, the head of the Moscow Department of Transport and Road Infrastructure Development, ‘the number of pedestrians escalated right after construction work was completed’.7 However, it is worth noting that with respect to location, these pedestrianization policies were applied to the territories gradually moving outwards from the centre: they started on the streets close to the Kremlin, the major historic and touristic sites, then proceeded further in a similar way around major public squares and parks, according to the historic tradition of concentric development. Moreover, pedestrianization zones in the centre were and are primarily spaces of consumption – space not meant for various non-consumers such as youth or beggars and not intended to have users simply hang out. These spaces were also designed to be appealing for tourists, highly mobile managers, and businesspeople and other wealthy ‘transients’ and to simply advance the global image of the city, an aim that was particularly important

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for the city’s elite. The city centre’s pedestrianized zones are seen as money-making machines, nicely appointed leisure sites for those with money to spend. They are thus commercialized public spaces that place particular stress on their image and appeal instead of servicing the public at large via a thorough accounting of the various needs and desires of all citizens.

Pedestrian Spaces and On-Foot Mobility outside the City Centre The pedestrianization policies are mainly localized in the city centre; in the period they were instituted, by contrast, not much was done to improve pedestrian space in the areas beyond. The study conducted for this chapter shows that pedestrian infrastructure in the periphery is underdeveloped and that the policies of 2011–2015 did not improve on-foot mobility outside the city centre. The official reports of the Department of Transport and Road Infrastructure Development declared that thirty pedestrian zones ‘of regional significance’ were established in 2013. Nonetheless, in practice, the quality of the areas created for pedestrian use was fairly low: they were located mainly in the central parts of residential neighbourhoods and were disconnected from other elements of pedestrian and transport infrastructure. They did not create continuity and safety for on-foot mobility. Which is to say that the policies instituted, instead of embodying a wider programme for improving pedestrian conditions in the outer parts of the city, have been limited to individual cases without continuity amongst them. The residents who spend most of their time in the residential areas outside the city centre – people with children as well as the elderly – require a safe and uninterrupted pedestrian environment to a perhaps even greater extent than others do, but the spaces of their everyday mobility are filled with cars: ‘While 30 years ago a pedestrian in the residential microrayon could push the pram with baby between the buildings without meeting any car, today it is impossible to do so and even when arrived at the playground, they are surrounded by moving and parked cars producing air pollution and noise in the distance of two-five meters’ (Ter-Voskanyan 2018: 98). These conditions for the residents in the city periphery have further deteriorated because of the increased number of parked cars in these areas. Given the typically heavy traffic conditions on Moscow’s peripheral highways, the importance and number of safe and accessible ­pedestrian

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crossings are crucial for walkability and the prevention of accidents. However, designated pedestrian crossings in Moscow’s periphery are scarce and unevenly allotted (Figure 6.3). The pattern of pedestrian crossings demonstrates their irregular spatial distribution around the city: unsurprisingly, the highest density of crossings can be observed in the districts of the city centre itself, whereas the districts in close proximity to the centre have an average density of crossings and the districts most lacking elements of pedestrian infrastructure are located in the periphery. Moreover, pedestrian use is restricted due to accessibility issues: because the territories containing railroads, industrial zones and military objects, industrial areas and gated housing blocks account for about 40 per cent of the entire (inner) periphery (Grigoryan 2013), mobility from A to B is limited, with increased travel time for pedestrians. Residential areas are required by law to have traffic-calming measures in place – the sign ‘residential area’ is to be installed on corners within residential districts, according to the Traffic Regulations of Russia. This sign enables pedestrians to freely use both pavements and roads,

Figure 6.3. The density of pedestrian crossings by administrative district, 2014. Image created by Anu Printsmann with OpenStreetMap.

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while motor vehicle speed is limited to 20 km/h. Nevertheless, as can be seen via simple observation, not only is this supposedly obligatory sign missing in many residential areas, but even where the sign is installed one finds cars parked on the pavements and drivers breaking the speed limit. From the perspective of the physical environment, our observations show (Figure 6.4) that the dominance of cars and the neglect of pedestrians in the Moscow periphery can be noted in many physical features: the lack of pavements have compelled pedestrians to introduce vernacular artificial trails; the existing pavements are mostly occupied by parked cars, advertisement shields, and other obstructions that thwart walking; the quality of paving is low and in some places, pedestrian paths are not even paved; existing elements of pedestrian infrastructure are not connected in continuous paths and thus people are pushed to repeatedly make dangerous street crossings. The section of Dmitrovskoe Shosse (between Beskudnikovskiy Bul’var and Korovinskoe Shosse) that was chosen for site observation highlights these trends (tendencies that could, however, be found in the pedestrian spaces around any other major radial road in the inner periphery). The developments we can see there include cars parked on the ­pavements – and sometimes the pavements are even used by cars to bypass traffic jams; heavy automobile traffic on ten lanes of road; low paving quality; many road construction sites blocking the pedestrian path without provision of space for walking. The nearest available crossing is located further than 700 metres away, and this is an overpass crossing lacking amenities for the disabled and offering no benches, other street furniture or flowerbeds; there is only segmented plots of grass fenced off from the pavement. Walking will be interrupted by multiple obstacles, including advertisement shields, parked cars and kiosks. There are high levels of noise and air pollution. Onrushing traffic is ­separated from the pavement by only a thin metal fence.

Conclusion: Postsocialist Public Space and the Unequal Effects of Pedestrianization Policies This chapter, focusing on the effects of the current pedestrianization policies on the centre-periphery dichotomy, has illustrated that pedestrianization in Moscow is bound up with the replication of socio-­ spatial disparity. Despite the shift in the urban political paradigm away from automobile-oriented city and towards the ‘livable city’ model, ­significant reforms to pedestrian spaces have as yet taken place mainly in the city centre. The postsocialist legacy of a car-dependent city is

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currently being transformed by pedestrianization and the implementation of traffic-calming schemes. However, this contestation between car and pedestrian favours the pedestrians only within the city centre. The periphery is left to be dominated by car users. At the same time, two major trends characterize the pedestrianization process in Moscow – the prevalence of urban design and the lack of coherent planning. While the small scale of the projects emphasizes urban street forms and gives particular attention to details and separate elements, these localized improvements have not been incorporated into the overall connectedness of ‘comfortable’ walkable spaces. More importantly, they fail to improve overall on-foot mobility: they do not create a coherent system but rather effect the ‘splintered’ urban space that in turn produces selective connectivity. The pedestrian environments in the periphery also tend to be fragmented, and everyday mobility is, for the most part, unsafe and uncomfortable. Disrupted pedestrian elements are responsible for low connectedness; the lack of traffic signs and street layout decrease pedestrian safety; the low quality of the pavements, along with the presence of mud, multiple road-­construction works and other obstacles, makes the pedestrian environment of the periphery highly unpleasant and prevents free navigation on foot. The provision of pedestrian spaces characterized by high urban design quality – accompanied by people-attracting features such as outdoor cafés and street performers, as one now encounters in the centre of Moscow – creates a vibrant atmosphere and fosters social activities typical of the policies of ‘cities for people’. However, the localization of such policies prompts us to ask who the beneficiaries of these policies really are. Two-thirds of Moscow’s residents spend most of their time in the residential neighbourhoods where they live, beyond the city centre. The pedestrianization policies do not intend to benefit the larger part of Moscow’s population but primarily target privileged groups of tourists, city centre residents and the commuters who work in this urban core. Moreover, the way in which streets are pedestrianized favours larger business chains (of cafés and shops) and is mainly devoted to commercial activities, instead of allowing space for the vulnerable or of generating activity space for the less wealthy members of the population. Thus, on the one hand, to a certain extent the implemented policies have exerted positive effects: for example, according to the TomTom Traffic Index, in the list of the most heavily congested cities Moscow moved down from first place to fifth by 2015, below Mexico City, Bangkok, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro (TomTom 2015). On the other hand, the largest part of

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Figure 6.4. Examples of neglected pedestrian spaces in the periphery. The photographs were taken in 2014 during field observations in neighbourhoods northwest of the city centre (Dmitrovskoe Shosse and nearby areas). © Sabina Maslova.

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Figure 6.4. (continued)

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Moscow’s physical territory, its periphery, is not involved in the pedestrianization process, in which the provision of comfortable pedestrian environments is essential. Moreover, the applied policies have been commercially oriented. Moscow, one of the largest cities in Europe in terms of territory and population, is relatively wealthy. Thus, the initiative to create an alternative transport future ultimately represents a political decision (Lowe 1990). Within this framework, urban planning decisions are imbued with political meanings. The case of pedestrianization illustrates that the allocation of municipal resources has been directed at distinct goals (such as making the city attractive for very specific categories of ‘central city’ users, through interventions that benefit a highly mobile and affluent minority) that have not been aimed at the needs of the larger share of city residents. The phenomenon of the polarized centre-periphery structure is deeply rooted in the history of the city as planned in the Soviet era and is divided amongst the administrative centre, production zones and dormitory communities. This historical past continues to have a big impact on social, economic and spatial disparities into the present. The top-down approach is still dominant, and recent pedestrianization developments have re-enforced and reproduced the mechanisms of spatial polarization. Pedestrianization in Moscow is still ongoing (at the time of writing, in 2020). The evolution of pedestrian-friendly space is a relatively new process for Moscow and is currently in transition. This is a continuous evolution, and Moscow is not the only city affected by the changes; as a pioneer, however, it is triggering reforms in pedestrian environments in other Russian cities and will be an example for other postsocialist cities. Yet the ways in which the current processes have unfolded reveal the unequal nature of working for livable cities – as advocated and developed by globetrotting consultants such as Jan Gehl – with policies tending to favour better-off areas in more central locations and often proposing commercialization at the expense of the wider collective and public benefits of public space improvements. Sabina Maslova is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research, Department of Land Economy (UK). She holds a PhD in Urban Studies from Gran Sasso Science Institute, jointly awarded with Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Italy). Her doctoral thesis examined high-skilled transnational migration and socio-spatial behaviour and housing choices in global cities. Sabina works on various urban issues including migrant

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decision-making, housing and planning polices, global mobility, smart cities and digital transformation, modern methods of construction, and human-centred housing design. Tauri Tuvikene is Professor in Urban Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His research covers the intersection of urban cultures, mobilities, cities and policies. His research interests include comparative urbanism and the (re)conceptualization of postsocialism, as well as the experience and regulation of urban mobility, ranging from automobility to walking and public transport. He has published widely on these topics in various journals as well as coediting (together with Wladimir Sgibnev and Carola S. Neugebauer) the book Post-­socialist Urban Infrastructures (Routledge, 2019). He was Project Leader for a HERA-funded project on public transport as public space (2019–2022).

Notes 1. Periphery is understood in this chapter as the territory of the city between the city centre and the Moscow Automobile Ring Road (abbreviated in Russian as MKAD). It is also known as the city’s ‘inner periphery’ (Brade et al. 2014) to distinguish it from suburban territories beyond MKAD. 2. In 2011–2012 Moscow increased its size considerably via its annexation of areas on its southern and southwest outskirts. As a result, the administrative territory of the city has grown from 1,091 to 2,511 square kilometres. The newly acquired part, called ‘New Moscow’, is an area of relatively low urbanization, counting around 250,000 inhabitants. Population density within the borders of ‘Old Moscow’ was estimated in 2016 to be 11,500 people per square kilometre. 3. That includes peripheral areas in the western direction where many wealthy Muscovites live (Brade et al. 2014), who in any case care little about pedestrian environments in their immediate surroundings because they mostly drive. 4. Work on the new Master Plan, which includes forecasts up to 2025, was still in progress at the time the research was done. 5. The TomTom Traffic Index assesses traffic congestion in major cities around the world. TomTom provides all-day congestion indexes and indexes for peak hours (heaviest traffic peaks during the morning and evening hours). The traffic indexes rate congestion based on the additional time necessary to complete a trip compared to those made under free-flow conditions (http://www.tomtom. com/en_gb/). 6. Acknowledged by Afisha magazine in 2012–2014 and by TimeOut Moscow in 2015. 7. He claims in the official statement that the number of pedestrians in the renovated streets has increased by 2.5 times from 2010 to 2016. Available on Department of Health of the City of Moscow website archive: http://old.mosgorzdrav.ru/ mgz/komzdravsite.nsf/va_WebPages/news_009843?OpenDocument (accessed on 13 June 2016).

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References Allison, Eric W. and Lauren Peters. 2010. Historic Preservation and the Livable City. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Argenbright, Robert. 2008. ‘Avtomobilshchina: Driven to the Brink in Moscow’, Urban Geography 29(7): 683–704. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.29.7.683. Argenbright, Robert, Viktoria R. Bityukova, Pavel L. Kirillov, Alla G. Makhrova and Tatiana G. Nefedova. 2020. ‘Directed Suburbanization in a Changing Context: “New Moscow” Today’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 61(3): 211–39. https://doi. org/10.1080/15387216.2019.1707700. Atlas of Urban Expansion. 2014. The NYU Urban Expansion Program. Available online at: http://atlasofurbanexpansion.org/cities/view/Moscow (last accessed 2 Feb 2023). Banister, David. 2002. Transport Planning. London: Spon Press. ____. 2008. ‘The Sustainable Mobility Paradigm’, Transport Policy 15(2): 73–80. Blinkin, Mikhail. 2014. ‘City Transport Strategies: History and Evident Conclusions for Moscow’, in Theo Deutlinger (ed.), Urban Routines: Cars. Moscow: Strelka Institute. Brade, Isolde, Alla G. Makhrova and Tat`yana Nefedova. 2014. ‘Suburbanization in Moscow’s Urban Region’, in Kiril Stanilov and Ludĕk Sykora (eds), Confronting Suburbanization: Urban Decentralization in Postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 97–133. Brömmelstroet, Marco te, Anna Nikolaeva, Meredith Glaser, Morten Skou Nicolaisen and Carmen Chan. 2017. ‘Travelling Together Alone and Alone Together: Mobility and Potential Exposure to Diversity’, Applied Mobilities 2: 1–15. Castillo-Manzano, José I., Lourdes Lopez-Valpuesta and Juan P. Asencio-Flores. 2014. ‘Extending Pedestrianization Processes Outside the Old City Center: Conflict and Benefits in the Case of the City of Seville’, Habitat International 44: ­194–201. Cox, Wendel. 2014. ‘Traffic Congestion in the World: 10 Worst and Best Cities’. Available online at: http://www.newgeography.com/content/004504-traffic-con​ges​ tion-world-10-worst-and-best-cities (accessed on 13 June 2016). Darieva, Tsypylma, Wolfgang Kaschuba and Melanie Krebs. 2011. Urban Spaces after Socialism: Ethnographies of Public Places in Eurasian Cities. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag. Dokmeci, Vedia, Ufuk Altunbas and Burcin Yazgi. 2007. ‘Revitalisation of the Main Street of a Distinguished Old Neighbourhood in Istanbul’, European Planning Studies 15: 153–66. Enright, Theresa. 2016. The Making of Grand Paris: Metropolitan Urbanism in the Twenty-First Century. Boston, MA: MIT Press. ____. 2019. ‘Transit Justice as Spatial Justice: Learning from Activists’, Mobilities 14(5): 665–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1607156. Evans, Peter B. 2002. Livable Cities? Urban Struggles for Livelihood and Sustainability. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gant, Robert. 2002. ‘Shopmobility at the Millennium “Enabling” Access in Town Centres’, Journal of Transport Geography 10: 123–33. Gehl, Jan. 1987. Life between Buildings: Using Public Space. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. ____. 1989. ‘A Changing Street Life in a Changing Society’, Places 6(1): 8–17. ____. 2010. Cities for People. Washington, DC: Island Press.

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Gehl Architects. 2013. Available online: ‘Moscow – Towards a Great City for People’ https://issuu.com/gehlarchitects/docs/moscow_pspl_selected_pages (last accessed 2 February 2023). GIBDD 2010. ‘Chislo avtomobiley v Moskve pochti dostiglo 4 mln. yedinits’ [The Number of Cars in Moscow has almost reached 4 Million Units], Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Grigoryan, Yuri (ed.). 2013. Archaeology of the Periphery. Moscow: Moscow Urban Forum. Guest, Peter, Paul Matthews and Mike Slinn. 2005. Traffic Engineering Design: ­Principles and Practice. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Hass-Klau, Carmen. 1993. ‘A Review of the Evidence from Germany and the UK’, Transport Policy 1: 21–31. ____. 2014. The Pedestrian and the City. New York: Routledge. Hatoyama, Kiichiro. 2011. ‘The Traffic Situation and the Future Direction of Moscow Region’, in Proceedings of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies Vol. 8 (The 9th International Conference of Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, 2011). Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, pp. 22–22. Available online at: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/eastpro/2011/0/2011_0_22/_ pdf (accessed 29 June 2020). Hirt, Sonia. 2013. ‘Whatever Happened to the (Post) Socialist City?’, Cities 32: 29–38. Interfax. 2009. ‘Srednyaya skorost dvizheniya avtomobiley po Moskve ne prevyshayet 22 km/chas’ [The Average Speed of Cars in Moscow does not exceed 22 km/h]. Interfax. International Monetary Fund. 2013. ‘Estimates of GPD (PPP) with the Data from International Monetary Fund, Report for Selected Countries and Subjects’, World Economic Outlook Database. October 2013. Iranmanesh, Nasim. 2008. ‘Pedestrianisation a Great Necessity in Urban Designing to Create a Sustainable City in Developing Countries’, ITE Journal. Kalyukin, Alexander, Thomas Boren and Andrew Byerley. 2015. ‘The Second Generation of Post-Socialist Change: Gorky Park and Public Space in Moscow’, Urban Geography 36: 674–95. Karrholm, Mattias. 2008. ‘The Territorialisation of a Pedestrian Precinct in Malmo: Materialities in the Commercialisation of Public Space’, Urban Studies 45: 1903–24. Kębłowski, Wojciech and David Bassens. 2017. ‘“All Transport Problems Are Essentially Mathematical”: The Uneven Resonance of Academic Transport and Mobility Knowledge in Brussels’, Urban Geography 39(3): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.108 0/02723638.2017.1336320. Kirillov, Pavel and Alla Makhrova. 2013. ‘Dinamika chislennosti I plotnosti naseleniya’ [Dynamics of Population and Population Density], Demoscope 551–52. Kotus, Jacek and Michał Rzeszewski. 2013. ‘Between Disorder and Livability: Case of One Street in Post-Socialist City’, Cities 32: 123–34. Kunstler, James Howard. 1994. Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. New York: Simon and Schuster. Levinson, Alexey. 2013. ‘Static and Fluid in the Moscow Urban Fringe’, in Yuri Grigoryan (ed.), Archaeology of Periphery. Moscow: Moscow Urban Forum. Lowe, Marcia D. 1990. ‘Alternatives to the Automobile: Transport for Livable Cities’, Ekistics 269–82.

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Lynch, Michael. 1993. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Makarova, Ekaterina. 2005. ‘The New Urbanism in Moscow: The Redefinition of Public and Private Space’. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the ­British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (Cambridge). Martinotti, Guido. 1999. ‘A City for Whom? Transients and Public Life in the ­Second-Generation Metropolis’, in Sophie Body-Gendrot and Robert A. Beauregard (eds), The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City. London: SAGE, pp. 155–85. McCann, Eugene J. 2008. ‘Livable City/Unequal City: The Politics of Policy-Making in a “Creative” Boomtown’, Interventions Economiques 37. Middleton, Jennie. 2010. ‘Sense and the City: Exploring the Embodied Geographies of Urban Walking’, Social and Cultural Geography 11(6): 575–96. Moscow Government. 2014. Programma razvitiya Moskvu – Moskva gorod udobnuy dlya zhizni [Programme for Moscow Development – Moscow as a Livable City]. Moscow. Robertson, Kent A. 1993. ‘Pedestrianization Strategies for Downtown Planners – ­Skywalks versus Pedestrian Malls’, Journal of the American Planning Association 59: 361–70. ROSSTAT. 2016. Population Estimates. State Committee for Statistics. Rudolph, Robert and Isolde Brade. 2005. ‘Moscow: Processes of Restructuring in the Post-Soviet Metropolitan Periphery’, Cities 22: 135–50. Rusanov, Aleksandr Valer’evich. 2015. ‘Russian Specifics of Dacha Suburbanization Process: Case Study of the Moscow Region’, Economic and Social Changes-Facts Trends Forecast 42(6): 232–45. Šeštokas, Vaclovas. 1980. ‘The Inter-Relation of a Town and Its Transport System’, Habitat International 5: 489–97. Shatilo, Daria. 2015. ‘Role of the Residential Real Estate Market in the Ethnosocial Differentiation of European Capitals: London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and Moscow’, Regional Research of Russia 5: 45–57. Sheller, Mimi. 2017. ‘From Spatial Turn to Mobilities Turn’, Current Sociology 65(4): 623–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392117697463. Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. 2000. ‘The City and the Car’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24: 737–57. Slinn, Mike, Paul Matthews and Peter Guest. 2005. ‘13-Public Transport Priority’, Traffic Engineering Design. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, pp. 166–79. Soja, Edward W. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Southworth, Michael. 2005. ‘Reinventing Main Street: from Mall to Townscape Mall’, Journal of Urban Design 10: 151–70. Tarkhov, Sergej. 2004. ‘Regionalnye razlichiya v avtomobilizatsii v Rossii’ [Regional Differences in Automobilization in Russia]. Paper presented at the X International Science and Practice Conference (Ekaterinburg). TASS. 2017. ‘Number of Cars in Moscow Quintuples over 27 Years – Mayor’, TASS Russian News Agency, 14 December 2017. Available online at: https://tass.com/ society/981132 (accessed on 29 April 2021). Ter-Voskanyan, Olga S. 2018. ‘Regularities of the Formation of the City Pedestrian Environment’, Academia. Architecture and Construction 3: 94–99. Available

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online at: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/zakonomernosti-formirovaniya-pe​ shehodnoy-sredy-v-gorode (last accessed 2 February 2023). Tolley Rodney, S. and Brian John Turton. 1995. Transport Systems, Policy and Planning: A Geographical Approach. Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical. TomTom. 2015. TomTom Traffic Index: Measuring Congestion Worldwide. Available online at: http://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/trafficindex/ (accessed on 30 April 2016). Topp, Hartmut and Tim Pharoah. 1994. ‘Car-Free City Centres’, Transportation 21: 231–47. Transport for London (TfL). 2018. ‘Travel in London Report’, Transport for London. Available online at: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-report-11.pdf (last accessed 2 February 2023). Trubina, Elena. 2020. ‘Sidewalk Fix, Elite Maneuvering and Improvement Sensibilities: The Urban Improvement Campaign in Moscow’, Journal of Transport Geography 83: 102655. Vuchic, Vukan R. 1999. Transportation for Livable Cities. New York: Routledge. Walljasper, Jay. 2008. ‘Brave New Nonmotorized World’, Planning 74: 20–23. Yiu, Chung Yim. 2011. ‘The Impact of a Pedestrianisation Scheme on Retail Rent: An Empirical Test in Hong Kong’, Journal of Place Management and Development 4: 231–42. Yuen, Belinda and Chin Hoong Chor. 1998. ‘Pedestrian Streets in Singapore’, Transportation 25: 225–42. Zhelnina, Anna. 2013. ‘Learning to Use “Public Space”: Urban Space in Post-Soviet St. Petersburg’, The Open Urban Studies Journal 6: 57–64. Zipori, Esther and Maurie J Cohen. 2015. ‘Anticipating Post-Automobility: Design Policies for Fostering Urban Mobility Transitions’, International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development 7: 147–65. Zupan, Daniela and Mirjam Büdenbender. 2019. ‘Moscow Urban Development: Neoliberal Urbanism and Green Infrastructures’, in Tauri Tuvikene, Wladimir Sgibnev and Carola S. Neugebauer (eds), Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures. London: Routledge, pp. 125–41.

CHAPTER 7

5 Between Non-Place and Public Space

Life at a Postsocialist (Trolley)Bus Stop Andrei Vazyanau

Waiting at a bus, tram or trolleybus stop is an everyday routine for many postsocialist commuters, taking up considerable amounts of their time. Many in Ukraine and Romania, the two countries that provide the main ethnographic examples for this chapter, cannot afford to buy their own cars and instead rely on public transport inherited from the socialist past. Yet public transport suffers from numerous deficiencies, such as deteriorating infrastructure and a badly maintained rolling stock, which leads to increased wait times for passengers at public transport stops. They wait together at these stops, which Chantal Akerman’s film From the East (D’Est, 1993) documented in an almost iconic fashion. Despite being typical elements within any urban street environment, public transport stops, shelters and terminals are hardly ever considered inviting spaces worth looking at in terms of their everyday ‘social’ potential. They are often seen as examples of what Marc Augé has called nonplaces (Augé 1995): these anonymous and transient spaces function primarily to facilitate people’s transit from one place to another. The most commonly held view is that commuters waste their precious time at stops, in ways that are pretty similar to waiting in other non-places such as airports and train stations. Stops do not seem to possess any ‘history’, nor do they produce ‘identity’, that is, a sense of belonging or spatial attachment. At public transport stops, people gather in physical proximity but are not ‘together’ with one another. Urban activists and researchers have begun to question the nonplace-ness of such transit spaces. Grassroots place-makers have started to regard public transport stops as possessing considerable potential to support communities, allowing social interaction to take place.1 A closer look at social life as it manifests itself at the public transport stop reveals that waiting is not just a passive and immobilizing experience but also involves a complex mix of activities such as ­communication,

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the exchange of information, small talk, forms of ‘light’ sociality and leisure. That these supposed ‘non-places’ are bustling and ‘inhabited’ is a result not of formal policies but rather of unplanned ‘vernacular’ practices (Scott 2012: 30–56). In what follows I will show that waiting at a bus, tram or trolleybus stop indeed allows for multifaceted social interactions to develop out of the imperfections of the formal commuting infrastructure. These stops are convivial and inclusive places, and as such their positive qualities may, paradoxically, be lost due to efforts made to minimize wait times. Drawing on ethnographic vignettes from field research carried out at public transport stops in Ukraine and Romania, I will trace how the slow-paced temporal order of the postsocialist street has been transformed with the introduction of new digital technologies aimed at making public transport more efficient and at reducing wait times. Employing Robin Kellermann’s work on the social effects of real-time arrival information systems, I will draw attention to certain ambiguities in what he calls ‘directed waiting’ in the postsocialist city. As soon as municipal agendas and policies eliminate ‘uncertainty’ and ‘waiting’, sociality inevitably tends to disappear. My chapter’s first section describes how public transport stops blend into the urban street environment and thus partly undermine the modernist temporal order that prioritizes planning over spontaneity and efficiency over experience. The second part discusses the various forms of sociality and public life found at public transport stops. I will illustrate their role as information hubs that may be regarded as ‘third places’ of intense social interaction and socializing located in between home and workplace. The concluding section addresses the detrimental changes that the digitalization of mobility infrastructures has brought to these places.

Public Transport Stops and the Urban Street Environment Bus, tram and trolleybus stops form a typical and ubiquitous feature of postsocialist cities, thanks both to the dense network of public transport lines created under socialism and the standardization of the appearance of such stops, in terms of their design for example. Stops are, to varying degrees, materially or visually separated from their surroundings, and of course physical borders matter here: many metro or light rail stations in post-Soviet cities have turnstiles and admission requires a ticket or card. Minor stops, neither materially fixed nor clearly indicated, may be virtually invisible and thus identifiable only by groups of people waiting for

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a bus or some other sort of vehicle. In the Ukrainian and the Romanian cities where I carried out my research, stops usually possess a specific materiality: they are recognizable as public transport stops, although their ‘publicness’ is also shaped by the slowed-down operation and impeded functioning of the public transport system. However, there is something to be gained from increased wait times: these periods offer new opportunities for socializing and for various small entrepreneurial, leisure and other activities. That people must wait and, perhaps against their will, are ‘immobilized’ for a certain amount of time means that they are presented with opportunities to participate in the social or public life unfolding in that very section of the street. The material condition of these stops marks their historical contingencies: they display a socialist design that has been overwritten by postsocialist elements that make manifest the ‘transition’. Their physical appearance is continually subject to transformation by the new realities that inscribe themselves into social relations and practices related to commuting and its infrastructure. In the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, for example, a public transport stop includes far more than a sign and an information board listing the schedules of lines that service the stop.2 Inherited from socialist times, the wooden benches installed in these stops, surrounded by walls on most sides, still serve their key purpose of providing respite and protection from wind, rain and snow. There may

Figure 7.1. Trolleybus stop in Mariupol (2021). © Andrei Vazyanau.

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actually be very little or even no information about the transport lines servicing the stop, but the physical structure is nonetheless there to offer shelter. Around it there may be small kiosks – natural extensions that have grown incrementally around the shelter’s poles-and-roof skeleton. They sell cigarettes and other small items such as chewing gum, mineral water, soft drinks, alcohol, peanut bars, ice cream, condoms and compact discs. One often sees informal street vendors beside them, sometimes with stationary ‘infrastructure’ such as cardboard boxes or tables, sitting on foldable camping stools, selling peanuts, sunflower seeds and cigarettes close to where people are waiting for their trolleybus or bus. Public transport stops are not only visual landmarks but are also familiar places for particular experiences and practices that do not take place anywhere else. Stops are also important and colloquial points of reference for everyday navigation: ‘Which stop do you live at?’ is a commonly asked question when someone is trying to identify someone else’s place of residence. When streets are renamed, as happened in Ukraine after 2014, stops are often ‘forgotten’, their old names kept. Residents continue to use these old names long after they have changed, the old nomenclature serving as a constant reminder of socialist times and the changes that have since taken place. Sometimes private firms symbolically appropriate a stop – as when a company renovates a nearby shelter and adds its name to it, even if it differs from the stop’s official name. For example, in Mariupol, while one trolleybus stop’s formal name is ‘Bread factory’, its physical structure is inscribed with the name of the nightclub located nearby.

Public Transport Stops and the Urban Temporal Order In their materiality and fixedness, public transport stops and terminals both reflect and reproduce waiting as a postsocialist practice. This triggers critical responses from policymakers and scholars, who see unnecessary waiting as a problem that makes public transport less attractive. Not only is time spent at a stop believed to be ‘wasted’ time; hanging out at stops when they are not illuminated may also be deemed dangerous: of course, they appear most often in the mental maps of women as zones of fear and anxiety (Vozyanov 2014). More abstractly, waiting epitomizes the possession of a lower social ranking: to not have to wait is seen as a matter of social prestige and higher status (Bissell 2007; Fuller 2007; Conlon 2011; Sheller 2011). Wealthy individuals can afford cars to make their way around the city, but the less well-to-do

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(workers, the unemployed, pensioners and women) must wait at public transport stops, an imposition that, as Joe Moran writes in reference to the United Kingdom, ‘confirms their status as second-rate citizens’ (Moran 2005: 3). Yet in the postsocialist world, waiting is a predicament affecting entire populations ‘yearning’ for a ‘normal life’, wishing to escape from the ‘abnormal’ situation they find themselves in. Being stuck in the ‘meantime’, as Stef Jansen calls it, they dream about a hoped-for better future (2015). Current waiting will be offset by a utopian future ‘when we finally enter Europe’ (Hartman 2007). In the pursuit of this desired future, the task of policymakers is to eliminate the waiting experience – either by minimizing the loss of time or by turning it into a form of ­entertainment. Harold Schweizer, adopting a more positive attitude to waiting, welcomes it as a temporary relief from ubiquitous ‘time-is-money’ pressures, offering some respite from the hurried and fast-paced nature of modern life (2008). Following his line of reasoning, waiting at the stop is an activity at odds with the city’s capitalist logic and temporal order, as has been pointed out by Jonathan Martineau, who sees an intimate connection between the emergence of clock time and the rise of capitalist production (2015). In capitalism, waiting can be interpreted as a kind of resistance against Taylorist management principles (Johansson and Vinthagen 2016), almost a form of protest against exploitation and consumption (Akingbe 2016; Schweizer 2016: 79). It indeed raises the question: can busy and quiet public transport stops and shelters in postsocialist cities be seen as domains of unconstrained communication and freedom from capitalism? The partly overlapping, partly contradictory meanings of waiting force us to ask what forms of social life, of participation and engagement, are made possible and mediated by public transport stops. How do we study this facet of postsocialist street life without romanticizing the forced stasis imposed on commuters? In this chapter, I will answer these questions through a fine-grained ethnographic analysis, starting from the assumption that we can see not only stops, shelters, stations and terminals but also public transport vehicles as spatiotemporal ‘extensions of the street’ (Walker 2009). These sites are located in the space between home and workplace and, through the exchange of information and participation in urban life, routinely serve as venues that help to manage the tasks of everyday life. Here I will propose that just as postsocialist deregulation has produced unforeseen effects, subsequent attempts at regulation have had (and will have) unexpected outcomes as well.

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The Historical Transformations of Waiting for a Tram or Trolleybus in a Postsocialist City Although the material appearance of public transport stops and shelters has remained virtually the same for decades, the social practices that take place in these places have been significantly transformed. Public transport occupies a prominent spot in people’s memories of the socialist city, as at least until the 1990s cars were available only to the privileged few. I do not have substantial historical data on passengering during socialist times, but the elderly people I interviewed did not mention waiting as a common experience in those days. They pointed out that public transport, though overcrowded, was reliable and frequent. To wait for a tram for more than fifteen minutes was rather exceptional. People regarded prolonged waiting back then as a betrayal of the trust they put into the authorities’ capability to organize efficient public transport. Failing to provide good service was sufficient to trigger action: in Mariupol, I was told, angry commuters walked one or two stations to the tramway depot and blockaded it in protest until the missing tram car was provided to take the workers home. Thus, should we talk about postsocialist waiting as a new kind of waiting? During the 1990s, urban populations in the former socialist world experienced many sudden and radical changes as a result of, for example, the worsening economic situation, the difficulties of securing an existence and procuring food supplies, and the deterioration of various urban infrastructures, all of which affected people’s daily routines and passengering practices. The rapid growth of trade and increased price variation led people to travel more often and more widely, including across international borders, in search of opportunities to buy products more cheaply. The urban geography of labour and workplaces changed, too, as numerous industries shut down, leading to the abandonment and dereliction of industrial areas and the deterioration of residential zones. Some groups, such as pensioners, were still entitled to free public transport, which they had earned under socialism. But at the same time public transport faced dramatic funding cuts, making it impossible to properly maintain and operate these systems. Municipal transport gave way to a system of private and shared taxis called marshrutkas in the post-Soviet space and maxi-taxis in the case of Romania; in some instances such competition caused public transport lines to disappear. Most electric transportation, i.e. tramways and trolleybuses, persisted, offering certain key ‘services of social importance’ but with reduced frequency and unreliable service (Vozyanov 2018). During the 2000s,

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the proliferation of shared taxis led to a stratified regime of competing transport systems in which some passengers waited longer than others. In Ukraine and Romania, public transport competed with private minibus companies, the latter offering a more expensive but faster, more reliable alternative to the irregular trolleybus and tram services. Many lines started to be served both by private marshrutkas and municipal trolleybuses, with marked differences in price and reliability and convenience of service.3 Postsocialist status differences began to be expressed in terms of waittime differentials, as has been described in ethnographic accounts – including in connection with public transport: Stef Jansen chose a bus terminal at the outskirts of Sarajevo, in the Dobrinja district, as an entry point to explore the everyday life of the inhabitants of a Bosnian apartment complex (Jansen 2015). Among many other details, he mentions how the experience was different for passengers entitled to kuponi (i.e. free or reduced-price tickets) and those who had no such ‘privilege’ and had to buy tickets; the latter started using the more expensive ­komercijala – buses owned by private companies, which had much in common with the Ukrainian marshrutkas and the Romanian maxi-taxis. Here the private services have been more expensive but are also faster and more frequent than the municipal trolleybuses and trams. Since they arrive regularly and consistently, they offer commuters a welcome relief from the experience of waiting. However, they do not offer the reduced fares or the free-of-charge rides for pensioners and other groups, as the electric public transport does. The choice people (can) make – taking a shared taxi or waiting for a trolleybus – depends on age, social status, level of income, time economy and ‘busyness’. In any case, the inability of some people to afford a shared taxi carries a stigma. Unlike the komercijala in Sarajevo, marshrutkas in Mariupol do not really provide a more comfortable ride than the municipal ­trolleybuses – they are usually small, crowded and old. The key benefit is that they are fast and come far more frequently. The differences in frequency are indeed striking, which is why waiting and aspects of temporality become particularly important in local passengering experiences: for the more well-off the commute consists primarily of time spent on a marshrutka, whereas for those taking municipal transport the trip is preceded by a long, unpredictable wait. During my fieldwork in 2011–13 in several Ukrainian cities, websites, mobile apps or electronic displays with real-time arrival information were not yet available to citizens. As of 2015–16, the situation was not so much different in the Romanian city of Galați, although timetables were available at the website of the local municipal transport authority. Neither Mariupol nor Galați used

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­ lockwise s­ cheduling, so trolleybuses did not arrive at a stop at fixed c minutes past the hour, making it difficult to predict when the next trolleybus was due to arrive. Thus spending time at stops with strangers who were also waiting there was a part of people’s everyday reality. Even if there is a service schedule posted at the stop, people tend to take its information with a pinch of salt, distrusting the arrival times given. In sum, because car ownership is limited, postsocialist commuting takes time and effort, on a daily basis, for a significant part of the population, much of it being spent ‘waiting’ together with others at public transport stops. Due to the systemic unreliability of public transport services, a ‘collective’ of waiting passengers inhabit the time-space of the particular stop, which is thereby transformed into a site where important everyday activities and urban functions develop and find their specific spatial niche. Public transport stops allow for multifaceted forms of communication, facilitated by the imperfections and (partial) failings of infrastructure, since the ‘must-have’ features of any ‘normal’ public transport service, such as reliability and predictability of arrivals and departures, are lacking.

Sociality of a (Trolley)Bus Stop Here I will provide a close ethnographic portrayal of one particular public transport stop in Mariupol, called vulycia Poljetajeva (Poljetaeva street). The stop is located in the Skhidnyi (Eastern) dormitory district, which was built in the 1980s and is serviced by a combination of buses, trolleybuses and marshrutkas. The stop is as old as the neighbourhood itself and bears the traces of its history. From the outset it was one of the best-indicated and immediately recognizable public transport stops, consisting of a structure with a roof and benches. During the 1990s, a kiosk was put up next to it, with small window displays full of bottles, cigarette packs and chocolate bars. I remember (as a child) how people would smoke their first morning cigarette here or buy bread to take home in the evening. Every so often grandparents would treat their grandchildren to a candy bar. During the 1990s, new postsocialist retail activity and consumption developed at these stops. Although most ordinary citizens waiting for a bus resisted the whims of buying sweets or chocolate bars, the ‘occasional’ consumption of such items nevertheless evolved precisely around the transport infrastructure. The stop is graced with an announcement board, with private ads attached or hanging next to it on the walls – handwritten and printed notes offering services, goods, trades, items and property for sale, or

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announcing various events. There are also notes that ask people for help and information in connection with missing persons, animals or objects. Hence, stops provide suitable venues for multilayered forms of communication, what James Duncan calls the ‘urban text’ (2005), which, in this particular case, can be taken literally, as words written and printed on paper spread particular messages. Duncan uses the notion of ‘city as text’ conceptually, as a starting point for his ‘reading’ of culturally produced urban landscapes, but I am applying his notion more directly to analyse what sort of communicative urban landscapes are crafted by mobility infrastructures. In Duncan’s approach, power relations form a key aspect of urban landscapes, and the case is no different here: public transport stops in a city like Mariupol indeed revolve around power relations that shift over the course of history. The recent permutations of these relations signal privatization and mismanagement on the part of the state and voluntarism on the part of local entrepreneurs. At the same time, one can spot an increasing variety and fragmentation at trolleybus stops and along public transport lines, indicating what has come to characterize postsocialist streets in general: growing social diversity and economic inequality. Social diversity manifests itself at the Poljetajeva trolleybus stop through the multiplicity of ads and announcements, along with people’s varied appearances and behaviour. Hence a public transport stop is where people of various backgrounds meet and where societal transformations and social divides become manifest, sometimes spectacularly so. During the 1990s, for example, public transport stops became the prime sites of ‘crisis’ and showed how people attempted to cope. Local newspapers in Galați (Romania) have documented diverse behavioural responses and coping mechanisms occurring at trolleybus stops, ranging from homeless people using stops as overnight shelters to children turning huge puddles formed by water and sewer leaks into playgrounds, from pickpockets exploiting the opportunities of overcrowded stops and vehicles, to frustrated bus drivers going on strike.4 In Mariupol, public transport was similarly ‘colourful’ at the time, populated by a variety of destitute characters: young drunkards, miserable beggars and companionless pensioners in need of assistance, all turning the stops into rather sorrowful spectacles. Also, in Mariupol, there was the added risk of pickpockets, aggressive panhandling and sexual assault in the dark of night. By contrast, small children – happily observed by elderly onlookers – would enliven the space with their careless noise. Most young professionals use marshrutkas to go to the centre of town, unlike the pensioners, students, young parents with children and

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people of pre-retirement age who prefer the less expensive trolleybuses. ­Members of these groups are the main participants in the ‘social life’ at the stop, which is why I prefer to use the term ‘trolleybus stop’ over ‘bus stop’ even if some fleeting presence of those taking marshrutkas remains. Most passengers are heading to the central Livoberezhnyi district, a mere fifteen-minute ride; any marshrutka or trolleybus pausing at the stop will take them there – but prices indeed differ. Given waits of twenty minutes or longer for a trolleybus, people use the time to talk to one another. These conversations may be brief or, depending on how long the wait is, may last a bit longer, and they occur both between friends, relatives and acquaintances who usually meet there and between strangers. Some people exchange comments (usually of a critical kind) on the transport service, others discuss the new food prices, the failing communal services and various other news. Relatives, friends and acquaintances might also share personal news: they may otherwise not have so many occasions to meet, and no other place in the neighbourhood is as popular and as frequently visited as the trolleybus stop. Many people read the ads on the boards and the walls or talk to each other about everyday problems and how to cope with them, doing so simply out of curiosity, without any particular purpose in mind. Not always immediately relevant, this information may come in handy later. For example, my grandmother recalls how she once made the acquaintance of a woman while waiting for a trolleybus. The stranger told her about a goat she owned. A few months later, a doctor recommended one of our relatives to drink goat milk – so my grandmother sought out the woman at the same stop and arranged for her to provide the milk from her animal. Waits at the stop also allow people to discuss political issues, or at least they did up until 2014, when Mariupol started to be affected by the war in nearby Donbas and the topic of politics became too sensitive to discuss in public. Not affected by war, the Romanian trolleybus stops continue to perform that role. I remember how in 2016, at the bus stop Eforie Nord in the city of Constanța, a bus passed by in the daytime without stopping and made its way to a garage, triggering a barrage of sardonic and obscene remarks about former city mayor Radu Mazar, who had abolished tramway and trolleybus transportation in the city. During his tenure Eforie Nord had been transformed into a ‘former’ trolleybus stop primarily used by pensioners, who had been the key beneficiaries of public transport. As maxi-taxis were now the only option, what had formerly been cost-free access to transport was no more. Even though the frankness with which they were venting their frustration made me wonder how much the conspicuous ‘silences’ in Mariupol

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were a consequence of political taboos or forms of r­epression, each trolleybus shelter continues to implicitly communicate social realities and forms of knowledge about the city – including ‘facts’ that are not visible at home and are not shared by the mass media. Waiting indefinitely at a stop for a tram or trolleybus to arrive is a manifestation of failures on the part of the state or the authorities, since it is they who, not long before, had claimed responsibility for the upkeep of transportation infrastructures, now dysfunctional or defunct. The generational differences evident in the ‘typical’ activities taking place at the stop are striking. Small children, when meeting their peers at the stop, start to play. Teenagers with smartphones are far less interested in this kind of ‘offline’ communication. Men in their thirties drink alcohol, while elderly persons – by far the most numerous group – mostly engage in mutual social exchange and communication. They talk to each other, observing and commenting on others on the street or at the stop, and not infrequently they chat with the children who are there. Quite a few street vendors belong to this age group; for them the stop is a place to earn a bit of income, have some fun with others, exchange news or enjoy some leisure activity, although sometimes the heat, rain or freezing wind makes things tough on them. The trolleybus stop possesses a certain temporal order and daily dynamic as well. Very early morning people usually greet each other (as they also do inside the trolleybus), as at 5am it is always the same ‘early birds’ who can be seen using public transport punctually, more than is the case in the daytime. Throughout the day, the regimes of privacy shift: rush-hour conversations are shorter and at these times people may prefer not to talk – just as the transport gets busier. After the morning rush hour, talkative mothers with children and pensioners going to the market or the hospital animate social life at the stop once again. In the evening, when most workers have returned home, the kiosks remain open, and drunkards lie on the benches or underneath them, embarrassing passengers and passersby. Occasionally, the elderly will ask a drunkard to hail a shared taxi, because the marshrutka drivers prefer not to stop when they see an elderly person waving (entitled as they are to free public transport in Mariupol). Otherwise, drunkards cause pity, disgust and fear in passengers waiting at the stop. Elderly passengers may comment that this type of behaviour was not tolerated under socialism, showing nostalgia for the times when this behaviour was suppressed in public. Hence stops also become places of communal remembering about a past that was in some respects ‘better’.

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The (Trolley)Bus Shelter as Public Space Bus and trolleybus stops can be seen as pop-up spaces of ‘light’ sociality, sharing many similarities with ‘public spaces’ and ‘third places’ and engendering ‘communities of practice’. In other words, stops are similar to the ‘traditional’ public spaces such as urban squares, pedestrian zones, parks and promenades, performing a key role as a ‘meeting place, marketplace and connection space’5 where people watch others or can be watched themselves. As ‘convivial spaces’, they are ‘open, public ­locations … where citizens can gather, linger or wander through’ (Shaftoe 2008: 4). The stops that I am describing here can indeed be used and accessed freely even by those who are not intending to commute; no entry ticket is required. Like many such spaces, they may offer shelter or shade from the sun and provide benches to sit on. They are not clearly demarcated the way a closed room or vehicle would be, and, like city squares and parks, they are never so crowded as to prevent ‘private’ conversations. Waiting, like other social activities happening on streets, normally entails being together with others: the minimal precondition for ­sociality to emerge. Apart from interactions directly triggered by passengering – such as queuing, asking and answering questions about the next bus, etc. – other forms of communication can emerge here, though these bear the imprint of waiting for a trolleybus together. They crop up in the space of waiting and the shared experience of some degree of uncertainty. The nature of waiting and the degree of uncertainty, in more general terms the local spatiotemporal regime of waiting, are important factors in understanding what social practices emerge, and how they manifest themselves, at a trolleybus stop. Speaking about the trolleybus stop as a ‘public space’, I am not suggesting that the stop is an ideal example in this regard. Rather, publicness can be seen as a ‘fractal’ aspect of social life at the stop, not some binary opposition to privateness (Gal and Kligman 2000: 37–62). Indeed, conversations at a trolleybus stop may contain both public and private aspects – so that topics considered too intimate or embarrassing would probably not be discussed here, or if so, these conversations would transpire only in lowered voices. Choosing a topic to talk about at the stop requires, by default, that it be considered publicly acceptable or palatable. It is unexceptional to hear people commenting on others’ conversations while at the stop, as would never happen in a restaurant; this shows that people enjoy having the prerogative to join other people’s ‘chats’. Some topics are discussed in whispers, so that others will not chime in and attempt to take part in the conversation.

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In other words, a public transport stop allows for only a limited degree of intimacy – due not just to conditions of visibility and audibility but also the stationary quality of proximity and mutual observation. Here people stand together with one another and thus they are not passersby: their experience of the street does not constitute an encounter while in movement (as it is for those walking or looking at the street from a moving car or taxi). Instead, the fixed position of the waiting passenger at a stop enables the street to more fully express, in its own diachronic contingency, coherence and recognizable character. Wiebke Porombka suggests that passengers in public transport (including at stations and stops) constitute a kind of ad hoc Gesellschaft that emerges when one makes a trip (2011). Waiting together, calling or hailing the dispatcher, queuing or figuring out and writing down the hard-to-remember timetable are indeed examples of this kind of ‘popup’ communality amongst commuters. In my view, however, this sociality is not limited to the flashes of community that emerge out of the blue and disappear after the trolleybus departs. Trolleybus shelters also facilitate more sustained and deeper social links, connections that are revived or activated repeatedly as locals go there to commute and to exchange information – visually, textually and through verbal communication and mutual observation. There is also a wide range of situations in which people – ­strangers, acquaintances as well as travelling passengers – come to the stop and stay there without having any intention of boarding a vehicle. As such, stops may be seen as ‘third places’, as temporary refuges from the home or workplace, locales where people can indeed meet friends, neighbours, coworkers and strangers (Oldenburg 1991). For Oldenburg, the key feature of a third place is its facilitation of conversations. Although not designed for conversations, a trolleybus stop is indeed often used for this purpose by members of various groups. Stops are regularly ‘occupied’ not only by passengers but also by alcoholics or street vendors – as members of both these groups can do ‘their thing’ here with minimal expenditure. Another group that happily makes use of the presence of people at stops are proselytizers for neo-Protestant and other religious sects. It is a common phenomenon for Jehovah’s Witnesses to start a conversation; it helps, of course, that passengers are waiting there at the stop. It is commonly assumed that Jehovah’s Witnesses hang out at stops because their religious creed obliges them to proselytize and thus to spend a considerable number of hours per week or month evangelizing. Making their case to passengers waiting at public transport stops helps them to meet their quota. Last but not least, there are researchers, myself included, who may benefit from

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waiting passengers: I took advantage of the unpredictable wait times at certain stops in MariupoI to conduct brief street surveys amongst elderly commuters. Doing so was not so easy at other stops, where schedules were more predictable and accurate and I encountered the same challenges faced by the Jehovah’s Witnesses proselytizers. At these stops, departures were scheduled at the same time every hour and people would come just five or ten minutes in advance, so I had very little time to interview them. The ‘third place’ quality of public transport stops can be elusive, becoming visible only during brief moments or episodes that are hard to ‘capture’. In Mariupol, for example, I noticed such episodes while observing the passengering practices of the elderly. I also once saw a young couple at a busy terminal in the city centre wanting to get to the Eastern district, who decided not to take a marshrutka but opted instead for a trolleybus going in the same direction. Trolleybuses circulate far less frequently, but this meant that they could enjoy more precious time with each other, the lower fare being only a pretext for a period of longer togetherness. Numerous trolleybuses serving other lines passed by but they were not annoyed and felt none of the normal irritation that comes when waiting is strictly pragmatic. On another occasion, I observed two women absorbed in conversation, chatting as each waited for a different tram. One woman’s tram departed every ten minutes, while the other had a headway of up to twenty-five minutes. The woman waiting for the first decided to skip one tram and said: ‘Anyway, I will have to wait less after you leave, so I will stay’. Doing so prolonged the duration of their conversation, showing that she was applying a more-than-individual time economy to the situation. Intriguingly, centre-bound stops at the city’s periphery (Poljetajeva is one such stop) are particularly productive, dense and animated as urban texts and hubs: passengers usually need to wait longer here, and the same people wait here at the same time every day. Those meeting regularly at the stop are mostly area residents. The messages and notices placed on the board and the walls commonly target a neighbourhood audience. The character of trolleybus stops in the city centre, by contrast, more greatly resembles that of ad hoc ‘third places’, emanating from the overlapping rhythms of different lines. Here headways are short enough for passengers to stop caring about particular departure times. During rush hours, people may get slightly nervous about missing a bus and running late for an appointment, but a moderate vagueness towards ‘being on time’ is tolerated, and exploited, as a social resource.

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A bus stop may have timetables hanging up, but often they are absent. The unpredictability of public transport, in combination with the convenient shelter provided by the solid physical structure of the stop, facilitates and encourages waiting rather than minimizing it. Hence, unreliable trolleybus services, which require people to wait, also provide them with an opportunity to communicate with others and legitimately spend some time in limbo, killing time talking to others. Of course, social life at the stop changes with the seasons: during winter people are loath to wait too long in the freezing temperatures and tend not to be that communicative, but from spring until autumn this dynamic changes, with the stop’s social life intensifying and taking many different forms. Regardless of the time of the year, however, sociality at the stop results from the inevitable unpredictability of public transport, enabling passengers to ‘waste’ a tolerable amount of time on activities that are hardly possible elsewhere. Such activities are integrated into the flow of urban life; they allow for fleeting yet meaningful moments of engagement, compassion and care. The usual ingredients of publicness – that is, the verbal and nonverbal exchanges and communication, the people observing one another and acting out, the performativity and theatricality of individuals navigating and inhabiting such spaces – are clearly visible at the bus stop, too (Low and Smith 2013). Last but not least, they are convivial spaces allowing for some degree of inclusion. For instance, elderly people have a chance here to participate in public life instead of staying alone at home, and to talk with peers and other passengers. Members of other age groups, such as children and teenagers, can also seize these opportunities. At the same time, however, the ethnographic vignettes that follow also show how precarious these social practices are and how close they may be to being obliterated.

The Public Transport Vehicle as an Extension of the Street Social life inside moving public transport vehicles is just as rich as that which transpires at the stops themselves. The interior of vehicles certainly possesses ‘street potential’; such an environment can be seen as an extension of the street, marked by dynamic and elusive social space characteristics. In a tram, as I experienced in Bucharest, one can meet street musicians, beggars and traders selling various items such as flowers, socks and clothes pegs, and one can also hear people engaging in ‘public’ debates. Once I observed how a man in his thirties embarked on a rambling speech on Romanian politics and relations with the European Union and Russia. For several minutes, no one interrupted him.

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People tried to suppress their giggles, after which they got bored and ‘turned on’ blanker, less engaged faces. Finally, an elderly man started to talk back to the orator. His considerate response transformed the situation: no longer a spectacle performed by a cranky eccentric, it had now, by the very fact of the elderly man responding to the rambling monologue, become a dialogue. It was interesting for me to hear passengers getting off at the next stop (as I myself was doing) discussing things they had just heard on the tram. So even if the tram did not turn into an ‘agora’ all at once, it nonetheless served as a medium for the dispersal of particular political messages. Vehicles can also become venues for exchanges of a less overtly political and more private nature, as I regularly observed in trams servicing a former industrial district of Mariupol while travelling with my granny or on my own. The tram was a place for occasional encounters between former employees of the steelworks: old colleagues and friends exchanged all sorts of news, whether about common acquaintances, the birth of grandchildren, moving homes, illnesses or people who had died. My grandmother, who often took this tram to visit friends or one of the local cemeteries, always sighed, with her typical mixture of anticipation and apprehension, ‘again I will meet someone at the tram …’ . In both Bucharest and Mariupol, the two temporalities of being at the stop and being in a vehicle are closely interconnected: on frequently serviced lines, one is more likely to meet someone and share some time with them; the more unpredictable and infrequent the service, the more personal the communication can be expected to be. Also, the duration of the average trip on busy lines in the city centre is relatively limited – so that even an encounter between friends might result in nothing more than a bit of small talk or a greeting. By contrast, travel from the city centre to a peripheral district may last more than half an hour: meeting someone at a stop plus commuting together to the outskirts can thus be of comparable duration – and warmth – to a friendly get-together at home.

Directed Waiting and Street Life As of 2019, trolleybus stops in Mariupol were still remarkably social. And yet this sociality has, to a certain extent, altered compared to what I observed in 2011. This change is due to a combination of factors, such as various economic processes (people now shopping in supermarkets), transportation policies (new municipal bus services gradually replacing

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the marshrutkas) and the authorities’ attempts to improve passengers’ experience by an increased use of digital technologies. Another important development has been the ubiquitous spread of technological innovations such as smartphones, Wi-Fi, 3G internet and GPS systems. Together with the digitalization of traffic planning and geo-tracking in urban life, time spent at the stop is becoming the target of what Robin Kellermann (2017) has called ‘directed waiting’ – new technologies that make public transportation more efficient, first and foremost through the introduction and implementation of real-time arrival information systems (RTIS). The first such devices appeared in Mariupol in 2017 in the form of fancy glowing electronic displays fixed on poles next to the ‘socialist’ shelter. The stop at Poljetajeva street has changed as a result of this process. Electronic displays, showing the times of the next bus and trolleybus departures, have appeared not only here but at almost thirty other trolleybus stops in Mariupol. Although they still function erratically, they have started to show ever more exactly the arrival time of the next vehicle. Other ‘online’ innovations are not immediately visible on the street but nevertheless affect how people come to the stop and spend time there: the Mariupol public transport authority has introduced a handy website with maps and timetables for every stop, as well as an online GPS tracking system that allows passengers to trace the location of every vehicle. Directed waiting coincides with other engineered transformations of urban space, in particular its transit areas. Many of these urban interventions align with Michael Herzfeld’s notion of ‘spatial cleansing’, the declared or alleged modernization (or ‘Westernization’) of urban space through the banishment of various ‘awkward’ and ‘undesired’ elements, including certain categories of people (Herzfeld 2006). The previously ubiquitous small street retail shop is currently considered an anachronism, and retail businesses are now forced to relocate to warm and shiny shopping malls or are replaced by chain stores located on revamped shopping streets. The Moscow authorities carried out one of the most brutal forms of such spatial cleansing during the ‘night of the long shovels’, removing thousands of small kiosks in a matter of hours (Ivanov 2018).6 Although in mid-sized and peripheral cities like Mariupol and Galați these processes have occurred with some delay, the trend is nevertheless notable everywhere: the old and spacious ‘socialist’ woodwith-concrete trolleybus shelters have now been replaced with smaller, state-of-the-art glass pavilions that do not allow vendors to carve out a space of their own for their small businesses. Their perfect transparency indicates that it is inappropriate to post announcements here;7 there

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is only space for one or two large commercial posters to be hung in a dedicated glass display case, unsuited and unaffordable for ordinary citizens. These standardized, transparent and colourless pavilions, virtually without benches, point to the denormalization of waiting. New shelters have very few (if any) seats. Instead, they have been fitted with RTIS displays. Modifying the previously described assemblage of socially productive waiting spaces at bus stops, they point to the inherent tension between the creation of animated public spaces and the provision of user-friendly efficient public transport. In other words, the elimination of waiting through RTIS systems is somehow undermining efforts to improve public spaces in cities. In contrast with New Urbanism approaches inspired by Rob Krier (2009) and his ilk, policymaking in the public transport sector focuses rather on the reduction of waiting and the elimination of unpredictability. These aims inevitably reduce the social communicative opportunities or the ‘publicness’ of trolleybus stops and public transport. Here the Mariupol story shows parallels with the ‘bus shelter revolution’ as described by Joe Moran with regard to Liverpool (Moran 2005: 5–7). The erection of glass pavilions at stops tends to change this type of street furniture from a civic space to a marketing instrument for companies advertising themselves. In mimicking these processes, the authorities in Mariupol may know next to nothing about the transnational advertising that drive this process in Great Britain – the glass walls of the new trolleybus stops remain largely unused – but their measures nevertheless produce a similar effect, turning public transport shelters into ‘clean’ but hostile, uninhabitable places. A key factor impacting these spaces of waiting is the planners’ and traffic engineers’ aspiration to speed up public transport via rapid (rail or bus) transit lines. In practice, tramways are often rolled out in the middle of the street, physically separated from the pavements and other pedestrian zones via car lanes and underground passages. Such spatial solutions create a situation of contained ‘waiting islands’ in the middle of broad streets dominated by motorized traffic. Here, traffic security requirements end up disrupting public spaces and eliminating what had heretofore served as the urban social fabric. Due to the combination of spatial and temporal ‘tidiness’, bus stops and waiting spaces at street level start to resemble subway stations where one no longer sees people putting up small notes, children playing or youngsters hanging out drinking alcohol. Directed waiting is commensurate with spatial cleansing. This change in the temporal quality of stops aims to achieve maximal efficiency and certainty, eliminating the unpredictability that had become normal in Eastern European urban spaces. It is implemented via the introduction

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of clock-face scheduling (recurring departures at the same minutes within every hour), real-time arrival information systems and mobile apps. Another trend in directed waiting is the information provided by Google indicating how crowded a particular place may be and when to visit it to save time. These new digital tools and efficiency measures in the management of public transport and street life will, however, inevitably lead to the gradual banishment of forms of informal sociality from public spaces and streets. The common alternative is, predictably, a shopping mall that draws many formerly dispersed small enterprises into a secluded, semi-privatized space. More often than not, ‘effective timing’ technology has been introduced gradually and in parts and with the usual trials and tribulations, causing mixed feelings amongst the local population. In Mariupol, the response to the introduction of RTIS displays in 2017 was not entirely positive. Although they look modern and introduce an exciting innovation into the space of a post-Soviet city, bloggers contributing to the local online platforms have criticized the prioritization of ‘knowing more’ over ‘waiting less’. Passengers are perhaps no longer left in the dark about how long they will have to wait, but they still have to wait regardless, and the wait times have not been reduced. This means that passengers do not gain much additional flexibility at the stop. These critics suggested that RTIS decision-makers, instead of ‘showing off’ by implementing the latest public transport gadget, could have used the resources to remedy more important problems, for example the repair of vehicles. Although the uncertainty of waiting at a stop has been reduced, the new RTIS displays provide people with a novel certainty of having to wait for a long time, causing indignation and despair. These new forms of directed waiting are closely linked to the emerging New Urbanism as well as to engineering-driven transit planning and smart urbanism agendas. While ‘New Urbanism is about slowing everything down’,8 the so-called ‘dromological’ urbanism (Virilio 1986) aims at increasing speeds and avoiding any kind of waiting at all. Waiting spaces are now designed in a more minimalist fashion, assuming that people will not want to spend time there. The spontaneous dwelling at so-called non-places is counteracted by the clean new glass surfaces of trolleybus stops, communicating predictable arrival and departure times. Directed waiting does not allow much time for conversation, playing or reading small ads on the announcement board, as it functions under the assumption that everybody wants smooth and rapid transit to the exclusion of all else. Activities that had previously developed around the older ‘unmanaged’ trolleybus stops have now been

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displaced to other (real or virtual) locations – the internet, children’s playgrounds, shopping centres and cafeterias – most of them utterly detached from the street environment. These changes follow the principles of municipal beautification, producing new and long-awaited urban landscapes interpreted as a sign of the authorities’ renewed commitment to urban policies. In Mariupol, the new public transport stops carry an additional political meaning, connected to the war in Donbas: after the city was seized back from separatist forces (which had held it under their control in 2014), the Ukrainian authorities were keen to carry out infrastructural improvements after years of decay. In the Romanian city of Galați stops were also modernized, more or less at the same time, but here the key incentive was ‘Europeanization’, with the EU funding the reconstruction of tram lines in Romanian cities. Amongst other things, this has meant the creation of secure waiting islands adjacent to the tram rails, without roofs or surfaces to stick things on. Though serving different agendas, both cases perform a role as showcases of positive change introduced by the authorities.

Conclusion Public transport stops clearly bear the imprint of local social orders but also signal far more than merely the postsocialist status inequalities between those who can afford to drive cars and those who use public transport. In Ukrainian and Romanian cities, the stop – the bus, tram or trolleybus shelter – provides space for commuters to share and exchange information, and these locales occasionally also serve as a ‘third place’ for others in search of alternative dwelling. Stops also offer spaces for postsocialist retail, small-scale trade and consumption. Particularly in the peripheral neighbourhoods, stops perform an important role as community spaces, fostering and sustaining, on a daily basis, social connections between strangers, acquaintances, friends and relatives. Public transport stops are thus genuinely and quintessentially social spaces that should not be labelled, as is commonly the case, as non-places, as such a designation denies their capacity to generate meanings, stories and social attachments. They form an important part of what makes the urban street environment essential in processes of placemaking, as is emphasized by the adherents of New Urbanism committed to rehabilitating pedestrian traffic in urban space. Nevertheless, stops have also been ‘modernized’, and as such they exemplify a tension between the modernist focus on speeding up traffic and the

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New Urbanism’s emphasis on prioritizing pedestrian spaces and using new web-based Smart City technological solutions. The latter spaces have been broken up for the sake of faster vehicular transit. It needs to be recognized that the new public transport stops located in the middle of urban arteries and thoroughfares, equipped with RTIS displays, produce quite different social effects than the ‘old-fashioned’ tram stops I have described in this chapter. The sociality of a postsocialist public transport stop does not solely depend on design. It is also inextricably bound up with the actual fusion and merging of speeds, rhythms and narratives surrounding it. As an assemblage the stop has both arranged and unarranged properties, which have emerged from attempts first to deregulate and then again to regulate public transport by the municipal authorities, the state and various transnational actors. As I have demonstrated, social life at a (trolleybus) stop is facilitated by low service frequency, but not to such an extent that citizens completely refrain from using public transport. To keep stops in their prior condition, so as to preserve a time-space in which waiting is not just a nuisance but also a resource, might be a little too idealistic or naïve; others may see it as an outright provocation, as the waiting and uncertainty, as well as the absence of privacy they endured in postsocialist urban public transport, are sensitive reminders of former suffering. My call for a more convivial public transport to remedy the problems that never existed under socialism (such as mass car mobility or congestion) may be vulnerable to criticism that it rebrands an old evil as a new blessing. If urban spaces are to be improved and renewed along the lines of new narratives emphasizing balance, compromise and temporariness (Carmona 2015), then slowness – that is, slower public transport and a bit of waiting – may be included as a positive social value within this urban agenda. The micro-sociality of public transport stops shows us that life in transition does not necessarily mean poverty; it also means diversity. Andrei Vazyanau received his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Regensburg (2018), with a dissertation on the demise of public transport infrastructures, citizens’ responses, and Europeanization in Ukraine and Romania, carrying out extensive fieldwork in these two countries between 2011 and 2016. He teaches at the Department of Social Sciences, European Humanities University, Vilnius. He is also an editor and researcher at the Minsk Urban Platform. Since March 2020 he has reported on everyday life, consumption and leisure during the pandemic and mass repressions in Belarus.

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Notes 1. See, for example, David M. Nelson’s blog post ‘Thinking beyond the Station’ in American cities, published 8 May 2014 on the Project for Public Spaces website (https://www.pps.org/article/thinking-beyond-the-station, last accessed 2 ­February 2023). 2. This chapter was completed before the siege of Mariupol during the 2022 ­Russian invasion of Ukraine. The author’s last visit to Mariupol was in March 2021. 3. In Mariupol, I documented the actual headways (in minutes) for tramways and trolleybuses. They varied greatly per line. For the most frequented lines, the headway was between ten and twenty-five minutes, while for other lines it could be as much as sixty minutes during rush hours (between 5–8am and 1–5pm). Outside of rush hours (8am–1pm and after 5pm), the headways of many lines (especially those running less frequently) remained the same. Yet the waits at some stops also increased twofold to fourfold, making the service completely unpredictable. 4. Reports from the newspaper Viața Liberă, respectively: ‘Singur pe lume. Un copil de 11 ani se “locuiește” într-o stație de autobuz’ (25 May 1998); ‘La trei stații de Centrul Galațiului’ (26 October 1998); ‘O stație de autobuz fără hoți de buzunare’ (5 August 1999); ‘Un șofer al firmei Transurb a refuzat să mai pleci din stație’ (6 December 1999). 5. An article ‘How to Revitalize a City’, https://www.pps.org/article/howtorevital​ izeacity (last accessed 2 February 2023). 6. Similar processes have occurred, with the same kind of ruthlessness, in other postsocialist cities such as Tirana. 7. In Rostov, surfaces are additionally covered with wires in order to prevent the posting of announcements. 8. See, for example following articles about transportation policy from a New Urbanist point of view: http://humantransit.org/2012/09/transit-planners-arefrom-mars-urban-designers-are-from-venus.html and http://humantransit.org/​ 2012/09/the-new-urbanisms-problem-with-transit-emails-of-the-week.html; or urban designer ideas of high-speed trains in USA following New Urbanist ideas http://carbusters.org/2010/01/25/urban-inspirations-andy-kunz-on-new-urban​ ism-and-high-speed-trains-in-america/ (all accessed 2 February 2023).

References Akingbe, Niyi. 2016. ‘Mapping Cavities of Despondency: Waiting as Resistance in Niyi Osundare’s Waiting Laughters’, Journal of Poetry Therapy 29(4): 237–46. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Bissell, David. 2007. ‘Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities’, Mobilities 2(2): 277–98. Carmona, Matthew. 2015. ‘Re-Theorising Contemporary Public Space: a New Narrative and a New Normative’, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability 8(4): 373–405. Conlon, Deirdre. 2011. ‘Waiting: Feminist Perspectives on the Spacings/Timings of Migrant (Im)Mobility’, Gender, Place and Culture 18(3): 353–60.

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Duncan, James. 2005. The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fuller, Gillian. 2007. ‘The Queue Project’, Semiotic Review of Books 16: 1–5. Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman. 2000. The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A ­Comparative-Historical Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hartman, Tod. 2007. ‘Moral Vectors, Transitional Time and a “Utopian Object of Impossible Fullness”’, Social Anthropology 15(2): 187–203. Herzfeld, Michael. 2006. ‘Spatial Cleansing: Monumental Vacuity and the Idea of the West’, Journal of Material Culture 11(1–2): 127–49. Ivanov, Petr. 2018. ‘Lar‘ki i pavil‘ony v postsovetskix gorodax: Scenarii èvoljucii’ [Kiosks and Shopping Units in Post-Soviet Cities: Scenarios of Evolution], Minsk Urban Journal, 3 September 2018. Available online at: https://urbanist.by/larki_i_pavil​ iony/ (accessed on 11 May 2021). Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. New York: Berghahn. Johansson, Anna and Stellan Vinthagen. 2016. ‘Dimensions of Everyday Resistance: An Analytical Framework’, Critical Sociology 42(3): 417–35. Kellermann, Robin. 2017. ‘The Final Countdown: Ambiguities of Real Time Information Systems – “Directing” the Waiting Experience in Public Transport’, in Malene Freudendal-Pedersen, Katrine Hartmann-Petersen and Emmy Laura Perez ­Fjalland (eds), Experiencing Networked Urban Mobilities. New York: Routledge, pp. 19–26. Krier, Léon. 2009. The Architecture of Community. Washington DC: Island Press. Low, Setha and Neil Smith (eds). 2013. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge. Martineau, Jonathan. 2015. ‘The Origin of Clock-Time, and the Origin of Capitalism’, in Time, Capitalism and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time. Leiden: Brill, pp. 47–106. Moran, Joe. 2005. Reading the Everyday. London: Routledge. Oldenburg, Ray. 1991. The Great Good Place. New York: Marlowe and Company. Porombka, Wiebke. 2011. ‘Im Netz vom Netz Neupositionierungen im sozialen Netz Nahverkehr’, in Wiebke Porombka, Heinz Reif and Erhard Schütz (eds), Versorgung und Entsorgung der Moderne: Logistiken und Infrastrukturen der 1920er und 1930er Jahre. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 89–102. Schweizer, Harold. 2008. On Waiting. London: Routledge. ____. 2016. ‘Waiting as Resistance: Lingering, Loafing, and Whiling Away’, Sociologia Internationalis 54(1–2): 79–95. Scott, James. 2012. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, ­Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shaftoe, Henry. 2008. Convivial Urban Spaces: Creating Effective Public Places. London: Earthscan. Sheller, Mimi. 2011. ‘Mobility, Freedom, and Public Space’, in Sigurd Bergmann and Tore Sager (eds), The Ethics of Mobilities: Rethinking Place, Exclusion, Freedom and Environment. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 25–38. Virilio, Paul. 1986 (1977). Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e). Vozyanov, Andrey. 2014. ‘Approaches to Waiting in Mobility Studies: Utilization, ­Conceptualization, Historicizing’, Mobility in History 5: 64–73.

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CHAPTER 8

5 Where the Streets Have No Name

Toponymic Changes, Wayfinding and Tashkent’s System of Orientiry Nikolaos Olma

In 1991, Tashkent – hitherto the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union’s fourth-largest city by population size – became the capital of the newly independent republic of Uzbekistan. In the years that followed, the administration of President Islom Karimov (1991–2016) launched a series of nation-building policies that aimed at removing socialist ideology from all spheres of social life. As part of this process, often referred to as ‘decommunization’ (in Russian: dekommunizatsiia), several monuments, buildings and public spaces symbolically associated with the Soviet era were demolished, modified or replaced with new ones more accurately representing newly minted imaginings of the Uzbek nation. And the official names of thousands of streets, squares, parks, metro stations and city districts, amongst others, were changed in order to achieve this very same objective. As this chapter will argue, this development had a direct impact on the ability of the local population to find their way in the city and to denote any given location to their fellow residents. Hence, they resorted to a wayfinding method based less on ever-changing street names and more on everyday urban experience and images by positioning any location in relation to certain landmarks and points of reference. These orientation points, locally known as orientiry (singular: orientir), usually refer to aspects of the built environment that are well known or clearly visible by virtue of their centrality, signage or features. Yet, they can also indicate sites or buildings that have physically vanished or have been renamed, in which case they take the form of what I will call ‘necrotoponyms’. Tashkent’s orientiry are an informal mode of knowing the city that works with, through and against more formal and more standardized modes of knowledge. It can be therefore argued that the use of orientiry is an act of ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott 1985), as well as a ‘tactic’ (de Certeau 1984) employed by the local population to make sense of

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Tashkent’s volatile ‘city text’ (Azaryahu 1990). As this chapter will show, orientiry constitute a parallel spatiality generated by means of the population’s corporeal, affective and non-discursive pluritemporal engagements with the city, which suggests that the generation of orientiry is in many ways similar to the process leading to the construction of cognitive maps. Indeed, just like the latter phenomenon, the former also depends on ‘a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, codes, stores, recalls and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in his everyday spatial environment’ (Downs and Stea 2011: 312). Relevant literature has indicated that such information is acquired kinaesthetically as people move in space, as well as through the exchange of environmental knowledge with fellow residents. In the case of Tashkent, the chapter will argue, the main mechanism by which the local population collect and subsequently utilize environmental information is their movement in the city’s informal taxis, and specifically the exchanges between driver and passenger while finding their way through different spatialities and temporal periods. Tashkent is one of the few large post-Soviet cities still served by a large number of informal taxis, making the informal livelihood strategy known as ‘taxiing’ (in Russian: taksovanie) an integral part of everyday life in the city (Olma 2021; 2022). Taxiing became widespread in the 1990s, when high unemployment rates and low salaries forced many – predominantly male – private car owners to seek to generate income by offering paid rides to their fellow residents, either occasionally – by only picking up passengers whose destinations were along their way – or regularly – as part- or full-time employment. The around-the-clock availability and relatively low fares of those informal taxis immediately made them popular amongst Tashkent’s population, thus prompting more and more individuals to take up taxiing as a means of livelihood. As a result, the volume of informal taxis has since consistently dwarfed that of the formal taxis’ fleet, with some estimates putting the number of informal taxis for 2018 at 30,000, as contrasted to a mere 2,212 formal taxis (Spot.uz 2018). These figures show that the vast majority of cars offering rides in Tashkent are driven not by professional drivers but rather by moonlighters, pensioners and rural-urban migrants who are seldom familiar with official street names. Yet, this drawback does not deter them from taxiing, as the extensive use of orientiry means that they can work as informal taxi drivers even if they do not know the city well. In this sense, taxiing in Tashkent is a rather inclusive – if informal – form of employment, unlike the situation in London, for example, where aspirant black cab drivers are required to memorize every city street and

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landmark in order to pass a notorious series of exams known as ‘The Knowledge’. Comparable localized wayfinding methods have existed in many urban centres across the globe (BBC 2019; Gustafsson 2015; Laszczkowski 2016; Liu 2012), but they have remained hitherto underconceptualized and undertheorized in the academic literature. Decommunization and the large-scale renaming of streets and places in postsocialist cities have also been well documented in scholarly work (Andrusz 2008; Azaryahu 1997; Diener and Hagen 2013; Gill 2005; Light 2004; Marin 2012; Saparov 2017; Tucker 1998; Verdery 1999). But the effects of these processes on everyday urban lives and practices have remained largely peripheral to the discussion, which instead has concentrated on the symbolic meanings and commemorative functions of street and place names. Eschewing such a representational perspective and focusing rather on the embodied and habitual qualities of everyday urban life, this chapter examines how Tashkent dwellers develop and sustain relations of knowledge about urban space and how they employ these means for wayfinding purposes. The chapter draws on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tashkent and builds on anthropological and psychological work on environmental perception and cognition to contextualize and conceptualize the notion of orientiry. It provides empirical evidence on the similarities between the generation of orientiry and the construction of cognitive maps, and outlines how the popularity of Tashkent’s informal taxis has led to the institutionalization of orientiry as the city’s de facto toponymical register, the proliferation of online maps and GPS-enabled smartphones notwithstanding.

Street and Place Renaming and the System of Orientiry The prevalence of orientiry in postsocialist Tashkent cannot be separated from the widespread use of colloquial toponyms in the city in the centuries preceding its incorporation into the Russian Empire. Since the assignment of official names to streets was not customary in Central Asia’s Islamic cities, neighbourhoods and other locations across Tashkent were colloquially named after their physical features, local landmarks and the ethnic identity or profession of their inhabitants (Buriakov et al. 1965). In the aftermath of the 1865 Russian conquest, colonial planners deemed the Asian city inscrutable, confusing and backward (Sahadeo 2007), and, hence, in a manner widespread at the time across the colonized world (see Giese 1979; King 2007; Legg 2007), decided to build a new – quintessentially European – town alongside it. The new town’s

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streets were immediately given official names, with some named after the military units stationed along them and others after the victorious battles that established Russian imperial rule in Turkestan. Progressively, colonial rulers and Imperial Army officers, influential or wealthy Tashkent dwellers and representatives of Russian art and culture were also inscribed into European Tashkent’s toponymic landscape. It is noteworthy that place naming was not extended to the Asian part of the city until 1893, and even then, its scope was rather limited, for it involved only seventeen large streets, to be designated by the colloquial names already in use by the local population (Buriakov et al. 1965). This policy changed after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks introduced new names for streets and places in the European part of Tashkent and, in an attempt to make the city’s Asian part legible, named most of its streets and alleys after the neighbourhoods they ran through. Yet, fluid policies, constant shifts of power and different winds blowing within the Communist Party and the Politburo made street and place names in Soviet-era Tashkent rather volatile. For example, in the 1980s, amidst the glasnost and perestroika policies launched by Mikhail Gorbachev, the scale of renaming was so extensive that to keep Tashkent’s population up to date, Vechernii Tashkent (Evening Tashkent), the city’s newspaper, provided the new names of streets and places on its front page. This situation intensified in the years following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, when the Karimov administration embarked on its decommunization campaign. Compared to other postsocialist cities, in Tashkent, renaming was less straightforward, primarily because there were no previous references with non-colonial or non-Soviet connotations to fall back on other than the vernacular toponyms used by the residents of pre-Russian Tashkent for specific parts of their city. Further complications were posed by the Uzbek nation being a product of intensive nation-building undertaken by the Soviet state, as well as by the ‘new’ ruling elite consisting of the same individuals who had been building communism only a few months earlier. Therefore, officials tasked with renaming Tashkent’s streets and places had to tread treacherous ground, ensuring that decommunization did not undermine nation-building or discredit the political establishment. The task’s complexity and the caution with which Tashkent officials proceeded significantly slowed down their progress, much to the dismay of those in the higher echelons of the political system. In May 1996, the Cabinet of Ministers passed Resolution No. 203 31.05.1996, which criticized Tashkent officials for inadequate commitment to decommunization and accused them of a ‘lack of understanding of the essence of Independence, weak national ideology and national pride,

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and sometimes irresponsibility and indifference’. Tashkent officials were given ten days to bring together expert committees that would erase ‘toponyms that serve the old order and communist ideology and that are not related to the history and national traditions of our people’, ensuring that, ‘at a period when our people learn to live and think in a new way’, these toponyms would not ‘distract them from the idea of Independence’. Having found themselves under such immense political pressure, in the next decade Tashkent officials overcompensated for their initial lack of enthusiasm by progressively renaming more than 1,500 of Tashkent’s at the time 3,473 streets, some of them more than once (Volosevich 2008). Yet, since this first wave of decommunization was characterized by hurriedness and had resulted in mistakes, inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies, a second wave of renaming was launched in 2009, leading to even more changes. Many Tashkent dwellers have responded to renaming by employing the Soviet-era names of streets and places, but this tactic does not adequately address all the practical challenges that these changes pose to everyday life in the city. More than simply removing the old nameplate and installing a new one (Latour and Hermant 1998: 11–23), renaming requires residents to update their resident registrations and inform public utility organizations of the new designation. It also hinders mail delivery, not least because it is often accompanied by new house numbering. Furthermore, it renders unreliable the use of street and place names for wayfinding, even for those equipped with GPS navigators or GPS-enabled smartphones. And it further complicates wayfinding inside Tashkent’s residential districts (in Russian: kvartaly), where a complex numbering system provides the location of one’s apartment via a sequence of numbers indicating the kvartal, the apartment building and the apartment itself. For example, the address ‘Sergeli 1–23–45’ indicates that the tenant lives in the first kvartal in the Sergeli district, in apartment building no. 23, in apartment no. 45. As opposed to a street address system, where a particular house number can be located by following the ascending or descending order of house numbers, the kvartal numbering system expects people to be familiar with the location and layout of each kvartal and each building in order to find any given apartment. All these considerations have prompted Tashkent’s residents to eschew addresses and official street names in favour of orientiry. In lieu of providing a definition of an orientir, I will take the liberty to quote a rather long excerpt from a Facebook post made by Gul’zhamal Milibaeva, a Tashkent resident, which attracted considerable attention after it appeared on the popular website Pis’ma o Tashkente (Writings about Tashkent). Like many of my interlocutors, Milibaeva (2016) has attempted

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to explain the system of orientiry by juxtaposing it with wayfinding practices in Almaty, the former capital of neighbouring Kazakhstan: The entire city of Almaty is laid out in a grid pattern, and one’s destination is given by indicating the intersection of two streets: ‘you have to drive to Dostyk/Abai’, or ‘that store is on Dzhambul/Bogembai Batyr’. To us Tashkenters this method seems unusual and certainly not applicable to our city. We hardly know the names of streets, let alone their intersections. A guest visiting from Almaty called me and asked, ‘what is the name of that street into which one needs to turn from Amir Temur Street, near the TV tower?’ Such a simple question, but it brought me into a light stupor. I was silent for two minutes, trying to remember, have I ever known the name of that street? All streets have been renamed two or three times. But I did not know the street’s old name either, because there was no need to know it. I know that one needs to turn at the location called ‘Shakhristanskaia’, but what exactly is ‘Shakhristanskaia’? A metro station? A square? (No, there is no square there, this I know.) Or is it the name of the street itself? I had never before thought about it. ‘Shakhristanskaia’, for us, is a ‘place’, that is, the intersection and its surroundings within a one-hundred-meter radius. Or two hundred, or five hundred meters, depending on the context or one’s desire. The Alaiskii market is also a place. ‘Their office is located at Alaiskii’, [someone says] and everyone understands that the office is located somewhere around Alaiskii and, of course, not inside the market itself. Almaty residents tell the taxi driver ‘such/such’, whereas we [Tashkenters] give orientiry: ‘to Pervushka’ or ‘to [the] Korzinka [supermarket] at [the] Turkmenskii [market]’. Almaty residents wonder how it is possible to navigate the city without naming street intersections, and we do not understand how you can remember the names of all the streets in the city.

The nature of the places that become orientiry varies, for they can refer to historical locations, buildings, enterprises (e.g. cafés, restaurants or stores), educational institutions of all levels, metro stations, bridges, parks or markets. In other words, they can refer to any aspect of the urban environment that is well known or evokes a strong image by virtue of its sociocultural significance and/or what Kevin Lynch (1960) has called ‘imageability’, namely its centrality, signage or features. For example, popular orientiry include the Efendi restaurant, the Bibigon café, the Uzbekistan Airways ticket offices (‘Aviakassy’), the Psychiatric Hospital (‘Psikhushka’), the sporting goods store SportTovary, the Ye Old Chelsea Arms pub (‘Chelsi’), the Tashkent Tractor Plant (‘TTZ’), the shopping centre Nekst, the bridge in Badamzar, the Aibek metro station and Westminster University (Figure 8.1). An orientir can refer to the place that gives the location its name, but it can also denote the larger area around it. In this case, the orientir’s ‘radius’ depends on the location’s

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Figure 8.1. Map of the specific orientiry mentioned in the chapter based on the author’s material, 2020. Image created by Anu Printsmann with OpenStreetMap.

distance from the city centre: the closer to the latter it is, the more accurate. For instance, the orientir ‘Bibigon’ indicates only the crossroads in the central Ts-1 district where the Bibigon café is located, ‘Psikhushka’ is a metonym for the larger area behind the Railway Station, whereas ‘TTZ’ designates the city section outside the outer ring road at the north end of Mirzo Ulug’bek Street, northeast of the city centre. Naturally, to more precisely indicate a particular location within an area defined by a large radius orientir, interested parties employ less established reference points or directions. Such usage is very telling of the orientiry system’s hierarchical structure, a topic to which I will return in the next section. While many of the landmarks that become orientiry are physically present in contemporary Tashkent, it is not uncommon for orientiry to refer to past names or functions of buildings and locations or even to sites that no longer exist, in which case they are revealed as ‘necrotoponyms’. For example, the busy intersection of Mustaqillik Street and Shahrisabz Street is colloquially called ‘Detskii Mir’ (Children’s World), after the large toy store that occupied the ground floor of one of the

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adjacent buildings from 1970 until the 1990s. The sixteen-storey building next to the Kosmonavtov metro station and its surrounding area are known as ‘Zhemchug’ (Pearl), after the eponymous jewellery shop that was open for business there in the early 1990s. And the square at the intersection of Buyuk Ipak yo’li Street and Mirzo Ulug’bek Street is referred to as ‘Svetlana’, after the store that operated there during the Soviet era and up till the mid-1990s. In some cases, the fact that orientiry refer to past names or functions of particular places is indicated by the adjectives ‘old’ (in Russian: staryi / staraia / staroe) and ‘former’ (in Russian: byvshii / byvshaia / byvshee). The adjective ‘old’ is scarcely used, and when employed it is to denote sites that have physically vanished. Such is the case of the location known as ‘Old Conservatory’, named after the old building of the State Conservatory that stood there until it was demolished in 2010. The adjective ‘former’, when not omitted, is used for cases in which the building or the site remains physically present and has retained its function, though its name has changed. This practice is habitually applied to large Soviet-era hotels, such as the ‘former Hotel Leningrad’ or the ‘former Hotel Rossiia’, despite the fact that today they operate under very different names.

Conceptualizing Orientiry Even though, as I suggested above, the origins of the orientiry system lie in pre-Russian Tashkent, the term itself and its contextualization are more recent. The word ‘orientir’, amongst its other meanings, is Russian for ‘landmark’ or ‘reference point’ and, hence, its use is by no means limited to Tashkent. But Tashkent is the only city in the former Soviet Union where the word is not simply employed to denote a reference point, but rather indicates a wayfinding tactic that has largely replaced the use of street names and addresses. To my knowledge, the term first appeared in this context in print in the 1972 ‘Taxi Driver’s Handbook’, published by the Tashkent Production Association for Taxi Transport under the Ministry of Autotransport of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. One of the handbook’s sections aimed to assist taxi drivers with locating lesser-known streets and, to this end, it listed reference points for each of them in the form of main streets, squares, parks, schools, factories and hospitals (Tashkentskoe Proizvodstvennoe Ob’edinenie Taksomotornykh Perevozok Ministerstva Avtotransporta UzSSR 1972). It cannot be said for certain whether the term had been widely used before the handbook’s publication or whether it was popularized only in its aftermath. Yet, given that no other such handbook has ever been published,

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it seems safe to argue that it played a substantial role in popularizing – and perhaps even standardizing – its use. In the previous section I showed that some orientiry continue to refer to sites and buildings that have ceased to exist. Such necrotoponyms are testament to Tashkent’s rich history, for a few of them date as far back as to the pre-Russian and Russian era (e.g. Darkhan, Kashgarka, Pervushka, Tezikovka, Urda). Nevertheless, as the examples cited throughout this chapter indicate, most orientiry have their roots either in contemporary Tashkent or in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet eras, namely periods experienced by the majority of Tashkent’s present population. This is because orientiry are the outgrowth of the population’s everyday experiences in the city and of their registering their environs, both consciously and inattentively, as something that ‘is there for us to live in, to move about in, even while we in a sense ignore it’ (Connerton 2009: 34). Therefore, new orientiry referring to sites and buildings situated temporally and/or physically closer to the everyday lives and experiences of the local population tend to replace older orientiry that have become obsolete. The mutability of orientiry is thus a token of the role that different individuals’ subjectivities play in their generation. It also suggests that orientiry are ‘embodied spaces’ (Low 2003: 10), namely locations where ‘human experience and consciousness take on material and spatial form’, and reveal them as what Edward S. Casey (1987: 186), writing about the intrinsic memorability of place, has called ‘containers of experiences’. However, given that every person can experience each location differently, the set of orientiry generated by any individual can potentially differ from someone else’s. Such differences can become even more complex over time, as individuals of a specific age group can possibly refer to any location by using an orientir enclosed in their own ‘envelope of space-time’ (Jess and Massey 1995) that can be unfamiliar to individuals considerably older or younger than their cohort. Hence, in theory, each location might be identified by many different orientiry, with every Tashkent resident using a subjective orientir produced by their personal experiences. But in practice the pool of the orientiry referring to each location is rather limited, because orientiry result from a dynamic interaction between people and their environment, which does not depend solely on personal factors. It also depends on the sociocultural significance of places (Appleyard 1969) and on various environmental qualities such as the environment’s capacity to evoke strong images and to be readily identified and understood (Lynch 1960). Places that are better known or better at eliciting emotions and stimulating the senses create strong images that stay with people. Therefore, even though ­orientiry

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grow out of personal experience and activities, they are shared by the wider community, for they are the products of common histories, common experiences and a similar habitual use of the city. Shared urban experience and common urban images do not necessarily eliminate all variation between the orientiry employed by different individuals, nor guarantee that the orientiry employed by one individual are known to another. Given their fluidity and susceptibility to change, orientiry can be multidirectional and contradictory and it is not uncommon for the orientiry used by some people to collide and interfere with those employed by others. Although these characteristics might potentially render orientiry a rather untrustworthy wayfinding method, they nevertheless remain functional. This is attributable to the very reasoning behind orientiry, for it is the population’s need to indicate locations to their fellow residents that keeps orientiry more or less coherent. Orientiry can never be strictly personal or idiosyncratic, for that would make their use counterintuitive or simply quixotic. An individual who employs an overly personal orientir to indicate a location will sooner or later realize that it is unknown to fellow residents and will be forced to substitute another orientir more readily recognizable by a larger audience. The fact that some orientiry become more established than others suggests that orientiry are asymmetrical, hierarchical and often unequal spatiotemporal orders, wherein the urban images – and hence the experiences and subjectivities – of some take precedence over those of others. Based on these considerations, I suggest that the orientiry system is nothing less than the standardization of the population’s simultaneously personal and collective ‘internal spatial representation of environmental information’ (Golledge 1999: xiv) or what Edward Tolman (1948) has called a ‘cognitive map’. Indeed, in my understanding, the process that generates orientiry is the very process that leads to the construction of cognitive maps, which, as relevant literature has shown, takes place over three stages (Siegel and White 1975), though it has been argued that the order of these stages is not strictly linear (Allen 1999). During the first stage, known as ‘landmark knowledge’, we get to know the reference points that facilitate our wayfinding; during the second stage, known as ‘route knowledge’, we link one reference point to another and manage to find our way along a route without getting lost; and during the third stage, known as ‘survey knowledge’, we become capable of understanding the relative location of landmarks and the ways they relate spatially to each other (Vandenberg 2016: 20–21). Understanding the orientiry system as a cognitive map, or rather as the end result of the layering of the population’s individual cognitive maps, explains many

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of the system’s particularities and, most notably, its temporal inconsistency. Not only are cognitive maps constantly reconstructed – as Keith Oatley (1977: 546) has put it, a ‘cognitive map is a process, not just a picture’ – they also habitually represent ‘information received at quite disparate time periods … and [hence] may contain fictional or hypothetical information or relics of the past which no longer exist’ (Golledge and Stimson 1997: 234; see also Gärling, Böök and Lindberg 1979). In this sense, the association between the orientiry system and cognitive mapping explains how orientiry can simultaneously be fluid and defy change, as is evident from the substantial number of necrotoponyms still in use. The production of orientiry is thus contingent on the at once personal and collective experience of space but physical movement is also very important in this process. For it is by and through moving in the city that individuals create an urban image (Cullen 1971) and subsequently generate orientiry. To succeed in doing so, however, wayfinders need to be immersed in the world when they are on the move, in a mode of being that Tim Ingold has called ‘wayfaring’. Wayfaring, writes Ingold, is ‘a trail of movement or growth … along which life is lived’ (Ingold 2011: 69) and a journey during which ‘[t]he traveller and his line are … one and the same’ (Ingold 2007: 76). Hence wayfaring, representing more than just a channel for getting from A to B, is an embodied multisensorial activity that ‘provides an increased sensitivity to and understanding of the polyvalence of environmental reading that takes place during daily life mobile situations in public space’ (Lanng and Jensen 2016: 250; emphasis in the original). Equally important to the production of orientiry is the exchange of environmental knowledge that occurs when Tashkent dwellers are ‘mobile with’ (Jensen 2014: 53) their fellow residents. As Paul Connerton (2009: 33) has written, ‘relationships to places are not lived exclusively or even mainly in contemplative moments of social isolation, but most often in the company of other people and in the process of doing something with them’. The next section examines both these two aspects of mobility and their role in the production of orientiry at the point where they converge: Tashkent’s informal taxis.

Orientiry and Informal Taxis The importance of physical displacement in the generation and proliferation of vernacular toponymic registers across urban post-Soviet Central Asia has been stressed by Mateusz Laszczkowski and Morgan Liu in their respective studies of Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, and Osh,

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Kyrgyzstan’s second largest city. In an attempt to understand how Astana’s long-time residents construct a sense of belonging to a city that drastically changed after it became Kazakhstan’s capital, Laszczkowski (2016) has argued that ‘mundane walking’ in the Soviet-era part of the city ‘blends the past and the present’ (ibid.: 100) and generates a ‘ghost toponymy’ (ibid.: 103) that is at once bodily and social. By walking together, Laszczkowski maintains, ‘individuals literally share the same outlook, participate in the same process of space-making and so acquire common, bodily knowledge’ (ibid.: 103–104). In a similar vein, examining everyday life in Osh’s Uzbek mahallas, Liu (2012) has suggested that locals find their way around the city by employing ‘local landmarks and relational orientations, that is, the perspective of an embodied walker with actual engagements rather than an aloof map reader’ (ibid.: 87). In this sense, they use ‘their own practical pedestrian geographies of the city’ (ibid.: 88), which are ‘produced according to local epistemologies of space via local practices of domestic space making’ (ibid.). The work of Laszczkowski and Liu, then, is very suggestive of how ‘pedestrian movements form one of these “real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city”. They are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize’ (de Certeau 1984: 97). The prominence of walking in the production of space in the contexts studied by Laszczkowski and Liu can be attributed to the fact that both have focused on relatively compact parts of cities. Laszczkowski has examined the Soviet-era part of Astana, whereas Liu has studied these neighbourhoods of Osh that are inhabited by ethnic Uzbeks. In both cases, relatively short distances allow for walking to effectively ‘make up the city’, but in Tashkent, where orientiry are employed to denote locations across Central Asia’s largest city, walking cannot play the same role. In fact, in recent years, several factors have diminished walking in Tashkent. The city’s automobilization has doubtless exerted the most significant effect on walking’s marginalization, but also salient here are its postsocialist sprawl, the demise of microdistricts (in Russian: mikroraiony), the unreliability of mass public transport, and the association of walking with lower income and social status. Moreover, even members of those segments of the population that habitually practised walking – such as, most notably, Tashkent’s Russian-speaking long-time residents – have recently been forced to re-adjust their routes and/or mobility practices. This has come as a result of the large-scale felling of the city’s deciduous trees, which has eliminated the pavement shade once offered by their canopies and has exposed pedestrians to the scorching sun, thus increasing their sunburn risk every time they set out to take a walk (Olma 2018).

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Rather than by walking, then, I suggest that Tashkent’s system of orientiry is generated, proliferated and kept more or less coherent by means of the local population’s extensive use of the city’s informal taxis. As I mentioned in the introduction, informal taxis are a popular means of urban transport in Tashkent and even constitute the cornerstone of the local ‘car culture’ (Miller 2001), for virtually all private car drivers in Tashkent are one way or another involved in taxiing. The argument here rests on a simple premise: after hailing an informal taxi, the potential passenger is first expected to give the driver a destination in the form of an orientir. If the driver knows the orientir, the exchange confirms for both parties that the orientir provided is indeed an accurate reference point for the given location and hence contributes to the orientir’s survival. However, should the driver be unfamiliar with the passenger’s stated orientir, the latter then transmits their environmental knowledge by either suggesting other nearby reference points that the driver might know or by agreeing to show the way. This scenario is quite common in Tashkent, where most drivers and passengers are unfamiliar with the city’s physical layout and find their way predominantly by following established routes. Therefore, drivers often depend on passengers to show them the way to their destinations (Olma 2021), and this exchange of environmental information, combined with the wayfaring of the involved parties, is what simultaneously proliferates and generates orientiry anew. However, since the generation of orientiry is largely contingent on the imageability of places and their capacity to trigger corporeal and/ or affective reactions, many locations across Tashkent are not identified by means of an orientir. This is particularly true with regard to the city’s ‘sleeping districts’ (in Russian: spal’nye raiony) and other residential areas, which are characterized by unremarkable, repetitive socialist-era housing blocks and no well-known reference points or landmarks. In such cases, passengers who want to indicate their destination to an informal taxi driver have two options: either give the driver the closest well-known orientir and, once there, explain to him where exactly to go next; or provide him with the destination’s precise location by denoting its position in relation to better-known orientiry by means of the prepositions ‘near’, ‘behind’, ‘in between’ or ‘opposite’. This practice suggests that, while cars move around the city in a continuous and coherent Euclidean space, wayfinding takes place in a parallel space where wayfinders move from one orientir to another. Tashkent’s orientiry system is thus revealed as a fragmented two-dimensional matrix of nodes, in which large parts of the city, those areas between the nodes, simply do not exist.

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While GPS navigation devices, GPS-enabled smartphones and online map services have the potential to transform wayfinding in Tashkent, as of mid-2019 several factors had made the use of these technologies rather limited amongst local drivers and passengers alike. Most importantly, the online maps of Google and Yandex – ‘Google Maps’ and ‘Yandex.Karty’, respectively – had been notoriously outdated and unreliable for years, partly due to the incompatibility of the Soviet-era SK-42 coordinate system retained by Uzbekistan with the world geodetic system WGS-84, which tech giants such as Google use. As a result, not only had maps been inaccurate, but they could also neither process addresses due to a lack of geocoding nor provide optimal route planning or turn-by-turn navigation. These complications rendered online maps and navigators unusable and hence rather unpopular amongst Tashkent’s residents, many of whom either chose not to trust them or remained ‘map illiterate’ due to limited exposure. Additionally, limited internet penetration, unreliable mobile internet and expensive data packages, as well as the relatively high price of smartphones, also played a significant role in inhibiting the use of online maps. Yet while the high costs and low speeds hindering the proliferation of mobile internet – and, by extension, the use of online maps – are still in place, the obstacles posed by Uzbekistan’s outdated reference system have been eliminated. In 2017, the Cabinet of Ministers passed a decree stipulating Uzbekistan’s transition to the WGS-84 standard. The decree opened the way for the establishment of a new geodetic reference framework that facilitates the use of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers and of the various programmes, applications and services that depend on signals from space to determine location. Indeed, only a few weeks after the decree was passed, Yandex announced that it had already begun the construction of a new online map of Tashkent. Rather than being the end product in its own right, Yandex’s online map was expected to serve as the infrastructure for the Tashkent version of Yandex.Taxi, a ride-sharing service and taxi aggregator widely used across the post-Soviet space. Yandex.Taxi relies heavily on Yandex.Karty, for it is on the basis of the maps provided by the latter that the platform determines the location of taxis and passengers and then maps the optimal route for the taxi driver to follow. This technology allows drivers equipped with little more than a smartphone to pick up passengers and to find their way around the city simply by entering the passenger’s destination into the application and following the route indicated. Despite the obvious ways in which Yandex.Karty could potentially revolutionize wayfinding practices in Tashkent by curtailing the use of the orientiry system, a replacement of the latter by the former is

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not imminent for several reasons, most important amongst them being the local population’s unfamiliarity with official street and place names. Given that most Tashkent residents taking taxis do not know their destination’s exact address but rather denote it by means of an orientir, it is unlikely that online maps, which are capable of finding only geocoded addresses, would be able to facilitate wayfinding. Unless Yandex.Karty or any other mapping service decides to geocode orientiry as well, the use of online maps and navigators will remain rather peripheral. Yet, even if Yandex.Karty did geocode orientiry and hence allow the population to combine their established wayfinding practice with new navigation technologies, the use of online maps would not put an end to the use of the orientiry system. On the contrary, it would reinforce its position as the de facto toponymic register in Tashkent. Nevertheless, a comprehensive use of online maps could theoretically exert an impact upon wayfaring and hence the construction of new orientiry amongst the population, for the drivers and passengers moving through the city would then depend solely on the indications of the online map and would pay reduced ­attention to their surroundings.

Conclusion Eschewing a representational reading of street names and focusing instead on everyday urban experience, this chapter has shown how never-ending large-scale street and place renaming has affected the wayfinding practices of Tashkent’s population. The chapter has conceptualized and theorized the orientiry system that eventually came to replace street names and addresses as the city’s de facto toponymic register. Drawing on a combination of anthropological and psychological work on environmental perception, it has suggested that orientiry are an outgrowth of the local population’s exposure to both cognitive and social stimuli and the standardization of the population’s personal and collective cognitive maps. Paramount to the generation and proliferation of orientiry is the widespread use of Tashkent’s informal taxis, and especially ‘the complex habitations, practices of dwelling, embodied relations, material presences, placings and hybrid subjectivities associated with movement through … spaces’ (Merriman 2004: 154). Yet, apart from being products of movement, orientiry are also the prerequisite and the context within which the very movement that produces them occurs. Accordingly, the extensive employment of orientiry for wayfinding purposes has resulted in the production of a parallel spatiality where

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wayfinders move from one orientir to another to reach their destinations while largely ignoring the space between them. Understanding, as this chapter has suggested, this parallel spatiality as a fragmented matrix consisting of nodes offers an interesting and apt analogy with the ancient memory enhancement method known as the ‘method of loci’ (see Yates 2010). Also known as the ‘memory palace’ technique, this method entails associating specific ideas with unique loci within a perceived or imagined structure, then linking them by means of a memory ‘walk’ from locus to locus in order to quickly and efficiently recall information. John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel (1978: 390) have explained the method as follows: the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject ‘walks’ through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by ‘walking’ through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items.

The analogy becomes all the more clear if, instead of the features of a building, one memorizes one’s daily commute to work, namely the sequence of orientiry that one needs to pass through or by to arrive at a destination. One might be unable to draw the route on a map or pinpoint one’s location but, nevertheless, by ‘walking’ from orientir to orientir, one manages to reach one’s workplace, even if that means the route is longer or one spends more time in traffic. Such an arrangement has a certain exclusionary nature, for it potentially hinders mobility for people with no previous experience of a given place. But in Tashkent the combination of individual cognitive mapping processes and the exchange of environmental information that occurs between driver and passenger, whilst they are finding their way together in one of the city’s informal taxis, ensures that each individual participates in the generation of orientiry. Hence, whether one sits behind the wheel or in the passenger’s seat, one’s role in the generation and proliferation of orientiry remains significant. Nikolaos Olma is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leibniz-­Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Before, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. His doctoral dissertation (University of Copenhagen, 2018) explored the nexus of

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embodied memory and urban infrastructure in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He is currently working on a book project examining how the inhabitants of a former uranium mining town in Kyrgyzstan negotiate life with radioactive uranium tailings amidst the town’s de-industrialization.

References Allen, Gary L. 1999. ‘Spatial Abilities, Cognitive Maps, and Wayfinding: Bases for Individual Differences in Spatial Cognition and Behavior’, in Reginald G. Golledge (ed.), Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 46–80. Andrusz, Gregory. 2008. ‘Berlin, Moscow, Warsaw: A Century of Sibling Rivalry Expressed in Urban Form’, Urban Research and Practice 1(2): 181–98. Appleyard, Donald. 1969. ‘Why Buildings Are Known: A Predictive Tool for Architects and Planners’, Environment and Behavior 1(2): 131–56. Azaryahu, Maoz. 1990. ‘Renaming the Past: Changes in “City Text” in Germany and Austria, 1945–1947’, History and Memory 2(2): 32–53. ____. 1997. ‘German Reunification and the Politics of Street Names: The Case of East Berlin’, Political Geography 16(6): 479–93. BBC. 2019. ‘Letter from Africa: The Art of Drawing Your Address in The Gambia’. Available online at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47968968 (accessed on 23 April 2019). Buriakov, Iurii F., Iurii I. Glass, Iurii A. Sokolov and Georgii N. Chadrov. 1965. Po ulitsam Tashkenta [Through the Streets of Tashkent]. Tashkent. Casey, Edward S. 1987. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Connerton, Paul. 2009. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cullen, Gordon. 1971 (1961). The Concise Townscape. London and New York: Routledge. Diener, Alexander C. and Joshua Hagen. 2013. ‘From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities: Narrating the Nation through Urban Space’, Nationalities Papers 41(4): 487– 514. Downs, Roger M. and David Stea. 2011 (1973). ‘Cognitive Maps and Spatial Behaviour: Process and Products’, in Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins (eds), The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 312–17. Gärling, T., A. Böök and E. Lindberg. 1979. ‘The Acquisition and Use of an Internal Representation of the Spatial Layout of the Environment during Locomotion’, Man-Environment Systems 9: 200–208. Giese, Ernst. 1979. ‘Transformation of Islamic Cities in Soviet Middle Asia into Socialist Cities’, in R.A. French and F.E. Ian Hamilton (eds), The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy. Chichester and New York: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 145–65. Gill, Graeme. 2005. ‘Changing Symbols: The Renovation of Moscow Place Names’, Russian Review 64(3): 480–503.

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Golledge, Reginald G. 1999. ‘Preface’, in Reginald G. Golledge (ed.), Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. xi–xvi. Golledge, Reginald G. and Robert John Stimson. 1997. Spatial Behavior: A Geographic Perspective. New York and London: The Guilford Press. Gustafsson, Jenny. 2015. ‘Mapping, Beirut-Style: How to Navigate a City without Using Any Street Names’, The Guardian. Available online at: https://www. theguardian.com/cities/2015/jun/02/mapping-beirut-style-how-to-navigate-acity without-using-any-street-names (accessed on 3 June 2015). Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London and New York: Routledge. ____. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge. Jensen, Ole B. 2014. Designing Mobilities. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press. Jess, Pat and Doreen Massey. 1995. ‘The Contestation of Place’, in Doreen Massey and Pat Jess (eds), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 133–74. King, Anthony D. 2007 (1976). Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Lanng, Ditte Bendix and Ole B. Jensen. 2016. ‘Linking Wayfinding and Wayfaring’, in Rebecca H. Hunter, Lynda A. Anderson and Basia L. Belza (eds), Community Wayfinding: Pathways to Understanding. Basel: Springer, pp. 247–60. Laszczkowski, Mateusz. 2016. ‘City of the Future’: Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Latour, Bruno and Emilie Hermant. 1998. Paris ville invisible. Paris: La Découverte. Legg, Stephen. 2007. Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Light, Duncan. 2004. ‘Street Names in Bucharest, 1990–1997: Exploring the Modern Historical Geographies of Post-Socialist Change’, Journal of Historical Geography 30(1): 154–72. Liu, Morgan Y. 2012. Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Low, Setha M. 2003. ‘Embodied Space(s): Anthropological Theories of Body, Space, and Culture’, Space and Culture 6(1): 9–18. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: The Technology Press and Harvard University Press. Marin, Anaïs. 2012. ‘Bordering Time in the Cityscape: Toponymic Changes as Temporal Boundary-Making: Street Renaming in Leningrad/St. Petersburg’, Geopolitics 17(1): 192–216. Merriman, Peter. 2004. ‘Driving Places: Marc Augé, Non-Places, and the Geographies of England’s M1 Motorway’, Theory, Culture and Society 21(4–5): 145–67. Milibaeva, Gul’zhamal. 2016. ‘Kvadraty i Krugi’ [Squares and Circles], Pis’ma o Tashkente [Writing about Tashkent]. Available online at: http://mytashkent. uz/2016/06/02/kvadraty-i-krugi (accessed on 13 January 2018). Miller, Daniel (ed.). 2001. Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg. Oatley, Keith G. 1977. ‘Inference, Navigation, and Cognitive Maps’, in Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird and Peter Cathcart Wason (eds), Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 537–47. O’Keefe, John and Lynn Nadel. 1978. The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Olma, Nikolaos. 2018. Enacting Memoryscapes: Urban Assemblages and Embodied Memory in Post-Socialist Tashkent. Doctoral dissertation. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. ____. 2021. ‘Driving in the Shadows: Rural-Urban Labour Migrants as Informal Taxi Drivers in Post-Socialist Tashkent’, in Rano Turaeva and Rustamjon Urinboyev (eds), Labour, Mobility and Informal Practices in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe: Power, Institutions and Mobile Actors in Transnational Space. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 36–50. ____. 2022. ‘Under the Auspices of the State: Examining the Endurance of Tashkent’s Informal Taxis’, Geoforum 136: 302–11. Sahadeo, Jeff. 2007. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent: 1865–1923. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Saparov, Arsène. 2017. ‘Contested Spaces: The Use of Place-Names and Symbolic Landscape in the Politics of Identity and Legitimacy in Azerbaijan’, Central Asian Survey 36(4): 534–54. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Siegel, Alexander W. and Sheldon H. White. 1975. ‘The Development of Spatial Representations of Large-Scale Environments’, Advances in Child Development and Behavior 10: 9–55. Spot.uz. 2018. ‘Pochemu v Uzbekistane tak mnogo “bombil” i kak vyvesti rynok taksi iz teni?’ [Why are There so Many ‘Bombily’ in Uzbekistan and How to Bring the Taxi Market out of the Shadows?], Spot.uz. Available online at: https://www.spot. uz/ru/2018/02/09/taxi (accessed on 14 December 2018). Tashkentskoe proizvodstvennoe ob’edinenie taksomotornykh perevozok ministerstva avtotransporta UzSSR [Tashkent Production Association for Taxi Transport under the Ministry of Autotransport of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic]. 1972. Spravochnik voditelia taksi [Taxi Driver’s Handbook]. Tashkent. Tolman, Edward C. 1948. ‘Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men’, Psychological Review 55(4): 189–208. Tucker, Erika L. 1998. ‘Renaming Capital Street: Competing Visions of the Past in Post-Communist Warsaw’, City and Society 10(1): 223–44. Vandenberg, Ann E. 2016. ‘Human Wayfinding: Integration of Mind and Body’, in Rebecca H. Hunter, Lynda A. Anderson and Basia L. Belza (eds), Community Wayfinding: Pathways to Understanding. Basel: Springer, pp. 17–32. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Volosevich, Aleksei. 2008. ‘Gimn natsionalizmu: Za poslednie semnadtsat’ let v Tashkente pereimenovana polovina ulits’ [A Hymn to Nationalism: Half the Streets in Tashkent have been Renamed over the Past Seventeen Years], Fergana.ru. Available online at: https://www.fergananews.com/articles/5574 (accessed on 12 November 2015). Yates, Frances A. 2010 (1966). Selected Works of Frances Yates, Volume III: the Art of Memory. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 9

5 No Future without a Motorway Exit Roadside Communities in Postsocialist Poland – the Case of Torzym Agata Stanisz

This chapter does not directly address urban streets and roads in the urban context or, for that matter, decisive changes to Polish cities. It does, however, show how the transformation of Poland into a modern European or Western country has much to do with road construction: an ongoing, incomplete process. Here I will discuss two roads that have been crucially important to the Polish transport system: the 92 National Road and the A2 Motorway.1 These motorways connect Polish cities to Western Europe, first and foremost to Berlin, running, on the Polish side, through numerous economically stagnant roadside communities usually regarded as provincial ‘backwaters’. Taking these two roads as my key ethnographic examples, I will show how ideals of political and economic development and modernization within an EU context commonly depend on, and are materialized through, infrastructure projects such as the construction and maintenance of modern roads. My analysis is based on extensive fieldwork, allowing not only general and theoretical reflections but also yielding ethnographic insights into the economic life of small and seemingly rather ‘peripheral’ roadside communities in western Poland. ‘Peripherality’ was not a concept or category in my research, but I did unconsciously perceive these somehow ‘left-behind’ communities in this way, which then caused certain problems in my interpretation and understanding of everyday life in the locales under investigation. In the analysis below, I would like to address this issue, focusing on one particular community. Contrary to my initial assumptions, ‘periphery’ is certainly not the best word to use in this context. These roadside communities are affected by transformations linked to similar processes taking place elsewhere, typically associated with the larger cities. Since 2013, I have conducted research in the Greater Poland and Lubusz provinces of western Poland as part of a larger anthropological

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project entitled Moving Modernizations: The Influence of the A2 Motorway on Local Cultural Landscapes.2 In the project we explored how local communities responded to the modernization of road infrastructure, more specifically the newly constructed section of the A2 Motorway between Nowy Tomyśl and Świecko, which connects the city of Poznań to Berlin. The research was conducted in numerous roadside communities alongside the 92 National Road and the A2 Motorway. Previously the 92 was the main transportation corridor between eastern and western Poland, but it lost that status with the opening of the new section of the A2 Motorway in 2011. Ideologies, narratives and practices of modernization, closely linked to modern motorway construction, have exerted a significant impact on the economic and political strategies adopted by the locals. Their response in this regard is the subject of this chapter. I developed a mobile and multi-sited methodology for my ethnographic research, carrying out fieldwork in sixty-one settlements sharing the same unique roadside aesthetics and economy. One of the most interesting fieldwork locations has been Torzym in the Lubusz province, a town situated very close to the Polish-German border, virtually at the midpoint between Poznań (145 km) and Berlin (130 km). Having just over 2,500 inhabitants (according to figures from December 2013),3 it lies close to an A2 exit and a motorway maintenance depot, and accommodates various facilities servicing the long-haul transport of goods and people (including tourists): motels and hotels, petrol stations, bars and restaurants, and currency exchanges, as well as other essential services centred on automobile maintenance and repair. The 92 and A2 largely run parallel – going in a latitudinal (east-west) direction – though they intersect and are connected at several points along the route. The A2 is part of the European road network, also carrying the designation E30, that connects Berlin, Poznań, Warsaw, Minsk and Moscow. Once it crosses the German-Polish border in Świecko, it becomes the German A12 Motorway from Frankfurt an der Oder to Berlin. In 2014, both its German and Polish sections received the honorary title ‘Motorway of Freedom’ (Polish: Autostrada Wolności; German: Autobahn der Freiheit): the (Polish) A2 on 4 June 2014, the ­twenty-fifth anniversary of the first free elections in Communist Poland, and the (German) A12 on 9 October 2014, twenty-five years after the first demonstrations in Leipzig that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because the 92 runs parallel to the A2, it is also known as the ‘Old Two’. In this narrative of local transformations, triggered by the construction of roads and infrastructure, a key date was 1 December 2011, when a new stretch of the A2 Motorway connecting Nowy Tomyśl to Świecko

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was opened. Although the changes observed around this time were not as spectacular as those of the early 1990s, when much of Poland was affected by rushed privatization, rising unemployment and the abolition or ‘liquidation’ of State Agricultural Farms, they were nevertheless substantial. These developments were spread across various fields, and although overshadowed by much larger social, cultural and economic transformations, they nonetheless exercised significant regional, national, even international impact. Poland, at last, became connected to the pan-European network of motorways. Due to the new road infrastructure, according to the Polish government’s narrative, Poland was now ‘plugged into’ the common European project. This touted advance, so it seemed, also sealed the fate of the 92. Once the new stretch of the A2 was ready, ‘the Old Two’, no longer the main route of communication connecting East and West, was superseded.

Peripheries, Transformation and Modernization and ‘the Old Two’ Many of the communities examined here – villages and small towns of only 10,000 to 22,000 inhabitants – might be labelled ‘peripheral’. These places lack industries during a time when agriculture has failed to recover; inefficient local public transportation is not very well connected to the national grid; such locales find themselves affected by high unemployment and low birth rates and suffer from the outmigration of young people. Livelihoods in almost all these communities had been derived from socialist state farms, and after their dissolution the population’s main sources of income shifted, as people moved to take advantage of opportunities offered by the 92 and, since 2011, the A2. These communities, though their local economies have greatly suffered, do not perceive themselves (administratively nor economically) to be marginalized, because they are well connected to one of the most important manifestations of road infrastructure in Poland twenty-five years after the end of socialism. This has not only had economic and political but also ideological and emblematic significance. Investment in motorway construction carried a strong symbolic message, especially during the period leading up to the UEFA European Football Championship in 2012 (e.g. Czauderna 2012; Głombicki 2012; Majak 2012; Szczęch 2012; Wachnik 2012). Modernization narratives gained wide currency, marked by declarations of ‘the end’ of Poland’s transformation and its full inclusion in Europe: slogans like ‘106 km of new motorway straight to Europe 2011’4 referred to

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the new stretch of the A2 discussed here. Every newly opened section of the A2 Motorway was celebrated, nationally and locally, as progress. Twenty-five years after the fall of communism, the inhabitants of the Greater Poland province, in a poll carried out by the Gazeta Wyborcza Poznań daily newspaper, chose the A2 Motorway as the most important event of the postsocialist period (Bartkowiak 2014). Official discourses had obviously met the expectations of Polish citizens in this instance. Another survey, commissioned by the On Board Public Relations Ecco Network and conducted in August 2012 by PBS DGA (a large market research company), showed that 75 per cent of Poles saw investments in road infrastructure to be the top priority for the following decade (Komu potrzebne są autostrady?). Many regarded the construction of the A2 to be the final stage of Poland’s modernization and accession into the European Union, stimulating economic growth and social regeneration amongst the communities and regions concerned. Such modernization and progress via infrastructure projects, a process that is still ongoing, should not be perceived as relevant solely to local ‘peripheral’ communities, pulling them out of economic backwardness. These endeavours connect places that have traditionally been labelled ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’; here the distinction between the two terms is undermined and collapsed in important ways. Considering the postsocialist processes of decentralization and increased regional and local self-government, I argue that we should cease seeing the ‘peripheries’ as passive zones dependent on the capital city or other urban ‘centres’ and instead recognize the productive interweaving and mutual interdependence of these ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ locales. What is more, globalization has given rise to centrifugal tendencies at the national level, leading to the loosening of ties within the nation-state and the intensification of cross-borders links, which create global ‘shortcuts’ bypassing the nearest regional urban centres and the capital city (see Duijzings 2013: 16). This process has diminished the relevance of urban centres within the national context, making local as well as regional development dependent primarily on foreign direct investment, especially after Poland’s accession into the EU. In addition, provincial governments are now responsible for regional development strategies. This development has generated new political mechanisms and constellations of power in which social and economic processes in the ‘peripheries’ cannot be perceived as passive responses to stimuli coming from national centres but must rather be regarded as the results of emergent entrepreneurial forms of governance in these localities based on an international orientation. The actions and initiatives of various local and regional actors (especially the local authorities and their representatives) are crucial here.

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All these considerations sparked my interest in exploring the consequences of the construction of the A2 Motorway for communities along the 92 National Road and the local responses to it. Not only had the ‘Old Two’ been a distinctive infrastructural and landscape element, it had also defined the dynamics of the local economy as well as the social fabric and quality of life in these communities. All this was partially challenged and partially transformed by the opportunities afforded by the A2, which local social actors did not always control. The roadside communities were affected, first and foremost, by a significant reduction in the volume of traffic or transit passing through their settlements. General traffic measurements provide the majority of data on road traffic intensity, and relevant Polish institutions use this information to manage, maintain and project the development of the country’s road network. In the case of the 92, more than 17,000 motorized vehicles, including 7,500 articulated lorries, passed daily through the section of the road where the settlements I visited were located in 2010. Five years later – four years after the opening of the A2 Motorway section between Świecko and Nowy Tomyśl – the numbers had basically been cut in half, to 8,200 motorized vehicles per day, including almost 3,500 articulated lorries.5 In other words, vehicle flows declined drastically, stripping the ‘Old Two’ of its claim to be the busiest, most important transit route between western and eastern Poland, a status it had acquired especially after Poland entered the European Union and opened its borders in the wake of its joining the Schengen Area in 2007. I’ll put it like this … When they opened the border, for three days, day and night, day and night, there was a line of cars on the road, literally day and night, day and night, cars were going abroad. Yes, non-stop. When they opened the border, after we entered the Union, right? It was such a boom because Germans would come to us and Poles were going there, right? So, non-stop there was a line, day and night. Later it calmed down and it continues, I think, all the time, without changing. (An entrepreneur from Torzym)

The road had already figured prominently in socialist times, when the authorities employed the same sort of rhetoric and pompous modernization discourse as their successors would use when the A2 opened. The route became especially important in the mid-1970s, when, in the run-up to the Seventh Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) in December 1975, the party commissioned a propaganda film from the Documentary Film Studio. The film, released in November 1975 as the forty-fifth episode of the Polish Film Chronicle, was tellingly titled: Ahead of the 7th Congress of the PZPR. So Poland can grow

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strong … In the third minute, we see vehicles moving smoothly along the modernized 92 National Road. A voiceover provides the narrative: ‘To meet the needs, we must invest in transport: we must invest a lot, quickly and efficiently. Not only in railroads. To meet future challenges, in this coming five-year period we will undertake the task of building expressways. Heavy road construction equipment will replace the work of thousands of people’ (Przed VII Zjazdem PZPR). In the first half of the 1970s, progress in all spheres of life was imperative, and the construction of modern road infrastructure was one of the key areas bolstering this sought-after socialist lifestyle (cf. Pawlak and Wójtowicz 2009: ­121–24). During the Seventh Congress, the authorities indeed declared that Poland was now ‘entering the stage of achieving a developed socialist society’.6 Underwriting the importance of road construction, the then first secretary of the PZPR, Edward Gierek, met with crews constructing the 92 in Poznań, which the Polish Film Chronicle reported on as well.7 The 92 was presented to the Polish people on the occasion of the Polish People’s Republic’s thirtieth anniversary, a gift made possible, amongst other factors, by labour brigades whose recruits included inhabitants of the province of Greater Poland: ‘On the initiative of the People’s Unified Worker’s Party’s Regional Committee, road engineers undertook the construction of the 92 as a supplementary and un-­ scheduled project, a contribution of the workers of Greater Poland to the celebration of the Polish People’s Republic’s thirty years of existence’ (cf. Nosal 2015). Acquiring other names, such as ‘the Warsaw route’ and (later) ‘the Euroway’, the road, with its frictionless and ­collision-free interchanges and underpasses, was celebrated as a successful example of Poland’s progress in building infrastructure. Even though the 92 and the A2 share the same modernist rationale, allowing for fast and uninhibited traffic flows, the 92 suffered a symbolic degradation when it was no longer a part of the European road network. As a result, the current perceptions of the two roads differ substantially: the A2 represents high-tech infrastructure, while the 92 has been downgraded and superseded by a more advanced motorway, a relic of an earlier time made obsolete by the effects of the country’s postsocialist transformation, as well as global economic change and ongoing modernization.

The Case of Torzym – Connecting the 92 and the A2 Torzym is an international transit town now … goods pass through all the time. When we have guests from elsewhere in Poland, they cannot

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believe their eyes, seeing all these new cars and how the road is busy all the time. It benefits everyone here when goods pass through town. It’s the same for the railroads … Petrol stations have appeared, well, only one … But we have it here. Obviously, nothing happened in Poland before this freedom of movement emerged. In the 1990s, when the political system started to change, then yes. New petrol stations were built, restaurants, motels, hotels, and so on … After 1989, trading and service businesses mushroomed, because there is no factory or plant here, no. But there are a lot of businesses offering services, such as hotels, motels, bars, petrol stations, that’s the direction it all went. (A woman from Torzym)

Amongst all the settlements located along the 92, the town of Torzym is one of the most noteworthy. Historically it was never an important trading centre, though it was included on the Frankfurt–Poznań railroad route in 1870; this did not lead to much development. After the First World War it became a popular sanatorium and spa town. During the first years of the Second World War (1940–1942), the Nazis established a forced labour camp in Torzym, and around three hundred Jews were forced to build a motorway, its foundations later used for the A2 in the

Figure 9.1. Map of Torzym. Image created by Anu Printsmann with OpenStreetMap.

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area. Towards the end of the war, the town was largely destroyed, and in 1945 the German-speaking population was displaced and replaced with Polish migrants from the Eastern Borderlands (present-day Ukraine). Due to its almost complete destruction, Torzym lost its status as a town, which it regained only during the transformations of the 1990s (Szczepaniak et al. 2014). Torzym is part of different local and trans-local transit routes. Since the Polish-German border is very close – only thirty minutes away by either the 92 or A2 – these routes overlap and their dynamic is continually transforming. Traffic in Torzym remains heavy, although it has decreased since the new section of the A2 was opened. Traffic going through Torzym consists mainly of lorries, transporting goods from East to West and vice versa. From the inhabitants’ perspective, the traffic flow decreased only temporarily, between December 2011 and May 2012, when the newly opened stretch of the motorway was still toll-free. Once the hefty toll went into effect, intensive freight transport returned to the 92. In addition, railway and bus lines pass through Torzym, moving along or over the 92 and the A2 – around ten trains and several buses stop daily at Torzym station. One crucial aspect, which I will discuss in greater detail, is the town’s proximity to a motorway junction, a motorway exit and maintenance depot. The town has oriented its economic profile towards being a roadside community located close to the Polish-German border – it is geared towards long-distance transport and people passing through for a variety of reasons. Their mobility takes on different forms and degrees of intensity, and the town caters to their needs. There are about nine motels in Torzym and almost as many eateries; six petrol stations with secure car parks; and five currency-exchange points, in addition to the other businesses servicing vehicles such as garages, car washes and used tyre shops. These services and facilities produce the characteristic car-­centred aesthetics of the town, which also has a well-developed infrastructure for its own population. Local amenities include groceries; clothing, construction and gardening shops; banks and numerous small-service providers; municipal and community offices; a post office; two schools and a kindergarten; a public library and cultural centre; playgrounds; a health centre and a hospital; a fire brigade station and a police station. This well-developed local infrastructure signals the continued vitality of the town, which unlike other localities in the region is not s­ hrinking but rather has attracted various newcomers from the surrounding countryside and other cities and towns in the Lubusz and Greater Poland provinces, who are drawn by the possibilities afforded by the rapid access and transit connections provided by the A2 motorway.

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The town also accommodates commuters travelling to work, primarily using private carriers which are shared amongst employees, since public transport is inflexible and has systematically been reduced. Most common is the shared daily commute to plants close to Berlin. Workers also travel by buses provided by their employers, including companies such as Molexin Sulęcin, a firm that produces electrical, electronic and fibre-optic connections. In spite of these commutes, the extent of mobility practised or enjoyed by Torzym’s inhabitants remains modest, a fact obscured by the ‘large’ mobility infrastructures and the constant twenty-four-hour automotive traffic going through town. The community is still struggling with the various socioeconomic effects of the political transformation of the 1990s, when the state-owned land was parcelled out and jobs were lost. Almost all towns and villages in this part of Poland, including Torzym, have had to come to terms with this transformation, as economic life had previously revolved around collective land ownership. Many of these communities still lack access to the internet and to gas pipelines or sewage systems, and they can be difficult to reach, since the good roads connect only to the A2 and the 92. Local everyday mobility includes trips for leisure and consumption – visits to shops, swimming pools, cinemas and cultural and educational institutions that provide something better than what is on offer locally. Thus many inhabitants of Torzym travel regularly to Frankfurt an der Oder, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Zielona Góra, Świebodzin or Poznań. During the day, Torzym displays a continuous flow of articulated lorries, lorries and car haulers bringing hundreds of used cars into the country, as well as buses carrying economic migrants from all over Poland seeking work in Western Europe, in addition to the luggage of airplane travellers and parcels with goods for relatives, supporting transnational family ties. Lorry drivers come mainly from further east (Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania and Latvia), and their transient presence leaves traces on the linguistic landscape and outlook of the region – both in written texts and the spoken word. Billboards and other advertisements and announcements placed on the roadside of the 92 are written in Cyrillic, and Russian is heard almost everywhere, in parking lots, bars and petrol stations. Citizens band (CB) radios advertise local bars in Russian, while Russian-speaking television channels are available in almost every motel and inn. The traffic of Polish economic migrants going in the opposite direction is most evident in Chrobry Inn in Torzym, located one kilometre from the motorway junction. This inn, located at the intersection of the 92 and 138 trunk road, stands out because it is stylized as a historical Polish establishment,

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manifesting ‘Polishness’ and indigenousness in the most stereotypical way imaginable. It consists of a restaurant, a motel and a parking lot where travellers can change buses and where goods and parcels are loaded and reloaded onto various vehicles. It is a desirable place to have a break and wait for other vehicles – facilitated by the proximity of the motorway and the loyalty programme of the Driver’s Inn. It is also the last stop before crossing the Polish-German border (or the first when coming from the other direction) where one can enjoy Polish cuisine for an affordable price; it is here that migrants returning home during the holiday season buy kilos of cabbage and mushroom dumplings or cold cuts prepared in the traditional manner. The large-scale road construction and maintenance activities happening in and around Torzym – whether the construction of the A2 motorway or the renovation of the 92’s road surface begun in late summer 2014 – produce a continuous influx of road workers and engineers, boosting the local economy. Naturally, local businesses respond to the increased demand for accommodation and other services. The town is also an important transit- and stopping-point for tourism. Organized groups of Polish and German tourists en route to or returning from Berlin often visit the Tropical Island amusement park in Krausnick, just across the border in Germany. To reduce costs, many stay overnight in motels in Torzym, where they enjoy cheap catering and entertainment in the form of tourist-group ‘integration’ evenings. Regular movements across the border ensue as tourists leave during the day and return in the evening. Torzym’s proximity to the Polish-­ German border has led to an influx of foreign workers (especially Ukrainians, Bulgarians and Turks) who rent rooms in town and commute to work in Germany. There are also small ambulant businesses: individuals conducting door-to-door trade in chemistry products from Germany or selling carpets, clothing, footwear and laying hens; still others make their living from the seasonal trade in forest fruits and mushrooms. They sometimes sell their products to local inhabitants and businesses out of empty (bankrupted) shops in Torzym, on the town’s squares or near the church. Easy road access also means foreign investments, which the local authorities have been quite adept in securing. Construction work began in 2016 in Kownaty, a village just a few kilometres north of Torzym, for the Majaland theme park and was finished by 2018. This huge Belgian-French investment materialized primarily because Torzym has a motorway exit and is located close to the Polish-German border. The theme park’s ­investors and stakeholders hope to draw visitors from the West.

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External political and economic developments exert a direct impact on traffic flows in and around Torzym. The best case in point is Poland’s joining the European Union in 2004, which caused customs officers, who had previously lived in and around Torzym, to relocate to Poland’s eastern border. This outflow from Torzym led to numerous long-­distance marriages and families. Another example was the opening of the Polish-German border, which contributed to the disappearance of the illegal trade in German cars, which not so long ago was one of ­Torzym’s key forms of commerce. The Russian families who had dominated this trade gradually disappeared as the roadside car markets vanished. A third example is the depopulation of cities in Brandenburg (formerly part of the GDR) after 1990 (cf. Jurkowska 2013: 163–77), which has had detrimental effects for Polish nightclubs. Systematic migration to the western parts of Germany and the aging of the population caused Polish nightclubs to lose their clientele and, in most cases, their raison d’être.

The Struggle for a Motorway Exit Generally speaking, the motorway exit is a plus for the municipality of Torzym. It is a huge plus actually. First that plus was not in the plans. Imagine, originally, the plan for the motorway did not include an exit in Torzym. That would have been an enormous disadvantage. Past and present local government representatives won this battle for us; they’d go to Warsaw, barge through doors only to be kicked out, so then they went in through the window instead and were kicked out again. I know all the details, because the council chairman and the current mayor are, so to speak, my buddies, we know each other from school. It was a really, really tough battle. Not only local representatives supported the idea, MPs from the region did too, and it was constantly discussed and adapted until we were successful. We simply succeeded. Well, it’s our window to the world, the very first exit after the border! (Torzym inhabitant)

The fight for Torzym’s motorway exit began in 2004, immediately after the opening of the A2 section between Nowy Tomyśl and Poznań-­ Komorniki; it soon transpired – for financial reasons mainly – that the rest of the project would have to be carried out in stages. That Torzym would get its own motorway exit was far from certain, because its construction depended on the profitability of the newly opened section. For Torzym’s inhabitants and neighbours, this uncertainty threatened their livelihoods and was unacceptable. Having pinned their hopes on the extension and further construction of the A2, they expected new investments in the

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area: ‘When the work on the A2 began …, all businessmen rubbed their hands. They took out loans and invested in the future. They believed that once the motorway was complete, they’d make even more money. And at that moment, they were rather afraid of these future uncertainties’ (a local government representative in Torzym). In a 2005 letter to the mayor of Torzym, the chairman of Autostrada Wielkopolska S.A., a private agency created for the purpose of constructing the A2, declared that ‘[o]ur position stems from the fact that Autostrada Wielkopolska S.A. bears the full financial risk of the project. Any additional changes to the plans that cannot be covered by AWSA during the period of construction and operation, must receive financial backing from those demanding these changes, or otherwise they must be postponed’.8 According to Torzym’s mayor, this letter triggered the lobbying for the construction of the A2 exit. Earlier, in June 2004, the Torzym Town Council had passed a motion in favour of the exit and had communicated the resolution to the relevant authorities and stakeholders, such as the prime minister, the Ministry of Infrastructure, local MPs and the regional authorities, the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways, and the CEO of Autostrada Wielkopolska S.A.9 In this resolution, the Town Council objected to the agency’s decision to give up its plan to build a traffic junction in Torzym, deeming this new course of action unacceptable, as the abandonment of the initiative would thwart regional and local development and squander any potential benefits of Torzym’s special location close to the border. Without an exit, the municipality would simply become a zone of transit, further burdened with environmental costs and inconveniences without countervailing opportunities. From the beginning, the exit was important for the municipality, its citizens and businesspeople. The local government’s strategy boiled down to convincing the main decision-makers in the Ministry of Infrastructure that the exit was indispensable and should be built and put into service immediately – not, as per the original plan, only after several years of the motorway being in operation. We wrote letters and sent memos, and I personally participated in several meetings at the Ministry. Their responses were negative, but our local government did not give up that easily. We kept fighting for that ­junction by presenting the arguments provided by citizens and entrepreneurs, pointing at the huge potential economic benefits, as were obvious elsewhere. We argued that if that junction were not built, the town would lose its advantages. Thanks to the exit we escaped poverty, that postsocialist agriculture poverty, and were able to make an end to the malaise that reigned here. Today, people keep asking when the construction of

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something will begin, as this means that they see a future in Torzym and in the municipality; they don’t want to run away from here. That is the greatest thing we’ve achieved in the last twenty-five years of our town and local government. The motorway exit drew investors who bought land and put their money into infrastructure. Without the junction, there would have been just desolation here, and fields. Without a motorway junction, no investor would ever decide to invest here, for the simple reason that there would be no road connection between us and the West, there would be no access. A motorway junction is a connector, a typical road, an exit and entry; I hope, though, more of an entry road. However, it is also a connector in a metaphorical sense: when some new information spreads that again something is going to happen thanks to the junction, people gather and rejoice. (The mayor of Torzym)

One of the key assets to come with the exit that was fought for so hard was a so-called Motorway Maintenance Depot (MMD), located directly at the exit. MMDs are ‘command centres’ that oversee specific sections of a motorway and provide road-maintenance services and facilities. Their purpose is to provide technical, organizational and infrastructural assistance so people can travel safely on the motorway. Due to the MMD, Torzym’s labour market has grown and local people have been able to find work. Thanks to the exit, both the construction and operation of the A2’s new section has also meant extra income for households in the region, leading to increased consumption and additional investments. Local entrepreneurs benefitted from this development, which has indirectly resulted in the creation of jobs in various sectors. One should also not forget the extra household income generated by employees of Autostrada Eksploatacja S.A. and certain other businesses that flourish, directly or indirectly, as a result of the motorway (e.g. petrol stations, restaurants, logistics centres, and warehouses located near motorway junctions). In September 2016, the local authorities published a report, funded by the EU, as part of the Local Programme for the Revitalization of the Municipality of Torzym by 2020. The document assesses the social, economic, environmental and spatial conditions and potential of the municipality and indicates as well those areas that still require ­revitalization and modernization. The report points to Torzym’s highly favourable geographical location for the provision of services for lorry drivers. It also discusses viable future options and economic strategies linked, directly or indirectly, to road traffic, such as those pertaining to the catering and hotel industries, as well as services offering technical assistance, such as car repair shops, car washes and petrol

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stations (Lokalny Program Rewitalizacji 2016: 39). This is all thanks to the traffic junction and A2 exit, which is labelled a key asset for the town’s future development. The report also defines the municipality’s land-use policy in this zone, arguing for the creation of the best possible conditions for further investment, exploiting the municipality’s favourable location in the vicinity of important road transport routes and urban centres such as Frankfurt, Berlin and Poznań. As the mayor told me, the town expands towards the motorway, with corresponding high expectations: people see opportunities, expect more jobs and desire entertainment. The quality of life in Torzym has increased significantly after years of stagnation and economic hardship caused by the collapse of the state farms. Typical narratives about this period always touch on this issue, but they also include stories about the privatization of state assets during the 1990s, which brought benefits to local businessmen able to inexpensively purchase properties previously owned by the state. Some of these individuals are nostalgic for the ‘golden 1990s’, when quick money could be made without too much competition and regulation. By contrast, one encounters little nostalgia for the socialist period in Torzym: people hardly ever say ‘it was better under communism’, a sentiment one is likely to hear in most other former state-farm-dominated villages and provincial backwaters. The reigning attitude in Torzym obviously has much to do with its booming economy, the result of a ‘random’ piece of infrastructure that connects it with the outside world: the A2 exit and junction. As a result, Torzym is a clear ‘winner’, unlike numerous other communities in Poland and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe that have fared worse and can be considered the ‘losers’ of the postsocialist transition (Dingsdale 2001; Gardawski 2001). As Gerald Creed (2013) has shown for Bulgaria, the status of ‘winner’ or ‘loser’ may have less to do with structural and historical conditions or social and/or cultural factors (such as an ‘entrepreneurial mentality’ amongst inhabitants) than with a locale’s position within a globalized world and the decisions of local citizens, politicians and local entrepreneurs to take the initiative in their own hands – a relatively random and idiosyncratic factor, as it depends on individual personalities. Thanks to the exit, Torzym has indeed succeeded where other towns have failed, attracting new investors and developing the local labour market in various sectors dependent on road infrastructure. Postsocialist ‘new poverty’, as well as its ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’ that attempts to remedy problems, is often triggered, conditioned and determined by matters of infrastructure. Such issues include what people would identify as development and progress in everyday life: the appearance of various chain

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and discount stores, the emergence of relatively robust internet access; proper pavements, traffic lights and bicycle lanes; efficiently functioning sanitation facilities and sewage systems; and decent-looking public buildings. Torzym has all of this. Its life, being a roadside community, has been significantly shaped by what has happened with roads in and around the town. In this way, what might have been described as a ‘peripheral’ place has managed to reframe its position – from marginalized locale to a municipality that is well connected to the outside world in various ways. Agata Stanisz is a social anthropologist, and Associate Professor at the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. She conducts research in the anthropology of infrastructure and road studies. Her main research interests are (trans)local socioeconomic changes and politics of modernization in the context of road construction in contemporary Poland. Between 2011 and 2015 she carried out research among international truck drivers in various European countries. Since 2018, she has also dealt with rural protests against the construction of gravel and sand mines, wind power stations, and the expansion of industrial zones.

Notes 1. The A2 Highway is a modern toll road which is currently 486.7 km long, to be extended to 657 km in the foreseeable future. Its construction started in 2001, three years before Poland’s accession into the EU. The 92 National Road is a fast traffic road (marked with the Polish acronym GP) connecting the city of Rzepin with Poznań and Warsaw. It is 472.7 km long and runs parallel to the A2 Motorway, crossing four Polish provinces: the so-called Lubusz, Greater Poland, Łódź and Masovian voivodeships. 2. I was the lead researcher on the project, which was supervised by Professor Waldemar Kuligowski, financed by the Polish National Science Centre and carried out by the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The project culminated in a joint publication (see Stanisz and Kuligowski 2017). 3. Ludność. Stan i struktura ludności oraz ruch naturalny w przekroju terytorialnym. Stan w dniu 31 12 2016 (2017), Warsaw: Central Statistical Office, p.112. Available online at: http://stat.gov.pl/obszary-tematyczne/ludnosc/ludnosc/ludnosc-stani-struktura-oraz-ruch-naturalny-w-przekroju-terytorialnym-stan-w-dniu-31-122016-r-,6,21.html (accessed on 30 January 2019). 4. See: ‘106 km of the New Motorway Straight to Europe’ https://www.prnews​ wire.com/news-releases/106-km-of-the-new-motorway-straight-to-eu​rope134779853.html (accessed on 7 October 2020). 5. In comparison, in 2015, 17,000 vehicles used the A2 on a daily basis between Świecko and Nowy Tomyśl, including 5,000 articulated lorries. See

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Generalny Pomiar Ruchu w 2015 roku, http://www.gddkia.gov.pl/pl/2551/GPR2015 (accessed on 10 January 2019). 6. See: ‘December 8, 1975. VII Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party’ https:// historia.interia.pl/kartka-z-kalendarza/news-8-grudnia-1975-r-vii-zjazd-pz​ pr,nId,2317711 (accessed on 10 January 2019). 7. Kroniki XXX-lecia sequence. Poznań region, Polska Kronika Filmowa 75/07A, 1975, http://www.kronikarp.pl/szukaj,53715,tag-691983,strona-9 (accessed 10 January 2019). 8. I was allowed to see the contents of the letter by courtesy of the mayor of Torzym, Ryszard Stanulewicz. 9. Resolution no. XIX/150/04 of Torzym Town Council from 30 June 2004.

References 8 grudnia 1975 r. VII Zjazd PZPR/December 8, 1975, the 7th Congress of the PUWP. Available online at: https://historia.interia.pl/kartka-z-kalendarza/news-8-grud​ nia-1975-r-vii-zjazd-pzpr,nId,2317711 (accessed on 11 January 2022). Bartkowiak, Wojciech. 2014. ‘Plebiscyt 25-lecia: Autostrady kontra Jan Paweł II’ [Twenty-five-year Plebiscite: Motorways versus John Paul II], Gazeta Wyborcza, 13 February. Available online at: http://wyborcza.pl/piatekekstra/​ 1,129155,15452089,Plebiscyt_25_lecia__autostrady_kontra_Jan_Pawel_II.html (accessed on 11 January 2022). Creed, Gerald. 2013. ‘Every Village a Different Story: Tracking Rural Diversity in Bulgaria’, in Ger Duijzings (ed.), Global Villages: Rural and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Bulgaria. London: Anthem, pp. 53–65. Czauderna, Piotr. 2012. ‘A2 przejezdne przed Euro: Wizerunkowa zasłona dymna rządu’ [A2 Passable before Euro: A Reputational Smoke Screen of Polish Government], na:Temat, 3 June. Available online at: http://natemat.pl/17179,a2przejezdne-przed-euro-wizerunkowa-zaslona-dymna-rzadu (accessed on 10 January 2019). Dingsdale, Alan. 2001. ‘The Production of Localities in Transition’, in Alan Dingsdale, Mapping Modernities: Geographies of Central and Eastern Europe, 1920–2000. London: Routledge, pp. 176–200. Duijzings, Ger. 2013. ‘Introduction’, in Ger Duijzings (ed.), Global Villages: Rural and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Bulgaria. London: Anthem, pp. 1–31. Gardawski, Juliusz. 2001. ‘Przedsiębiorcy: beneficjenci czy przegrywający? [Enterpreneurs: losers or winners?]’, in Marii Jarosz (ed.), Manowce polskiej prywatyzacji/Backroads of Polish Privatization. Warszaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, pp. 110–29. Generalny Pomiar Ruchu w 2015 roku (GPR 2010)/General Traffic Measurement. 2016. Warsaw: Generalna Dyrekcja Dróg Krajowych i Autostrad. Available online at: https://www.gddkia.gov.pl/pl/2551/GPR-2015 (accessed on 10 January 2019). Głombicki, Łukasz. 2012. ‘Pechowa A2 – czy będzie przejezdna na Euro?’ [Unlucky A2 – Will it be Passable for Euro?], na:Temat, 15 February. Available online at: http://natemat.pl/983,pechowa-a2-czy-bedzie-przejezdna-na-euro (accessed on 10 January 2019). Jurkowska, B. 2013. ‘Demografia a rynek mieszkaniowy we wschodnich landach niemieckich ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem Brandenburgii’ [Demographics and

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the Housing Market in Eastern German Federal States, with Particular Emphasis on Brandenburgia], PWSZ IPiA Studia Lubuskie 9: 163–77. Komu potrzebne są autostrady? Najważniejsze obszary inwestycji w infrastrukturę komunikacyjną według Polaków [Who Needs Motorways? The Most Important Investments in the Transport Infrastructure by Poles]. 2012. Available online at: http://www.onboard.pl/data/file/pdf/raport_komu_potrzebne_sa_autostrady. pdf (accessed on 10 January 2019). Kroniki XXX-lecia: Poznańskie, Polska Kronika Filmowa 75/07A [Chronicles of the Thirty-first Anniversary: Poznan, Polish Film Chronicle 75/07A]. 1975. Available online at: http://www.kronikarp.pl/szukaj,53715,tag-691983,strona-9 (accessed on 10 January 2019). Lokalny Program Rewitalizacji Gminy Torzym do 2020 roku [The Local Revitalization Program of the Torzym Commune to 2020]. 2016. Torzym. Available online at: http://www.torzym.pl/asp/pliki/aktualnosci/2016-09-27_lpr_ torzym_23.09.2016_do_konsultacji.pdf (accessed on 20 January 2019). Ludność Stan i struktura ludności oraz ruch naturalny w przekroju terytorialnym: Stan w dniu 31 XII 2016 r. [Population: The Condition and structure of the Population and Natural Movement in the Territorial Cross-section: Status on 31 December 2016]. 2017. Warsaw: Główny Urząd Statystyczny. Available online at: http://stat. gov.pl/obszary-tematyczne/ludnosc/ludnosc/ludnosc-stan-i-struktura-orazruch-naturalny-w-przekroju-terytorialnym-stan-w-dniu-31-12-2016-r-,6,21. html (accessed on 10 January 2019). Majak, Krzysztof. 2012. ‘“Dramat” na budowie autostrady A2: Mogą nie zdążyć na Euro’ [‘Disaster’ on the Construction of the A2 Motorway: They May Not Make it to Euro], na:Temat, 16 February. Available online at: http://natemat. pl/1087,dra ​ m at-na-budowie-autostrady-a2-moga-nie-zdazyc-na-euro (accessed on 10 January 2019). Nosal, Bartosz. 2015. ‘22 lipca – PR święta PRL: Propaganda, przodownicy pracy I przecinane wstęgi’ [July 22 – PR PRL Celebrations: Propaganda, Work Leaders and Cut Ribbons], Gazeta Wyborcza: Poznań, 22 July. Available online at: http://poznan.wyborcza.pl/poznan/56,36037,18402595,lata-70-22-lipca-i-dro​ gi-warszawska-i-wezel-na-golecinie,6.html (accessed on 10 September 2019). Pawlak, G. and A. Wójtowicz (eds). 2009. Szlaki, trakty, autostrady: 190 lat centralnej administracji drogowej [‘Trails, Routes, Highways: 190 Years of Central Road Administration’]. Warsaw: Generalna Dyrekcja Dróg Krajowych i Autostrad. Przed VII Zjazdem PZPR: Aby Polska rosła w siłę … Polska Kronika Filmowa 45/75 A [Before the 7th PZPR Congress: For Poland to Grow Strong … Polish Film Chronicle 45/75 A]. 1975. Available online at: http://www.repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=pl/ node/10114 (accessed on 12 January 2019). Stanisz, Agata and Waldemar Kuligowski. 2017. Ruchome modernizacje: Między Autostradą Wolności a ‘starą dwójką’ [Mobile Modernizations: Between the Motorway of Freedom and the ‘Old Two’]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Książka i Prasa. Szczęch, Michał. 2012. ‘Przez A2 pustoszeją kieszenie przedsiębiorców’ [A2 Makes the Pockets of Entrepreneurs Empty], Gazeta Lubuska, 22 January. Available online at: http://www.gazetalubuska.pl/strefa-biznesu/pieniadze/a/przez-a2-pustosze​ ja-kieszenie-przedsiebiorcow,10207012/ (accessed on 14 January 2019). Szczepaniak, Bogdan, Kazimierz Kwiatkowski, Robert Borkowski and Zbigniew Wołoncewicz. 2014. 20 lat miasta Torzym na szlaku turystycznym [Twenty Years

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5 Conclusion Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene This volume explores postsocialist streets and roads as places where urban residents and visitors dwell, interact and move around; as for the latter type of activity, patterns of mobility have radically changed because of the unparalleled growth of private car mobility. Most chapters explore what this ‘invasion’ of the automobile has meant for street life in the cities of the former socialist world, documenting forms of adaptation and resistance that citizens have developed in response. We question the love affair with the car and, as a corollary, the unthinking acceptance and implementation of car-enabling urban planning measures (Fain 2012), which have dominated postsocialist urbanism. We shifted attention away from an exclusive focus on circulation, as is common in street studies dominated as it is by traffic engineers, towards the ‘convivial’ aspects of life in public spaces, following in the footsteps of critical thinkers like Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich and Richard Sennett. We perceive streets indeed to be ultimately social spaces, whose function cannot be reduced to facilitating mobility and circulation only. As we have indicated in the introduction, one aspect that makes the postsocialist context salient is the unprecedented pace of change. In just one decade, the 1990s, cars became the dominant mode of everyday mobility, causing problems such as congestion, previously unknown under socialism. With the rise of a burgeoning car culture, the social functions of street life were marginalized, turning streets into ‘roads’, the function of which is to meet all the exigencies of motorized vehicles, facilitating the flow of traffic as well offering ample space for parking. Roads are associated with speed, progress and modernity, marginalizing slower modes of mobility, such as walking. We call for a revaluation and rebalancing of the different functions of streets, positioned between flows and movement on the one hand, and dwelling and inhabitation on the other. We do not see circulation and conviviality necessarily as opposites: they may mutually reinforce each other and animate postsocialist streets, but the question is, really, what types of mobility contribute to sustained conviviality. We argue that slow modes can help, as we have flagged up in the first part of the title of this volume,

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If Cars Could Walk. Cars cannot walk of course, but this improbable phrase exemplifies our vision of slowness and ‘stickiness’. It is a plea for a slower type of mobility despite and against the car’s dominance, which has stigmatized and marginalized walking as an ‘undesirable’ mode of mobility. Moreover, noticing people’s preference for the safe cocoon that cars provide, many would indeed only ‘walk’ if ‘cars could walk’, stripping down their participation in society to a rather literal version of the SUV model of citizenship (Mitchell 2005). Yet there are signs that walking is nevertheless gaining in status as we can observe with the pedestrianization of city centres. The rapid rise of the private automobile in the postsocialist context (with precursors in the socialist era, as one of the postscript authors will argue) has produced imbalances, causing new problems on postsocialist streets. Most chapters offer insightful ethnographic accounts of the frictions that occur on the street level, providing everyday, localized and micro-scale perspectives in a field of study that is largely dominated by generic overviews. As we indicate in the introduction, we explore empirically and ethnographically how new forms of dwelling and mobility have reshaped life on postsocialist streets. This book furthers a broader notion of postsocialism, which hitherto has been utilized only as a straightforward spatial-temporal marker, of a particular region in a set period. We developed the notion of ‘postsocialism’ as providing conceptual leverage for thinking about streets, motorization and urban life in general. Apart from showing that postsocialism can be used in a broader sense, one of the volume’s contributions is to suggest new concepts which emerge in these postsocialist contexts, such as ‘im-mobility’ and ‘passengering’, or vernacular terms such as ‘orientiry’, ‘birzha’, and ‘marshrutka’. It makes sense to develop new and innovative concepts inspired by non-Western and ‘off-centred’ contexts, as Jennifer Robinson has argued (2011). We question the idea that postsocialist cities have been in ‘transition’ simply copy-pasting the car culture of ‘the West’. From our perspective, the situation is far more complex in that there are socialist legacies and postsocialist path-dependencies, which play a crucial role in shaping current mobility patterns. Indeed, there has been a sudden rise of car use, but the socialist ‘ghost’ of public transport, particularly electric transport, is lingering on. After a period of infrastructural decline and disinvestment, this legacy is now pointing in the direction of a desired future of carbon-neutral mobility. Postsocialist cities have an edge in that many of them have kept electric transportation systems. In addition, we want to point out that the ‘West’ cannot and should not be understood as a monolithic entity, in terms of urban forms and poli-

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cies, as Hartmut Häussermann and Anne Haila have argued. These two authors helpfully distinguish between American and European cities: the latter have a far more developed tradition of regulation, by the local authorities, of public spaces through town planning and of public welfare services, which they label as ‘municipal socialism’ (Häussermann and Haila 2005: 52–61). On the other hand, some of the features of neoliberal reform have taken their purest form in East European cities: the withdrawal of the state and popular resentment against state interference has been strongest in cities like Bucharest, which moved from a model of radical top-down socialist intervention to the other extreme of an unregulated laissez-faire attitude characteristic of American cities. Therefore, we think that the trope of ‘the West’ is unhelpful. It does not figure prominently in this volume, and when it is mentioned (such as in the introduction), we refer particularly to the strong car-enabling US tradition (in cities such as Los Angeles, see Fain 2012), where the shortcomings of the ‘Western model’ have been the clearest. Our volume is a plea not to copy that model, but to revitalize and remodel postsocialist cities using and mobilizing their inherited strengths. The socialist experience has meant that, paradoxically, socialist cities have adopted American models of car-enabling urban planning: quite a few cities have been ‘Americanized’, not trying to curb the dominance of the car through the promotion of other modes of transportation. European cities provide slightly better reference points, offering more pedestrian and public transport friendly options than American cities, although here too there is much to be desired. All of this suggests that it makes sense to collapse the binary between the capitalist West and the socialist East. As we wrote in the introduction, it would be a mistake to assume that the former socialist countries simply reproduced trends in ‘the West’ at a delay of four decades, as if socialism never happened. It is imperative to have local and regional path dependencies in mind and to understand and analyse postsocialist streets as emerging from their socialist forebears. Also, postsocialist examples – usually ignored in the urban studies literature – can be instructive and far from ‘peripheral’, since transport legacies from the socialist past can inspire urban futures across and beyond Europe. Instead of adopting the usual ‘transitology’ from socialism to capitalism, we propose a reverse trajectory, from ­fossil-fuel based private automobility to electric public transport mobility inherited from the socialist past. For all its downsides, socialism can be a useful reference point, and not the pre-socialist period, as has been the case before, when the socialist period was just regarded as a misguided historical interlude. After all, the socialist ‘chronotope’ – fewer cars, slower modes of mobility, and more (electric) public ­transportation – is what

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the world needs. This conceptual perspective is tied to transformations that – while particularly pertinent for the region – may also be relevant in other parts of the world. In that vein, we solicited three postscripts providing reflections from specialists who are not experts of postsocialism, but rather of socialist, Western and non-Western contexts. They add interesting insights from the perspectives of preceding models of socialist car culture (Luminita Gatejel), and of automobility in Japan (Joshua Roth) and the US (Peter Norton), the latter two being ‘classic’ automobile-oriented societies in the capitalist world. They permit us to transcend the regional focus and problematize simplistic spatio-temporal notions of postsocialism, while at the same time forcing us to reconsider the literature on urban street life and automobility based on Western examples. Gatejel points at the continuities between socialist and postsocialist car culture, showing how (informal) practices (such as tinkering and car boot sales) that had emerged in conditions of scarcity lingered on after the end of socialism. She argues that since the 1960s, private car ownership was definitely on the rise in socialist countries, seen as one of the key indicators of an alternative socialist modernity, to the extent that she speaks of a socialist ‘automobile cult’ that was at the origin of the postsocialist love for the car. Whereas under socialism, private car ownership remained a rare privilege of the few, who had waited for years to obtain their Lada, Dacia or Trabant, in the postsocialist era foreign (mostly second-hand) cars became suddenly available, reflecting the new values of privacy, property and flexibility. Indicative of the continuities is that socialist car brands continued to thrive after the end of socialism, as they were absorbed by multinational corporations. Roth and Norton compare postsocialist realities with those in Japan and the US, two iconic examples of car-dominated societies which accommodated the automobile into their street spaces at a much earlier stage. Roth provides an interesting reflection on the Japanese habit of ‘getting lost’ as a symbol of cultural defiance against the ‘hypermobility’ of postwar Japan, heralding in fact the end of the ‘postwar’ period. The notion of the directionally challenged individual, called hoko onchi, emerged in Japan’s postwar context, and it was a negative and mildly stigmatizing concept that fitted the era of mass mobility and high-speed growth of the 1960s. During the 1990s and 2000s, the ‘postwar’ years of the economic boom came to an end as Japan went through a deep recession: hoko onchi became a notion that people proudly embraced as a self-description, positively validating the idea of slow movement and aimless promenades. Roth argues that the same kind of shift may be in store for the postsocialist world, announcing

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the end of ‘postsocialism’. The latter will lose its relevance when the next ‘post’ announces itself and a new turning point makes us forget the previous ‘post’. One of these new ‘posts’ that is heralding itself now is the post-fossil fuel era. Roth makes the important point that there are diverse postsocialisms, as there also were diverse socialisms, which differed markedly from country to country. This does not diminish the importance of the insight that in each of these cases, the socialist past continues to be a reference point. Finally, Norton puts great effort into commenting on all chapters as well as some of the presentations given during the workshop held in Regensburg in 2016. He offers a reflection on the relevance of the idea of ‘postsocialism’ from a US perspective, seeing it as a manifestation of larger global transformations. The issues are not geographically bounded. Postsocialism is, as he writes, ‘an unstable condition’ – it resides in the experience of people striving to secure their existence and make a living under circumstances of rapid change that make life highly unpredictable. What Norton also shows is that certain historical legacies, both ideological and practical, also linger on in non-socialist contexts: the US, for example, bears witness to the endurance of the ideological dogmas or ‘official fictions’ of highway engineering, which are hard to change in spite of the various arguments against building more (and wider) highways. He highlights the relevance of anthropology and ethnography for street and traffic studies, as they capture the lived experiences of those inhabiting these spaces, of making the ‘invisible’ visible, and ‘bringing unheard voices’ to the attention of traffic engineers, urban planners and transport experts. Engineered transportation systems cannot just be imposed top-down and one-way, without regard for people’s specific needs and agencies; in the real world they are negotiated, formally and informally, implicitly or explicitly, as the chapters in this volume show. Planners and engineers have much to learn from anthropologists and other scholars, in the social sciences and humanities, using qualitative and ethnographic methods. The book is ethnographic and ‘observational’ on the one hand, and theoretical on the other hand, offering various reflections that will need to be translated into real life by urban planners and traffic engineers, whom we urge to listen to the vernacular voices that ethnographic studies bring to the fore. Ger Duijzings is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universität Regensburg. Until 2014, he taught anthropology at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He did extensive research on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and is currently studying urban

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transformations in postsocialist cities. He has published widely on these topics, amongst others, the edited volume Global Villages: Rural and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Bulgaria (Anthem, 2013), and the coedited volume (together with Ben Campkin) Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (I.B. Tauris, 2016). Tauri Tuvikene is Professor in Urban Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His research covers the intersection of urban cultures, mobilities, cities and policies. His research interests include comparative urbanism and the (re)conceptualization of postsocialism, as well as the experience and regulation of urban mobility, ranging from automobility to walking and public transport. He has published widely on these topics in various journals as well as coediting (together with Wladimir Sgibnev and Carola S. Neugebauer) the book Post-socialist Urban Infrastructures (Routledge, 2019). He was Project Leader for a HERA-funded project on public transport as public space (2019–2022).

References Fain, William H. 2012. If Cars Could Talk: Essays on Urbanism. Glendale, CA: Balcony Press. Mitchell, Don. 2005. ‘The S.U.V. Model of Citizenship: Floating Bubbles, Buffer Zones, and the Rise of the “Purely Atomic” Individual’, Political Geography 24: 77–100. Robinson, Jennifer. 2011. ‘Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(1): 1–23.

POSTSCRIPT 1

5 No Alternative to the Car; or

What Remained of Socialism after 1989/91? Luminita Gatejel

This contribution looks for connections between state socialism and postsocialism with regard to modes of mobility, car culture and street encounters. In this brief reflection, the terms ‘state socialism’ and ‘postsocialism’ do not designate theoretical concepts or analytic tools but describe two distinct though overlapping historical periods. I start from the premise that both periods developed distinct regimes of mobility understood as assemblages of specific human activities, machines, roads, buildings, signs and cultures of mobility (Edensor 2002; Urry 2004). However, I want to emphasize the transformational character of ‘postsocialism’, meaning that certain artefacts, practices and forms of sociability lingered on after the demise of communism (Müller 2019: 541). And whereas some scholars prefer to use the plural to emphasize the plurality and diversity of postsocialist experiences and spatial idiosyncrasies (Borelli and Mattioli 2013), I employ the singular because it allows me to offer a condensed overview of some of the shifts that occurred in the transition from late state socialism to postsocialism, focusing more on continuities and less on the breaks that characterized this transformation. Due to the collectivist nature of state-socialist societies, public transport was their predominant transport mode. However, from the 1960s onwards, private car ownership was on the rise throughout most of the former Eastern Bloc, radically changing state-socialist mobility. At the beginning the automobile seemed ill-suited to these countries, but most of the socialist states (with the exception of Albania) slowly developed their own socialist versions of personal automobility and car culture, even if a characteristic feature was material scarcity. Cars, spare parts, repair stations, garages and in some cases even gasoline were in short supply, revealing severe malfunctions in production, provision and distribution. Citizens of the Eastern Bloc responded to shortages with dealings ‘on the side’, building widespread networks of informal exchange (Siegelbaum 2009; Möser 2012). And although clandestine

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transactions followed the personal automobile everywhere, socialist car cultures were also deeply influenced by official discourse and state practice. In addition, official campaigns branded automobiles as socialist artefacts of modernity and technical development. Thus, owning and driving an automobile came to symbolize social and material progress. As such, during the last two decades of the Eastern Bloc, privately owned cars became a powerful symbol of the socialist way of life, even if reality lagged significantly behind representation (Siegelbaum 2008; Fava 2014; Gatejel 2014). Against this backdrop, I argue that both the official and the informal features that shaped socialist car cultures also influenced postsocialist mobility. After the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, a quickly growing fleet of automobiles took over postsocialist streets, causing significant congestion. Car ownership became ubiquitous and – at least during the early 1990s, when public transport suffered from frequent disruptions – it seemed there was no alternative to automobility. I see in this phenomenon a clear connection to socialist times, when ordinary citizens had to wait from six to ten years to buy a car. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Western imports (at first mostly second-hand cars) finally overcame the automotive scarcity, owning an automobile was suddenly possible, which for many of these citizens was the fulfilment of a long-held dream. Private automobiles occupied centre stage in the postsocialist transformation because they reflected best the new values of privacy, property and flexibility. However, as mentioned above, this ‘automobile cult’ had originated in late state socialism, when official discourses deemed personal automobiles to be representations of socialist modernity. Thinking of the transition from state socialism to postsocialism as a gradual transformation and not as a clear-cut break also proves very fruitful when analysing the practices of informality that surrounded cars. Historizing ‘informality’ means noticing that state-socialist cars, besides being the embodiment of societal progress, were also quite literally the vehicle of clandestine activity, which occurred in hidden backyards as well as in plain sight on streets and pavements. Private cars often functioned as improvised venues for selling fruits, vegetables and, sometimes, other scarce products. Garages of state plants often doubled as places where private car owners could illegally purchase gasoline. Private cars parked in certain spots outside rail stations and central marketplaces were recognized by knowledgeable pedestrians as taxis ‘on the side’. These informal and sometimes b ­ orderline-illegal exchanges allowed citizens in the Eastern Bloc to improve their quality of life within an economic system that seldom catered to their personal needs. These exchanges were also manifestations of valuable

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skills they were able to employ and resources they could use after the collapse of state-sponsored provision systems. In other words, the web of exchanges and relationships on the verge of legality provided many with a safety net that helped them to survive the ‘deregulated’ 1990s. Furthermore, it was not only informal exchanges that made state-­ socialist streets dynamic places. In the late 1970s, rising car ownership revealed significant infrastructural shortcomings. For instance, the lack of garages and carparks galvanized numerous housing communities to determine for themselves how to properly use the space between apartment blocks. The main contentious issue was whether it should be used collectively or privately. Some residents even held the view that since private cars claimed too much public space, vandalism against them was justified. Others complained to the authorities about the air and noise pollution caused by private cars. These frictions increased and diversified when the number of cars grew exponentially, but this cannot obscure the fact that, as with other emerging automobile cultures, cars in state socialist countries were both embraced and rejected by different societal groups and that some of these conflicts lingered on during postsocialism. Finally, when examining the transition from state socialism to postsocialism, scholars often look into the way that artefacts and material infrastructures were appropriated after 1989. Kurt Möser has analysed in his chapter here the reorganization of traffic infrastructure. For my part, I want to briefly mention that certain state-socialist factories and their brands went on to thrive as parts of multinational automotive corporations. Analysts often take the commercial success of the Romanian Dacia and Czechoslovak Škoda firms as proof that at least from an economic point of view, the transition to a market economy has been completed in Eastern Europe (Gill and Raiser 2012). While economists and political commentators often think that these countries have put their pasts completely behind them, this contribution has looked for a state-socialist heritage after the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. Thus, to sum up, to historicize this transformation process is to determine how certain practices and preferences lingered on within the new political and economic framework of the 1990s and possibly later. On the one hand, one might argue that with the passing of time the disparity amongst countries and individuals grew stronger or that state-­socialist legacies became ever less significant in the negotiation of current social conflicts (Müller 2019). On the other hand, skills and relationships formed during socialism helped various citizens to navigate the new, often confusing realities of capitalism.

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Luminita Gatejel is a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany. She received her PhD from the University of Tübingen (2010) and was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She has published extensively on the history of automobility, everyday life and consumption in the Eastern Bloc. Her new book Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland, Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries will be published in 2023 with CEU Press.

References Borelli, Caterina and Fabio Mattioli. 2013. ‘The Social Lives of Postsocialism’, Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 5(1): 4–13. Edensor, Tim. 2002. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fava, Valentina. 2014. The Socialist People’s Car: Automobiles, Shortages and Consent in the Czechoslovak Road to Mass Production (1918–1964). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gatejel, Luminita. 2014. Warten, hoffen und endlich fahren: Auto und Sozialismus in der Sowjetunion, in Rumänien und der DDR, 1956–1989/91. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Gill, Indermit S. and Martin Raiser. 2012. ‘Golden Growth: Restoring the Lustre of the European Economic Model’, World Bank Publications, No. 6016. Möser, Kurt. 2012. ‘Thesen zum Pflegen und Reparieren in den Automobilkulturen am Beispiel der DDR’, Technikgeschichte 79(3): 207–26. Müller, Martin. 2019. ‘Goodbye, Postsocialism!’, Europe-Asia Studies 71(4): 533–50. Siegelbaum, Lewis H. 2008. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ____. 2009. ‘On the Side: Car Culture in the USSR, 1960s–1980s’, Technology and Culture 50(1): 1–23. Urry, John. 2004. ‘The “System” of Automobility’, Theory, Culture and Society ­21(4–5): 25–39.

POSTSCRIPT 2

5 Periodization, Postsocialism and the Directionally Challenged Joshua Hotaka Roth

As a scholar of Japanese automobility especially interested in the 1960s, an era when the members of an expanding middle class could afford to buy cars for the first time in Japan, it was with great curiosity that I attended the Postsocialist Street workshop, the origin of the present volume. My comments here weave together some thoughts about historical periodization and about parallels between ‘postsocialism’ in Eastern Europe and ‘postwar’ Japan, in which we may find interesting shifts in the experience of mobility as well as its governance. My discussion of the experience of mobility focuses on the appearance of a particular term, in the Japanese context, to describe someone with a poor sense of direction; my remarks on governance pertain in particular to emerging modes of responsibilization. Hopefully my comments on the Japanese context will provide a comparative perspective that provokes reflection and the gleaning of insights relevant for an understanding of the postsocialist street. In Japan, a directionally challenged individual is said to be hoko onchi (literally ‘directionally tone-deaf’). This term is used casually. Though I consider myself pretty good at finding my way around, I have been called hoko onchi once or twice. A few years ago, I researched this term and discovered that it had first been included in a Japanese dictionary in 1969. People have gotten lost throughout Japanese history, of course, so I wondered why the term was coined precisely when it was. What had been going on in the 1960s in Japan that made visible the relative difficulty some people had in finding their way? Well, the era of mass automobility in Japan began in the mid-1960s, a time when cars first became affordable for much of the growing middle class. The experience of losing one’s way accordingly became more commonplace: more and more people travelled via car over longer distances and drove with greater frequency to unfamiliar neighbourhoods. But this explanation could not be the full answer, because if everyone

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was getting lost more frequently, why coin a term that indicated only certain people as being especially directionally challenged? Over the course of two summers I brought some of my US-based students to Japan to conduct a survey and carry out directional orientation experiments at two universities. In the survey, we asked Japanese students whether they considered themselves to be hoko onchi and whether others had used that term to describe them. The experiments involved a classic pointing experiment as well as a wayfinding experiment. In the pointing experiment, we asked the Japanese students to point towards five major train stops on the Yamanote loop line that goes around the central part of Tokyo. These stations would be very familiar to every Tokyoite, the equivalent of the informal ‘orientiry’ landmarks that Nikolaos Olma describes in his chapter on wayfinding in Tashkent in this volume. Using compasses, my students recorded the directions the Japanese students pointed to, and I later compared them with the true directions. It was remarkable how badly most of them did. Many were off by 90 degrees, some by 180 degrees. Their pointings were all over the place. The students were relatively accurate only for the closest station, Takadanobaba, from which they often walked to get to the university, but even in this case, they were off by an average of 45 degrees. For the wayfinding experiment, we directed the Japanese students to walk through back alleys and emerge at a large intersection near their university. I had one of my students walk behind each Japanese student, recording on a map the exact path and length of time taken to reach the destination. Interestingly, in our experiments we found no difference between self-described hoko onchi and those who were confident in their navigational abilities. They were equally bad. What does it mean that one might call oneself hoko onchi even when one’s sense of direction is not measurably different from that of others? Before Facebook took over the social media market in Japan, the Japanese social media site Mixi hosted dozens of hoko onchi interest groups, the largest with more than 180,000 members. You could not find anything equivalent on Facebook (this was before Japanese users of Mixi started migrating there). So hoko onchi is a term that continues to be salient in Japan, although its valence seems to have shifted somewhat from what it had been in the 1960s. It still has the mildly stigmatizing nuance that is conveyed when pointing out someone’s incompetence, but it is also something that people now embrace as a self-description. Many of the posts on these hoko onchi interest groups boil down to a declaration that ‘I am hoko onchi’, followed by a hilarious account of all the different ways that this person has lost their way. The founder

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of the largest hoko onchi interest group on Mixi told me, ‘By all means, please enjoy hoko onchi!’ So, in addition to asking what was happening in the 1960s that led to the term being coined, we might also ask why this term has shifted in meaning in the 2000s? What is going on in the 2000s that has led people to embrace, even to celebrate, hoko onchi? The history of the term hoko onchi provides some sense of the shifting experiences of space and time in Japan from the 1960s to the 2000s. Not only was the 1960s the start of mass automobility in Japan, it was also the height of what Japanese historians refer to as the era of highspeed growth: familiarity with train timetables was required, and you were expected to get to places on time, culminating eventually in the invention of ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing systems. In such a context, those who failed to show up in time, who got lost en route to their destinations, would have stood out. The 1990s and 2000s, however, were recessionary decades in Japan, a time marked by a low birth rate and a rapidly aging population. A new experience of time and space seems to have emerged in this period, as more people were (and are) appreciating the idea of wandering in a leisurely fashion rather than rushing to predetermined destinations. There is a ‘slow’ movement in Japan, as in other countries, which encourages people to appreciate where they are at any given moment, to allow themselves to be surprised in multiple unexpected ways and, ultimately, to celebrate the experience of getting lost. Perhaps there are other peculiar terms within other contexts that similarly mark shifting concerns. In a personal communication, Ger Duijzings has noted that in Romania one finds the ‘șmecher’, a culture hero who knows how to trick the system, an expert in all the ‘shortcuts’ to avoid traffic congestion, for example, and a skilled queue-jumper who gets ahead at everyone else’s expense. A holdover from the socialist era, this type has shifted in valence under postsocialism. Although a standard periodization of recent Japanese history includes the postwar period (1945–1989) followed by recessionary Japan (1989–present), the emergence of the term hoko onchi in the mid1960s and its shifting valence in the first decade of the new millennium suggest that a moment of political or economic rupture (the end of the Second World War in Japan or the end of socialism in Eastern Europe) does not cause one mode of experiencing space and time to be replaced immediately by another. It takes a while for the characteristics of a historical era to congeal or to solidify in a way that becomes noticeable. When thinking about the ‘postsocialist street’ we might consider how new experiences of space and time may only now be emerging, taking different forms in different postsocialist contexts a considerable amount of time after the

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historical marker of 1989. Nikolaos Olma’s chapter suggests that the informal mechanisms involved in generating ‘orientiry’ landmarks may actually serve to preserve or adapt a sense of an older landscape within a rapidly changing built environment. Costanza Curro’s chapter likewise examines the disjunctive experience of marginalization visited on certain groups within the context of the accelerating mobility that others have experienced. Alongside shifting subjective experiences of time and space, we can discern shifting modes of governance towards drivers, pedestrians, cyclists and anyone sharing the space of the road in Japan. Earlier in the postwar era, there had been greater emphasis on what the historian of Japan Sheldon Garon has called programmes of ‘moral suasion’ (Garon 1997: 7–15) – government–led campaigns that attempted to mould the minds of the citizenry so that they would understand their legal obligations in moral terms. But there are limits to moral suasion. Suasion is difficult to accomplish. And gradually greater emphasis has been placed on the ‘responsibilization’ of individual drivers through risk mechanisms such as insurance systems. The new paradigm does not require people to buy into a moral system. It just makes them pay a price for not abiding by the rules or for causing an accident even when they have not broken any rules. Insurance also provides compensation to those who are injured in accidents. So insurance systems contribute an incredibly important piece to a new laissez-faire system that may allow forms of transport to provide convenient and flexible services that had not previously been available, services that could otherwise cause chaos and danger. The paradigms of moral suasion and responsibilization through risk mechanisms both existed in postwar and recessionary Japan, yet there has been a shift in balance between them. Their new alignment suggests that different systems of governance over street space and mobility can coexist under new and emerging societal conditions: one can gain importance as another becomes less visible, though the latter does not necessarily disappear completely from sight. Moreover, the contributions to this volume make it clear that there are diverse postsocialisms, which follow from diverse socialisms and vary from country to country, with experiences in turn varying between centres and peripheries and between urban or rural areas. In addition, the experience of postsocialism may depend in part on the stories that are told about socialism, which can differ markedly from one national context to another. Postsocialism seems so varied that it raises the question of whether it is even a useful category at all. Perhaps, despite the diversity contained under its umbrella, the term is still helpful because it marks a kind of reference point, a moment when something undeniably

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changed. The given situation could have changed in any number of ways and to a greater or lesser extent from one location to another, and might have been gradual or abrupt; and yet the transition point indicates a collectively held consciousness that something did change at a particular moment in time, and that we are in a process of transition. Perceived in this way, postsocialism can be regarded as a category that is suitable for multiple, diverse experiences. But a question remains: when is that category no longer relevant? Probably when individuals no longer think that the particular moment of transition is a significant reference point for understanding the present. Japan provides here a salient reference. In the Japanese context, historians in the late 1980s debated the end of the ‘postwar’ era. Some suggested that ‘postwar’ ended in 1989, upon the death of Hirohito, the Showa emperor. His passing opened up a space for a much more explicit discussion of wartime responsibility, and there was a sense of the passing of an era and of the possibility that a different kind of Japan might then emerge. The year also coincided with the end of high-speed growth and the start of the recessionary era. Postsocialism may continue as long as the ghosts of socialism continue to haunt our imagination, and as long as nothing else emerges that would mark a new kind of turning point. Joshua Hotaka Roth is Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, USA. His publications include ‘Kamikaze Truckers in Postwar Japan’ (Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, 2019); ‘The Shared Road: Cars, Pedestrians, and Bicyclists in Japan’ (in Wheels of Change: Cars, Automobility and Development in Asia, Routledge, 2016); and ‘Hoko onchi: Way-finding and the Emergence of Directional Tone-deafness in Japan’ (Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 2015). His previous research on ethnic migration resulted in Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan (Cornell University Press, 2002).

Reference Garon, Sheldon. 1997. Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

POSTSCRIPT 3

5 ‘Where Is the Postsocialism Here?’ Peter Norton Some years ago, when I told a colleague in the United States that I was going to attend an academic gathering on the ‘postsocialist street’, I was met with the reply: ‘What’s that?’ I could offer only a dictionary-like definition: the years 1989–1993 were a moment of concentrated transformation in the (former) socialist world; at the workshop we would consider the transformation’s significance for streets and mobility. My colleague and I took this matter to be a European or a Eurasian affair, largely irrelevant elsewhere. The workshop, held in Regensburg in 2016, however, revealed much wider significances. At the start of the workshop, Tauri Tuvikene asked the participants: ‘Where is the postsocialism here?’ This provocative question compelled us all to reexamine our assumptions. Over the ensuing days the participants’ close examinations of lived experiences disclosed a postsocialist phenomenon that is a manifestation of larger global transformations. These sometimes paradoxical changes resist characterization, though they tend to be recognizable in traits such as diffusion at a cost to centralization, the erosion of distinctions between the public and the private, and the proliferation of intersections between the personal and the commercial. The problem is far more complex than a simple dichotomy between socialism and postsocialism, and is not geographically bounded. In postsocialism as in other transformations, historical legacies linger. As in the postsocialist world, the United States has also inherited strictly enforced ideological legacies from the twentieth century that will persist for decades. For example, transportation engineering standards that never made any sense, except within the self-defined terms of a closed and defensively enforced ideology, survive unimpaired even in an era when many no longer believe in them. Highway engineering in the United States has something in common with traits that have been associated with socialism: it is ideologically self-enclosed and self-­ justifying, statist, officially indifferent to markets, self-congratulatory, impervious to reason, intolerant of dissent and sometimes oppressive. If US highway engineering promoted car dependency while the socialist

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states tended (despite themselves) to constrain automobility, the difference is relatively superficial. In the postsocialist world people may have to wait forty years for the ghosts of socialism to disappear; in the United States, young critics of car dependency might say: ‘We’ve got to wait for forty years for the engineers and the bureaucrats to die off so that we can finally fix these things’. But there is a risk, as Sabina Maslova and Tauri Tuvikene demonstrate in their respective critiques, that we may smugly suppose we can finally deliver the promised land, when in fact we are as susceptible as anyone to dogma. Superficially observed, postsocialism followed a transition from centralized control to chaotic atomization. However, the contributors to this volume challenge us to question this simple control-versus-chaos dichotomy. Their work suggests that if we can even specify distinct stages, there were at least three: control, then chaos and finally a sort of reinvention. For some, as one of the workshop participants argued, ‘democracy’ (as it was called) initially meant everybody doing whatever they want, for better and for worse. For many, postsocialism has meant that survival demands working fifteen hours a day. In their contribution on Prishtina, Rita Gagica and Ger Duijzings concur that though the postsocialist transformations were profound, in the city’s streets there was no unambiguous trend marking a passage from authoritarian control to democratic liberation – certainly not during the 1990s. With release from the stifling political constraints of Serbian state control after the end of the 1999 war came new burdens that confined the streets’ social vitality, for example the proliferation of informal construction projects and, particularly, an explosion of motor vehicle traffic. Elsewhere political authority persisted undiminished, if in new forms. Unlike in Prishtina, in Moscow the authorities continued to shape the cityscape in response to new political agendas. Consistent with trends from abroad guided by notions of ‘livable cities’, after 2000 Moscow introduced more pedestrian zones. But, as Sabina Maslova and Tauri Tuvikene show, these trends affected the city centre while neglecting the great majority of Muscovites, exacerbating and epitomizing the growing inequalities that have characterized postsocialist transitions. Their account compels us to question the more facile assertions about ‘livability’, and indeed whether the term is defensible when its advocates neglect underlying power relationships and social inequities. In response to socialism’s mechanisms of control, people developed unofficial and informal means of retaining autonomy. The unofficial systems of postsocialism, though less prominent, are not necessarily less significant to the social life of cities, streets and roads. ­Nikolaos

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Olma reveals elaborate postsocialist geographic regimes that are almost entirely invisible to the outsider. Amidst the indeterminacy of transformations in Tashkent, resourceful residents, without formal coordination or official support, have developed extraordinarily complex navigational systems and transport services based on perpetually evolving common orientation points. The result, Olma contends, is a kind of shared cognitive map. Far from a deficient imitation of absent state-supplied services, the orientation system is a robust and practical organic complex. If stage magicians make the visible invisible, the authors assembled here, with comparable dexterity, have performed the more practical service of revealing the invisible. In most disciplines with an interest in urban mobility, waiting is neglected; if it is recognized at all, it is solely as a loss of time characterized only in quantitative terms. But for most travellers, and particularly for those taking buses, trams or other scheduled public transport vehicles, waiting is an essential part of every journey. Waiting is a complex experience, and no linear measure can do it justice.  Andrei Vazyanau is amongst the very few who have given waiting its due. In his study of waiting at tram stops in Ukraine and Romania, Vazyanau observes that unpredictability has been essential to the experience. Postsocialist efforts to reduce waiting to a quantitative measure and to apply technology to diminish its unpredictability thus have experiential significance for the traveller quite apart from time savings alone. Like the other authors who make the invisible visible, Kurt Möser illustrates how underlying, often imperceptible ideologies can still be detected, offering us ways to look for such visible indications. The felling of trees along roads of the former GDR indicated that the roads were now primarily meant for fast driving; the substitution of paving blocks for asphalt could testify either that pedestrians were finally granted some priority (since blocks are not ideal for driving) or that a mayor had made a deal with the paving block contractors. Similarly, researchers’ understandable attention to travel within cities can diminish the visibility of intercity and rural travel. In compensation, Agata Stanisz offers a close look at postsocialist roadside life along routes in Poland, revealing transformations induced by efforts to ‘modernize’ road transport. She finds roadway settings that are neither urban nor rural but rather shaped by long-range road travel. In a study of a vast urban periphery, Ger Duijzings, like Sabina Maslova and Tauri Tuvikene, characterizes its distinctions from more rigid urban centres. As in Moscow, Bucharest’s peripheral zone is more motorized and less interested in the trends associated with ‘livable’ cities. Like a deeply intensified variant of Stanisz’s roadside zones, the areas around Bucharest’s

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urban belt road are shaped by ambition, opportunism, improvisation and expediency. The authors document a persistent dichotomy between informal personal-trust systems and formal systemic orders. The postsocialist transformations entailed a crisis of trust in formal systems. The crisis has not been limited geographically to the countries we associate with the political ‘transition’ from socialism to neoliberal democracy, though it is particularly marked in them, where many formal systems lost users’ trust. To travel and sometimes even to be still, people had to be resourceful in order to find alternatives (often unofficial). Informal personal-trust systems have served many of their needs. In the birzha phenomenon in Tbilisi, illuminated by Costanza Curro, young men form networks of mutual support so as to make a living from the streets. Amidst proliferating hypermobility, birzhas remain distinctly local and purposefully immobile. Despite official disapproval, birzhas’ dense social networks and local loyalties act as a countervailing force to the governing order in postsocialist Georgia. There is no agreement amongst this volume’s authors about what was lost and what was gained in the transformation from socialism to postsocialism. Socialism was in some respects oppressive, in others humane; postsocialism has been both liberating and menacing. Like Curro, Jeremy Morris stresses the endurance of interpersonal relations through these transformations. Morris documents the persistence of automobility in Russia as a means for working-class men to express values and cultivate group cohesion. Though subject to the fluctuating winds of global economic and political transformation, these men cordoned off realms of autonomy for themselves within subcultures of automobile ownership, maintenance and tinkering. Perhaps paradoxically, they have found opportunities for autonomy within unreliable systems. Similarly, observing the workshop, Luminita Gatejel vividly depicted the constraints of travel under socialism and the resourcefulness required of travellers. She echoed a persistent dichotomy in the work gathered here, between self-reliance and system reliability. Is a reliable system – one that can be counted on – liberating? Or is liberation found in the self-reliance that follows when unreliable systems compel inventive resourcefulness? Official fictions abound in these cases. As in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, participants in systems, including (but not only) users, frequently confront demands that would have them agree that two plus two equals five. Socialism was, of course, a complex of official fictions, where (for example) social equality was supposedly in sight, if on a perpetually receding horizon. But official fictions pervade postsocialism

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as well. The transition shifted fictions rather than abandoning them. As most of the authors show, in various ways, postsocialism’s promises are sometimes inconsistent with lived realities. The transformation also meant substantial loss, as Kurt Möser shows: die Wende produced Ostalgie, which has lingered in eastern Germany. Nostalgia is loss – the loss that time and ordinary change inevitably impose and that sociopolitical transformation compounds. Amongst these authors’ case studies there is a persistent interplay between the public and the private.1 As with the control-versus-chaos dichotomy, we can never really separate these two realms. Such opposites are evidently implicated and entailed in each other. We also find persistent dramas of authority versus individuality, of bottom-up versus top-down, of planned control versus spontaneity. These pairs of opposites defy our attempts to distinguish them. For example, at the Regensburg workshop, Ger Duijzings showed scenes of traffic in Bucharest from Alexandru Solomon’s 2008 film Apocalypse on Wheels. The film ostensibly depicts traffic chaos (‘apocalypse’), but there is nonetheless everyday rationality in the ways in which individuals navigate the city and find their way, independent of formal systems. Routine system-­ following does not work in such circumstances. Amongst planners, policymakers and engineers, transportation is a complex of problems to be simplified and solved. Over the course of the twentieth century, and to varying degrees in both socialism and postsocialism, the problem-solving frame included (and in practice promoted) the rise of automobility and motor vehicle infrastructures. As several of the authors confirm, postsocialism, by lifting constraints on automobility, let motor vehicles overwhelm the streets and roads, constraining and modifying but not quite suppressing their socialities. Since the 1970s there have been growing pressures to step away from the more extreme versions of the problem-solving frame of normality, to find ways to lubricate frictions instead of seeking, at any cost, to eliminate them. To paraphrase the words on the back of a marshrutka in Bishkek (as one of the workshop participants showed us): instead of ‘Sorry, brother, my job is like that’, we might have ‘Sorry, brother, the system is like that’. All of the authors bring unheard voices into scholarship. All demonstrate invaluable skill at applying and even developing new ways to uncover the words of people we would otherwise miss. These voices need the attention of not only anthropologists and other social scientists but also transportation experts. A week before I joined the workshop in Regensburg, I attended a conference of transportation planners in Colorado. The question before us there was framed as ­figuring

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out what people want and how to deliver it. This was the model. But the planners proceed without the kinds of perspectives the Regensburg researchers uncover. The workshop participants have demonstrated that transportation systems are not the products of a one-way channel, where experts, on the basis of voiceless data, deliver (or try to deliver) what people want. There is a negotiation, whether formal or informal, explicit or subversive. The negotiation is inescapable, even when experts exclude certain participants or ignore the underlying back-and-forth. ‘Data’, in the narrow sense of the term that unfortunately prevails, and ‘data collection’, are not sufficient substitutes for real negotiation. Negotiation requires the voices that the Regensburg researchers have sought out and found, by means that are beyond the reach of transportation experts. Negotiation is not the problem. It is the real system. In short, policymakers, planners and engineers have much to learn from anthropologists. Transportation experts need them. Just as Gijs Mom and Ruth Oldenziel of the Technical University of Eindhoven have valuably brought together historians and planners in the Netherlands, the Regensburg workshop has convinced me that anthropologists and planners should get together as well. At the very least, planners (and other experts) must learn to recognize that they inescapably inhabit a subculture. In the study of human mobility, the transformation from socialism to postsocialism has already revealed patterns, practices and methods of significance that extend far beyond the particular transition under examination. These findings deserve a wider audience. Where is the postsocialism? The question is worth asking wherever the extraordinary political transformations of circa 1989–1993 overturned regimes. But no satisfactory answer can come from exclusive attention to national politics, corporate strategy or global finance, no matter how thorough. As the authors collected here demonstrate, postsocialism lies in the experience of people striving to make a living, struggling for predictability amidst rapid change, seeking sociability, pursuing aspirations. From such a perspective, postsocialism is less a geographically bounded temporal state defined by its predecessor (socialism) than an unstable condition, a newly exposed terrain subject to the buffeting and sometimes violent winds of corporate enterprise, entrepreneurial opportunism and official authority, but also scattered with a dazzling variety of improvised shelters manifesting personal ambition, collective sociability, cultural tradition, subversive nonconformity and individual expression. In its particular and distinctive forms, postsocialism is where socialism was. But in its generalizable patterns, varieties of postsocialism are recognizable wherever such conditions may be found.

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Peter Norton is a historian of technology and an observer of cities, streets and people. He is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (MIT Press, 2008) and of Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-tech Driving (Island Press, 2021). Norton has been a visiting faculty member of the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands and is a member of the University of Virginia’s Center for Transportation Studies.

Note 1. For this see, e.g. Gal and Kligman 2000, ch. 3: ‘Dilemmas of public and private’, 37–62. I thank Ger Duijzings for suggesting this reference.

Reference Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman. 2000. The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A ­Comparative-Historical Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Index 5 Abkhazia, 103n2 activism, 19, 62; online anti-corruption platform, 66n4; civic initiatives, 54; cycling protests, 18; traffic, 19, 62; traffic blogs, 18, 24n6, 180 ‘agoraphilia’, 3 Albania, 2, 11, 24n4, 46, 58, 64, 229; Albanians, 46–47, 50; diaspora Albanians, 49, 52, 55, 58, 63 anthropology, 20, 23, 75, 227. See also ethnography Apocalypse on Wheels (film, Alexandru Solomon, 2009) architecture, 49–50, 106, 122; turboarchitecture, 49–50 arteries, 5–6, 16, 182 artists, 1, 4, 66n1, 106, 130; street musicians, 176; street performers, 153 assemblages, 94, 102, 179, 182, 229 Augé, Marc, 6, 111, 162; ‘non-places’, 6, 110, 162 authoritarianism, 3, 32, 37, 38, 71, 93, 239 automobiles. See under cars automobility, 11–16, 21, 23, 89–103, 128, 136–38, 144, 225–26, 230, 234–35, 241–42; and masculinity, 14, 21–22, 92–103. See also mobility: car avtomobilshchina, 18, 136 beggars, 54, 126, 149, 170, 176 Berlin, 31, 35, 118, 205–6, 213–14, 218; Berlin Wall, 206, 230; East Berlin, 31, 40; West Berlin, 31 bicycle, 17, 63–64; infrastructure, 146; lanes, 16, 64, 48, 123, 139, 146, 219; as vehicle for ‘peasants’, 17. See also cycling billboards, 52, 58, 117: walking billboards, 59 birzha, 21, 71–84, 224, 241; im-mobility, 21, 72, 75, 78, 84 boulevards, 11, 49, 56, 109; (socialist)

magistrales, 11 bridges, 6, 144, 191; flyovers, 6, 117; footbridges, 16; overpasses, 16, 152 Brömmelstroet, Marco te, 6–7, 20 Bucharest, 13, 22, 106–32, 176–77, 240, 242. See also Centura Bulgaria, 19, 119, 218; Bulgarians, 214 buses, 11, 17, 55–56, 146, 168–69, 212–14, 240; bus stops, 19, 56, 58–59, 160–83; trolleybuses, 146, 162–69, 175, 183n3. See also mini-buses capitalism, 130, 166, 225, 231 car brands, 226; ARO, 9; Audi, 58, 91, 100; BMW, 93–94; Dacia, 9, 226, 231; Fiat, 24n3, 96; FSO, 9; Jaguar, 58; Lada, 9, 94–97, 99–100, 226; Mercedes, 58, 95; Moskvitch, 9; Nissan, 100; Porsche, 58; Škoda, 9, 99, 231; socialist, 226; Trabant, 9, 21, 35, 38–41, 226; Volga, 9; Volkswagen, 97; Wartburg, 9; Zastava, 9, 24n3; ZAZ, 9 car culture, 39, 41–42. 198, 229; capitalist, 1; postsocialist, 23, 39, 223–24, 226; socialist, 1, 226, 230; Western, 1 cars, 1–2, 7, 11–12, 14, 18–19, 24, 31, 34–35, 41, 51–58 passim, 63, 90–103 passim, 116, 128, 136–37, 140, 143–44, 146, 150, 152, 167, 181, 223, 226, 230–31, 233; car parades, 21; car repair, 21, 23, 33, 39, 92–93, 96, 102, 116, 206, 217, 229; cars as ‘cognition-impairing machines’, 7; illegal car races, 13, 64, 129; cars as ‘living room on wheels’, 4; private car ownership, 2, 12, 15, 21, 38, 52, 59, 92, 95, 97, 100, 128, 169, 226, 229–31; used and second hand cars, 12, 21, 34, 116, 213, 226, 230; Western, 34, 37–39, 90, 95, 100. See also parking centre-periphery, 141–42, 152, 156; within cities, 22, 141–42. See also peripheries

246Index Centura (Bucharest), 22, 106–32 children, 14, 17, 52, 54, 62–63, 143, 150, 170, 172, 176, 179; street children, 52, 124; teenagers, 51, 72, 143, 172, 176 chronotopes, 8, 10; socialist, 225; postsocialist, 8, 10 circulation, 2, 7, 20, 111, 114, 119, 128, 140, 149, 224 cities, 1–3, 11, 13–14, 17, 19, 61, 95, 127, 136–39, 141, 144, 179, 225, 239–40; American, 48, 183n1, 225; Central and East European, 11, 114, 141, 225; European, 118, 132n5, 225; global, 137, 149; liveable, 138–39, 140, 156, 239–40; postsocialist, 1, 10, 16, 18–19, 47, 52, 59, 65, 111, 137, 156, 163, 166, 183n6, 188–89, 223–25, 239; post-Soviet, 136, 163, 187; socialist, 16, 19, 225; sustainable, 138 city, 4–5, 7, 17, 48; automotive, 7; city branding, 145; city symphonies, 11; modernist, 16, 24n1, 112; planned, 156; right to the city, 3, 141. See also cities collectivism, 8, 229 communism, 76, 94, 113, 189–90, 208, 218, 229; communist elites, 130; Communist Party, 77, 189 commuting, 97, 121, 129, 163–64, 177, 201, 213; commuters, 38, 141, 153, 162–68 passim, 173–75, 181, 213–14 congestion, 15–18, 20, 36, 51, 55, 59, 63, 118, 128, 137, 144, 153, 157n5, 182, 223, 230, 235. See also traffic jams conviviality, 2, 4–7, 15, 24n1, 163, 173, 176, 182, 223 corruption, 50, 66n4, 71, 84, 89, 95, 125–27, 131n3 crime, 58, 71, 73–79 passim, 84, 127, 130; criminalization, 16, 21 cultural studies, 15, 76; cultural imaginaries, 15, 18 cycling, 17, 19–20, 64, 139–40, 146, 219; cycle protests, 18; cyclists, 16–17, 59, 117, 145, 235. See also bicycle dash cams, 19 Debord, Guy, 20 D’Est / From the East (film, Chantal Akerman, 1993), 12, 162 digital technologies, 157, 163; electronic displays (RTIS), 168, 178–82 passim; GPS, 178, 188, 190, 199; mobile apps, 168, 180; mobile (3G) internet, 199, 213;

smartphones, 172, 188, 190, 199; Wi-Fi, 178 dogs, 57–58, 129; as accessories, 58; stray dogs, 57, 120, 124; watch dogs, 57, 122 drivers, 7, 13, 16, 19, 38–39, 41, 47, 52–65 passim, 89–90, 94–95, 102, 103n3, 117–18, 136, 145, 236; ambulance, 93; bus, 63, 170; disputes between, 54, 59–60; Eastern, 37; lorry, 213, 217; marshrutka, 172, owner-driver, 101; taxi, 18, 23, 47, 54–56, 96, 187, 191, 193, 198–99, 201; Western, 35, 38, 91 driving, 13–15, 21, 35, 41, 53, 56–57, 64, 89–90, 94, 100, 106, 141, 230, 240; night cruising, 100; for pleasure, 99; drinkdriving, 91, 94, 98–99; on pavements, 64; reckless, 13, 38, 93; against traffic (on other side), 65, 93, 117 dwelling, 1, 6, 15, 21, 180–81, 200, 224; mobile, 1, 18 e-scooters, 17 East Germany, 33–40 passim, 242; East Germans, 34, 38, 44n4. See also GDR Eastern Europe, 8, 12, 18, 24n2, 34, 46, 95, 111, 141, 143, 179, 218, 231–35 passim; Eastern Bloc, 42, 229–31; the (socialist) East, 33; economy, 32, 34; informal, 21, 39, 50, 98–99; local, 209, 214, 218; market, 84, 137, 231; planned, 33, 36; roadside, 23, 206; time, 168, 175 elderly people, 12, 17–18, 51, 55, 59, 74, 143, 150, 167–77 passim; elderly men, 53–54 electrification, 11 elites, 89, 93, 119, 129, 131n3, 145; business, 127, 130, 147–50 passim, 216, 218; celebrities, 51; communist party, 119, 130; nomenklatura, 11; oligarchs, 131n3; politicians, 51, 127, 218; ruling, 189 engineering, 7, 115, 141, 242; engineers, 210; highway, 227, 238; public transit, 180, 227, 238; road, 36, 210, 214; traffic, 2, 7, 14, 20, 61, 141, 179, 223, 227; urban, 178 environment, 11, 104n9, 129, 137, 194, 217; built (physical), 3, 10, 49, 107, 137, 140, 152, 186; environmentalists, 126; environmental knowledge, 7, 23, 187–88, 195–96, 198, 200; environmental concerns, 116, 129, 140, 142, 216; pedestrian, 137, 140, 145, 150, 153, 156,

Index

157n3; urban, 3, 18, 62, 120, 137, 145, 162–63, 181, 191 Estonia, 16 ethnography, 2, 15, 20, 22, 72, 89, 92, 106, 127, 162, 166, 169, 176, 224, 227; auto-ethnography, 89; ethnographic composites, 92, 103n4; fieldwork, 47, 188; of infrastructure, 112; mobile methods, 47, 105; participant observation, 47; relevance for street studies, 15, 227; road ethnographies, 6, 106, 115, 205–6 Europe, 9, 23, 72, 81, 90–91, 93, 118, 132n5, 137, 145, 156, 205–7, 210, 291n4, 225, 238; EU accession, 23, 207–9, 215; Europeanization, 181; European Union (EU), 118, 176, 181, 205, 215, 217 everyday life, 1, 3, 31, 51, 56, 79, 143, 146, 166, 168–69, 171, 186–88, 190, 194, 197, 200, 205, 218, 242; everyday immobility, 75; everyday mobility, 2, 6–7, 17, 137, 143, 150, 153, 165, 213, 223; everyday narratives, 82; everyday resistance, 3, 186 expatriates, 50, 62, 132n6 feminists, 52 films, 12, 18, 66n1, 70, 98, 115, 125, 132n4, 162, 209–10, 242; city symphonies, 11; propaganda, 209–210; Soviet, 11 flows, 7, 223; pedestrian, 149; transnational, 82: vehicle, 2, 7, 16, 48, 114, 136, 210, 215 foreign investment, 80, 208, 214 fossil fuels, 11, 225; post fossil-fuel era, 227 freedom (post-socialist), 3, 51–52, 71; afforded by the car, 13, 18, 21, 41; ‘freedom of the road’, 37–38; Motorway of Freedom, 206; of movement, 52, 128–29, 138, 211; zones of, 109–10 Gal, Susan, 4, 14 garages, 14, 39, 47, 60, 92, 95–99, 131, 171, 212, 231; garage areas, 12, 92, 94, 96, 98; garage culture, 39, 44n6; as male working-class domain, 39, 96–98, 101–2; as refuge, 92, 102. See also parking gated communities, 6, 106, 120–22, 128, 132n6, 151; walled compounds, 111, 121 GDR, 8, 21, 24n2, 31–42 passim, 215, 240; car parades (1989), 21, 32; Ostalgie, 40, 242; die Wende, 21, 242

247 Gehl, Jan, 139, 145, 156 gender, 14, 51, 54, 92, 95, 98, 103. See also masculinity, men, women geography, 18, 20, 75, 167; symbolic, 109 Georgia, 8, 21, 70–85, 241; Rose Revolution (2003), 21, 70, 76 Germany, 12, 31, 33, 46, 52, 55, 63, 214–15; reunification, 32, 34–37, 41–42. See also East Germany, GDR ghettos, 123 globalization, 3, 10, 21, 208, 218, 227, 238, 241; global finance, 243; Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), 199; global ‘shortcuts’, 208 Goffman, Erving, 1, 49, 56 governance, 3; entrepreneurial, 208; local self-government, 208; of mobility, 233, 236; public, 64; socialist, 11; urban, 3 graffiti, 58 green spaces, 118, 122, 136, 139, 142, 147, 149 Haussmann, Baron, 7 holidays, 57, 214; religious, 126; socialist, 11, 31; socialist street parades, 31 hoko onchi (Japan), 226, 233–35 homeless people, 6, 131n2, 170; shelters, 116, 124 housing, 84, 98, 142–43; communities, 231; high-rise, 142; prefabricated, 142; shortages, 114; socialist, 12, 77, 119, 143, 198 Illich, Ivan, 223 immobility, 71, 75–77, 81–84, 95; immobility, 21, 72, 75, 78, 84 individualism, 19, 40, 93, 96, 104n7 industries, 119, 129, 207; post-industrial sites, 123–24, 167; industrial employment, 101; industrial towns, 21, 103n5; industrial zones, 33, 119, 142, 151 inequality, 76, 90, 93, 107, 130 informal neighbourhoods, 5, 46, 109, 113, 123–24, 129; informal construction, 50, 239; informal urbanism, 119 informal practices, 12, 226; barter, 12; car boot sales, 226; informal exchanges, 229–31; survival strategies, 11, 239; taxis (taxiing), 18, 63, 96, 99, 101, 187–88, 196, 198, 200; vending, 79; tinkering, 12, 39–40, 92, 96, 226, 241. See also street hawking

248Index informality, 22, 102, 121, 130, 230; informal personal trust systems, 241 infrastructure, 71, 84, 90, 106, 110–12, 116, 120, 199, 206–10 passim, 216–18, 231; motor vehicle, 138, 242; bicycle, 146; local, 212; military, 113; mobility, 143, 163, 170, 213; infrastructural nodes and networks, 110; pedestrian, 150–52; public transport, 162, 169, 172; road, 94, 96, 103n2, 116, 123, 139, 142, 150, 207–8, 210, 218; traffic, 231; transport, 142, 150, 169, 172; urban, 167 insurance systems, 236 intersections, 54, 59, 64, 110, 117, 191; conflicts at, 52 Jacobs, Jane, 6, 24n1, 48, 62, 65, 223; ‘eyes on the street’, 5, 74 Japan, 10, 14, 23, 226, 233–37 kiosks, 124, 152, 165, 172, 178 Kligman, Gail, 4, 14 Kontroll (film, Nimrod Antal, 2003), 18 Kosovo, 8, 21, 46, 49–50, 57–58, 60: independence (2008), 46 Kyiv, 11, 118 Latour, Bruno, 111 Lefebvre, Henri, 48, 71 logistics, 116; logistic parks, 116, 217 lorries, 38, 117, 209, 212–13, 219n5. See also trucks mafia, 52, 58; cemetery mafia (Bucharest), 125; Italian, 127 Man with a Movie Camera (film, Dziga Vertov, 1929), 11, 15 maps, 116, 178; geocoding, 199; cognitive, 187–88, 195, 200; Google, 63, 199; mental, 119, 165; online, 188, 199; Yandex, 199 Mariupol, 164–65, 167–72, 175, 177–81, 183nn2–3 marshrutkas. See under mini-buses masculinity, 14, 21–22, 71, 75–77, 82, 92–103; and class, 22, 72, 92–103, 241. See also birzha, garages: as male working-class domain, men memory, 129, 201; collective, 8, 21; memory of socialism, 12; public, 4 men, 13–14, 51, 57, 60, 62, 73, 92, 96–98, 102, 172; elderly, 53–54, 73; hanging out

in streets, 47, 53; working-class, 96, 98, 241; young, 21, 56, 64,72–76, 78–81, 123, 172, 241. See also birzha, masculinity metro, 116, 119, 163, 186, 191, 193 metropolitan areas, 114, 118, 121, 129, 142 micro-interactions, 11, 47; micro-sociality, 182 microrayon, 77, 150 migration, 111, 143–44, 215; migrants, 129, 212–14; outmigration, 207; rural-urban, 46, 49–50, 109, 112, 114, 187 minibuses, 81, 90, 168; komercijala, 168; marshrutkas, 22, 81, 167–72, 175, 178, 224, 242; maxi-taxis, 167–68, 171; shared taxis, 18, 167–68, 172 ‘mobile looking’, 14 mobile phones, 18, 55, 63, 110, 118; smartphones, 172, 178, 188, 190, 199 mobile workers, 17; couriers, 17; delivery people, 17 mobility, 1–8 passim, 14–21 passim, 37, 41–42, 46, 65, 70–79 passim, 82–84, 92–98 passim, 100, 136–37, 140, 143–45, 151, 196–97, 201, 212–13, 223–24, 229, 233, 236, 238, 243; car, 1–2, 8–16 passim, 19, 23, 47, 51–52, 65, 138, 182, 223; carbon-neutral, 224; cultures of, 40, 42; electric public transport, 225; everyday, 2, 137, 143, 150, 153, 213, 223; frictionfree, 20; hypermobility, 23, 226, 241; and immobility, 5, 71–72, 74–75; individual, 38, 40, 42; infrastructures, 143, 163, 170, 213; masculinity and, 71, 75; mass, 226; as modernity, 70; motorized, 15; patterns, 11, 14, 223–24; pedestrian, 16, 136–37, 140, 146, 150, 153; postsocialist, 230; regimes of, 229; slow modes of, 6, 15, 20, 182, 223–26, 235; social, 76, 80, 82, 100; socialist, 23, 37–40, 42, 229; socially interactive, 4; spatial, 76, 80, 82; subversive, 32; sustainable, 12, 137–40; urban, 144–45, 240; Western, 41. See also cycling, immobility modernity, 11, 43, 70–72, 84, 95, 223, 226, 230: modernism, 16, 49, 24n1, 112, 163, 181, 210: modernization, 7, 37, 40, 43, 71–72, 76–77, 84, 112, 145, 178, 205–10, 217; socialist modernity, 11, 43, 226, 320 Monderman, Hans, 61 monuments, 186; ‘decommunization’, 186 moorings, 95

Index

Moran, Joe, 16–17, 48–49, 111, 166, 179 Moscow, 11, 22, 89–95 passim, 118, 136–57, 178, 206, 239–40; inner and outer periphery, 136, 141–43, 151–52, 157n1 motorbikes, 17; bikers, 17 motorization, 3, 10, 19, 224, 240; motorized traffic, 5–7, 12, 15–16, 19, 41, 48, 56, 59, 66–67n5, 179; motorized vehicles, 11, 51, 146, 209, 223 motorway (highway), 5, 23, 31, 35–37, 44n4, 46, 71, 90–94, 99–100, 102, 103n3, 120, 136, 144, 150, 205–19 passim, 227; construction, 206–7; engineering, 227, 238; infrastructure, 6 navigation, 17, 48, 51, 99, 153, 165, 199–200; Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), 199; GPS, 178, 188, 190, 199; streets as channels for, 48. See also orientiry neighbourhoods, 4, 6, 21, 63, 72–83 passim, 140–41, 143, 150, 154, 169, 171, 188–89, 197, 233; dormitory, 123, 143, 169; gentrified, 140; informal, 5, 46, 123, 129; kvartaly, 73, 190; mahalas, 112–13, 197; microrayons, 77, 142–43, 150, 197; neighbourliness, 49; peripheral, 22, 106, 109, 112–13, 115, 123, 141, 175, 181; residential areas (districts), 6, 14, 17, 77–78, 117, 119, 121–23, 127–30, 142–43, 150–53, 167, 190, 198; socialist, 12, 49, 113–14; ubani, 71–84 passim. See also gated communities, segregation: residential neoliberalism, 3, 11, 76, 92, 97, 101, 241; neoliberal subject, 101 Norton, Peter, 6–7 orientiry, 18, 22–23, 51, 186–201, 224, 234, 236 Osh (city), 196–97 parking, 12, 14, 16, 48, 51, 60–63, 91, 95, 116–17, 120, 122, 136, 138, 145, 150, 213–14, 223; bicycle parking, 146; parking problems, 5, 12–18 passim, 21, 56, 59–61, 64–65, 150, 152 parochial realm (Lyn Lofland), 5, 49, 77 passengers, 18, 23, 47, 91, 101–2, 145, 162, 168–69, 171–80 passim, 187, 198–200; passengering, 167–68, 173, 175, 224 ‘pausability’, 19

249 pavements, 5, 16, 47–48, 53–62 passim, 146–53 passim, 197, 219, 230; cars parked on, 5, 16, 56, 60–62, 152; as extension of living space, 5 peak hours, 55, 63, 157n5 pedestrians, 7, 16–17, 22, 47, 53–54, 56, 136–37, 139–41, 145–53 passim, 157n7, 197, 230, 236, 240; marginalization of, 14, 16, 56, 59, 122–23, 144, 152, 197; navigating obstacles while walking, 16, 60–62, 66–7n5, 152–53; pedestrian crossings, 63–64, 117, 151; pedestrianization, 5, 16, 22, 136–56 passim; pedestrian perspective, 47, 197; ‘pedestrian shuffle’, 16; pedestrian zones, 48, 141, 144, 146–50, 152–54, 173, 179, 182, 239; yielding to cars, 13, 52, 59. See also walking, pavements pensioners, 166–72 passim, 187 peripheral vision, 20 peripheries, 207–8, 236. See also centreperiphery ‘permeability’ (Conley), 19 petrol stations, 14, 23, 31, 106, 116, 129, 206, 211–13, 217–18 photography, 15; photographs, 47, 125 pickpockets, 170 Piotrowski, Piotr, 3 playgrounds, 72, 77–78, 122, 150, 181, 212; streets as, 51, 170 Poland, 8–9, 23, 42, 205–19; modernization of road infrastructure, 205–10 police, 47, 51–52, 54, 60, 64–65, 78, 90, 98, 212; bribing of, 91, 93; highway police, 89; military police, 115; police patrols, 79–81; policing, 7, 31, 103n3; road police, 91, 94, 102, 103n3; traffic police, 13, 38, 52, 63–64, 93, 103n3, 144 politics, 22, 42–43, 51, 54, 75, 78, 84, 111, 171, 176, 243; counter-politics, 32; infrapolitics, 92, 98–99; infrastructure and, 111–12; politicians, 40, 51, 91, 127, 218; spatial politics, 138; symbolic politics, 33; transport politics, 42; urban politics, 138, 140 pollution, 120, 129; air pollution, 118, 127, 132n5, 149–50, 152; noise pollution, 231 postcolonial critiques, 9 postsocialism, 1, 3, 8–19, 23, 95, 152, 224–29 passim, 233–43 passim; as analytical lens, 8, 19–20, 224; collective

250Index postsocialism (cont.) memory of socialism, 8, 21; historical continuities, 3, 11, 23, 226, 229–31; path dependencies, 8–10, 20, 224–25; postsocialist streets, 1–2, 8–15, 19–20, 22, 37, 41–42, 75, 96, 98, 163, 166, 170, 223–25, 230, 233, 235, 238; socialist legacies, 10, 19, 224, 229, 231; as spatialtemporal marker, 224, 226; as unstable condition, 227, 243 poverty, 71, 76, 123, 126, 182, 216, 218; evictions, 109, 123–24, 131; ghettos, 123; the poor (and wealthy), 52, 55, 107, 109, 124, 131; slums, 109, 123–24; underclasses, 123. See also Roma Prishtina, 16–17, 21, 46–67, 239; turbourbanism, 46, 49, 65 privacy, 48–49, 113, 138, 172, 182, 226, 230; privateness, 4, 14, 18, 173; private spaces, 4, 58, 122 private security, 120, 122, 124–25 privatization, 12, 46, 77, 107, 115, 125, 137, 170, 180, 207, 218; of socialist housing, 12, 77 promenades, 51, 147, 173, 226 prostitution, 110 protests, 3–4, 51, 127, 166–67; counterpolitics, 32; cycle protests, 18; street demonstrations, 21, 31–32, 41, 206 Prytherch, David, 6 public and private, 4, 14, 173; as fractal distinction (Susan Gal and Gail Kligman), 4, 14, 173 public life, 3, 163–64, 176; the ‘public’, 150; public deliberation, 21, 47, 51; public gaze (eye), 48, 78, 111, 113; public memory, 4; publicness, 4, 14, 19, 164, 173, 176, 179; public realm, 5, 138; public safety, 5; public sphere, 3, 51, 58, 78, 122; public welfare, 225 public space, 3–5, 14, 16, 20, 22, 46–47, 49–52, 73, 77, 84, 122, 124–25, 130, 137, 139, 145–47, 152, 156, 162, 173, 179–80, 183n1, 186, 196, 225, 231; appropriation of, 53, 59, 165; commercialization of, 137–38, 140, 145, 150; as convivial, 2, 4–7, 15, 24n1, 163, 173, 176, 223; face-toface interaction in, 1; post-totalitarian ‘openings’ of, 3; privatisation of, 137; regimentation of, 3, 4, 10–11, 109; social life in, 2–3; socialist public space, 8, 10–11; sociality in, 7–8, 24n5, 48, 53,

163, 169, 173–82 passim; as space of deliberation, 47; unpublic space, 65, 110, 130. See also agoraphilia public transport (transit), 55, 64, 79, 116–20 passim, 128–29, 162–74, 178–82 passim; convivial, 182; electric public transport, 11–12, 19, 167–68, 224–25; as extension of the street (‘street on wheels’), 17, 176–77; public transport infrastructure, 162, 169, 172; low prestige of, 19, 166; as mobile public space, 19, 55; timetables (schedules), 164, 168–69, 175–76, 178, 180, 183n3, 235; unpredictability of, 176, 179, 240; public transport vehicles, 17–18, 22, 56, 166, 170, 176–77, 180, 240. See also passengers, waiting. public transport stops, 162–70, 173–76, 181–82; as convivial spaces, 163, 173, 176; as shelters, 162, 166–74 passim, 178–79; small talk at, 22, 163, 177; sociality at, 162–63, 180; as third places, 163, 173–75, 181. See also waiting, buses: stops queues, 12, 117; queuing, 173–74, queue jumping, 13 redistribution, 52, 125 Red Light (film, Toma Waszarow, 2016), 18 refugees, 6, 50, 129 registration plates, 58 residential areas. See under neighbourhoods ride-hailing platforms, 18 ride-sharing, 56, 199 right of movement, 7; ‘right of the fastest’, 20 right to the city, 3, 141 ring roads, 5, 33; Bucharest, 106–32; London (M25), 129–30; Moscow (MKAD), 142, 157n1; Rome (Sacro GRA), 129; Tashkent, 192 road construction, 11, 36, 152–53, 205, 210, 214; road engineering, 36, 210, 214; use of forced labour in, 211; labour brigades (socialism), 11, 210; road maintenance, 35–36, 50, 89, 94, 96, 205–6, 214, 217 road rage, 64 road safety, 16, 36, 89–91, 103n2–3, 140, 150, 217; crash barriers, 35; felling of trees, 36, 197, 240; hard shoulder, 90; pedestrian safety, 16, 22, 139–40, 150,

Index

153; rescue and assistance systems, 38–40, 217; retroreflectors, 16; road humps, 140; road signage, 14; safety strips, 35; seatbelts, 90–91; widening of roads, 36 road-talk, 89–93 passim, 98, 102 roads, 4–13 passim, 23, 24n4, 33–41 passim, 46–50 passim, 71, 77, 79, 89–103 passim, 112–13, 115–23 passim, 136, 138, 144, 147, 149, 151–52, 205–6, 209–11, 213, 216–19, 223, 229, 236, 239–40, 242; arteries, 16; as mobility corridors, 6; road aesthetics, 21, 37; rural roads, 99; and streets (compared), 4–8, 223. See also boulevards, infrastructure: road, ring roads, arteries, thoroughfares roadside communities, 8, 23, 205–19 Robinson, Jennifer, 9, 224; ‘think with elsewhere’, 9 Roma, 19, 109, 120, 123–25 Romania, 13, 24n4, 24n6, 42, 107–32, 162, 167–68, 170, 181, 235, 240 roundabouts, 63, 117, 136 routes, 65, 146, 197–98, 240; alternative routes, 64; detours, 64–65, 123; route planning, 199; shortcuts, 64–65, 208, 235; transit routes, 212; transport routes, 218; use of parallel streets, 64; walking routes, 147 running (jogging), 17, 57, 62 rural places (areas), 6, 115, 208, 236; ruralurban migration, 46, 49–50, 109, 112–14, 187; urban-rural interface, 115, 208 rush hours, 54, 60, 63–64, 118, 147, 172, 175, 183n3 Russia, 89–103 Saak’ashvili, Mikheil, 21, 70, 79–80, 82 Sacro GRA (film, Gianfranco Rosi, 2013), 115 security, 5, 36, 72, 76, 80, 102, 110, 120, 122, 125, 130; state security, 46, 95, 110–11, 115; traffic security, 36, 179. See also private security, road safety segregation, 16, 18; in public transport, 18; residential segregation, 120, 122. See also gated communities Sennett, Richard, 2, 6, 7, 20, 223 Serbia, 46, 49–52, 58, 239; Serbs, 47, 49, 64 shopping, 5, 59, 177; shopping centres, 181, 191; high streets, 5; shopping malls,

251 4, 14, 91, 106, 117, 178, 180; shopkeepers, 5, 47, 53; shoppers, 59, 140; shops, 5, 14, 34, 48, 53–54, 59, 78, 80, 97, 117, 147, 153, 178, 193, 201, 212–14, 217; shopping streets, 53, 178 sidewalks. See under pavements Siegelbaum, Lewis H., 1, 8, 11, 44n6, 95, 229, 230 signals and gestures (in traffic), 47; blinking, 56, 63; cursing (yelling), 47, 55; emergency sirens, 13; eye contact, 14, 20, 56; flashing lights, 13, 47, 55–56; hailing, 47, 172, 174, 198; hand gestures, 14, 53, 55–56; honking, 47, 55, 63; saluting, 47 Simmel, Georg, 52 Sinclair, Ian, 115, 121, 128–30 Situationists, 20 slow movement, 20, 57, 226, 235; lateral accounting, 20; slow modes of mobility, 6, 15, 20, 223–25; slowness, 5, 163, 182, 224. See also hoko onchi, ‘stickiness’ slums, 9, 123–24 sociability, 14, 19, 229, 243; courtyard sociabilities, 16 social class, 72, 92–103 passim; class distinctions, 12; class enemy, 31, 42; class identity, 22; middle class, 13, 93, 127–28, 141, 233; nouveaux riches, 50, 102; upper class, 128, 138; working class, 21, 92, 96, 98, 100–1, 104n6, 119, 241 social cohesion, 122, 129, 241; social fabric, 4, 6, 19, 22, 48, 75, 179, 109, 209 social control, 5, 71, 109 social media, 56, 63, 234 socialism, 1–4, 8–13 passim, 17, 34, 39, 41, 46, 49, 53, 70, 84, 109, 111–12, 114, 119, 123, 126, 130, 163, 167, 172, 182, 207, 223, 225–31 passim, 235–43 passim; collective memory of, 8; municipal socialism, 225; planned economy, 33, 36; shortages, 11–12, 114, 229; socialist modernity, 11, 43, 226, 320; stagnation, 12, 71; urban planning during, 119, 156. See also communism sociality, 8, 74, 95, 101; masculine sociality, 98; micro-sociality, 182; in public transport, 24n5, 163, 169, 173–74, 176–77, 182; street sociality, 7, 48, 180; in transit spaces, 8 Sofia, 17, 134 solidarity, 17, 21, 59, 77, 83, 102, 122

252Index Soviet Union, 8–9, 24n2, 103n2, 136, 186, 193; dissolution of (1991), 71, 75, 137, 143, 189; Soviet films, 11; Soviet planning, 77 space(s), 34, 77, 82, 89, 98–103 passim, 122, 144, 149, 153, 187, 196–201 passim; between buildings (apartment blocks), 6, 231; car-dominated, 2, 4, 6, 15; commercialized (commodified) spaces, 4, 48, 138, 140, 145, 150; of consumption, 149; convivial spaces, 4–5, 173, 176; Deleuzian understanding of, 104; ‘espace perçu, conçu, vecu’ (Henri Lefebvre), 48; experiences of, 196, 235–36; garage spaces, 92, 97–99, 102; green spaces, 118, 122, 136; industrial spaces, 103n5; liminal spaces, 77; marginal spaces, 98; mobile spaces, 17, 55; mobility spaces, 16, 98; parking spaces, 16, 56, 59–61, 65, 120, 122, 145, 223; pedestrian spaces, 60–61, 141, 144, 149–54, 156, 182; performative spaces, 5, 49, 56–58; periurban spaces, 109; domestic spaces, 4–5, 48, 58, 77–78, 122, 180, 197; pop-up spaces, 173; postsocialist spaces, 84, 93; post-Soviet spaces, 167, 199; production of (Lefebvre), 48, 71, 197; representative spaces, 109; residual spaces, 109, 123–27; road spaces, 41, 92, 94, 102, 136; shared spaces, 20, 48, 61, 97, 122, 236; social spaces, 2, 17, 53, 71, 85n1, 176, 181, 223; space-making, 197; street spaces, 15, 17, 21, 23, 31–32, 37, 52, 54, 60, 66, 226, 236; symbolic spaces, 71, 98; time and space, 8, 73, 235–36; time-space, 10, 169, 182, 194; transit spaces, 7–8, 22, 162, 173; untended (in-between) spaces, 112; urban spaces, 3, 6, 65, 72, 75, 95, 99, 145, 153, 166, 178–79, 180–82, 188; virtual spaces, 56; waiting spaces, 162, 173, 179, 180–81; working-class spaces, 92. See also parochial realm, public space spatial order, 4, 32; spatial cleansing (Herzfeld), 178–79; spatial politics, 138–40 speed, 5–6, 13, 17, 35, 70, 93–94, 144, 179–82, 199, 223; speed bumps, 140; high-speed mobility, 6–7, 183, 226, 235, 237; speed limits, 38, 44n4, 117, 149, 152; ‘middle-lane’ driving, 13; ‘normal’ speed, 7; and slowness, 5; speeding, 13–14, 56, 62, 64, 91, 99. See also velocity ‘stickiness’, 224; ‘sticky places’, 20

stopping points (Sanjek), 7, 48 strangers, 51, 55, 56, 169, 171, 174, 181 street design, 7, 49; street furniture, 22, 56, 60, 140, 152, 179 street fashion, 56–57, 59; street dress codes, 57; street-style blogs, 57, 66n2 street hawking, 14, 52, 54; hawkers, 54, 110; petty traders, 22, 176; street musicians, 176; street vendors, 47, 165, 172, 174, 178; windshield cleaners, 54–55. See also beggars street life, 1–2, 47–49, 56, 58, 72–73, 177, 180, 223, 226; dwellers, 7, 54; hangouts, 71–72, 74; norms, 72–74, 82; postsocialist street life, 8–16, 19, 166; post-war street life (Prishtina), 21, 50–52; street communities, 73, 84; street corner societies, 72, 78, 83. See also birzha street names, 18, 22, 50–51, 109, 186–93 passim, 200; renaming of streets, 2, 188–90, 200; socialist street names, 109 street studies, 5, 10, 223 streets, 1–24, 30–38, 40–66 passim, 70–84 passim, 89–102 passim, 109, 120–24 passim, 130, 136–40 passim, 145–53 passim, 157n7, 162–81 passim, 186–93, 200–1, 205, 223–42 passim; as channels for navigation (Lynch), 48; congested streets, 21, 51; conviviality in, 4–7, 15, 24n1, 163, 173, 176, 182, 223; streets dominated by cars, 1–3, 5, 11, 15, 23, 51, 153, 179, 223, 226; streets enabling mobility (circulation), 2, 5, 7, 46, 140, 149, 223; fleeting encounters in, 1, 5, 8, 16–22 passim, 46, 53–56 passim, 65, 110, 174, 177, 229; streets as gendered, 14, 51–54 passim; streets as multifunctional spaces, 5, 24n1, 37; 48; Ottoman streets, 49; performative behaviour in streets, 5, 21, 46, 49, 56–58, 65; streets as playgrounds (socialism), 51, 170; political deliberation in, 21, 47, 51, 65; postsocialist streets, 1–4, 8–22 passim, 37, 41–42, 75, 96, 98, 163, 166, 170, 223–25, 230, 233, 235, 238; protests (demonstrations) in, 3, 21, 31–32, 41, 51; public congregation in, 5; streets and roads (compared), 4–8, 223; streets as sites of friction (and conflict), 1, 5, 13, 16, 19, 21, 24n1, 48, 52, 59–66, 224, 231, 242; socialist streets, 11–12, 17, 31–32,

Index

35, 231; streets as social spaces, 2, 5–7, 17, 48, 53, 176, 181, 223; streets as spaces of communication, 16, 46, 53–60 passim, 65, 162–77 passim; streets as stratified, 89, 92–96 passim, 101. See also conviviality, congestion, shopping: high streets, pedestrians, protests suburbs, 6, 22, 95, 143; dachas, 143; dormitory suburbs, 143; suburban areas, 34, 107, 119–22 passim, 141, 157n1; suburbanization, 111, 129, 143; suburbia, 128. See also urban sprawl surveillance, 3, 7, 31, 98, 109, 122; CCTV cameras, 122 survival strategies (informal), 11, 17 sustainability, 139–40; sustainable cities, 19–20, 138; sustainable electric transport, 12, 19; sustainable mobility, 137–40 SUVs, 89–90, 93–94, 102, 128; SUV model of citizenship, 224 Tashkent, 22–23, 186–201; renaming of streets, 188–90, 200 taxi drivers, 18, 23, 47, 54–6, 96, 187, 191, 193, 198–99, 201; black cab drivers (London), 187 taxiing (informal), 18, 23, 56, 63, 96, 99, 101, 187–88, 196–201 passim; as streetwise activity, 18; unlicensed, 98 taxis, 18, 54–56, 63, 80, 187–88, 196–201 passim, 230; taxis as confessional zones, 55; taxis as semi-public transport, 18; shared taxis, 18, 167–68, 172. See also mini-buses Tbilisi, 21, 70–84, 241; neighbourhoods (ubani) in, 73–74, 77–79, 81–84. See also birzha thoroughfares, 4, 5, 7, 51, 53, 147, 182 tinkering, 11–12, 39–40, 92, 96, 226, 241 TomTom Traffic Index, 118, 132n5, 144, 153, 157n5 toponyms, 188–90; necrotoponyms, 186, 192, 194, 196; toponymic registers, 23, 196, 200 Torzym (town in Poland), 205–22 Tourists, 22, 55, 124, 138, 145, 147, 149, 153, 214 traffic, 2, 5–7, 12–24, 33–42 passim, 47–65 passim, 90–94 passim, 103n3, 110, 114, 116–22, 131–32, 136–40 passim, 144, 147, 149–53, 157n5, 178–81 passim, 201,

253 209–19 passim, 223, 227, 231, 235, 239, 242; traffic chaos (lawlessness), 52, 55, 131, 239, 242; coping strategies in, 48, 65, 170; traffic flows, 2, 16, 48, 61, 114, 136, 210, 212, 215; (intermodal) traffic interaction, 16, 47; motorized traffic, 5–7, 12, 16, 56; non-motorized traffic, 15, 48, 117, 179; social hierarchies (stratification) in, 21, 48, 52, 59, 89–96 passim, 99, 101–2, 168. See also signals and gestures (in traffic) traffic (road) accidents, 13, 36–38, 44n5, 53–54, 59, 63–64, 90, 144, 151, 236; cenotaphs and floral tributes, 13, 24n4; DTP (Russia), 94; extortion (cost of repairs), 89, 94; road deaths, 13, 37–38, 44n5, 103n2; triggering ethnic conflict, 19. See also cars, road safety traffic activism. See under activism traffic engineering, 16; traffic calming, 137, 139–40, 151, 153; enabling vehicle flows, 2, 7, 136, 144–46; traffic engineers, 2, 7, 20, 61, 179, 223, 227; of pedestrian crossings, 63–4, 117, 151; prioritizing car traffic, 7–8, 61, 16; separating flows, 16, 146; road and traffic signage, 14, 21, 37, 117: traffic lights, 17, 117 traffic jams (congestion), 17–18, 52, 54, 60, 63–65, 117, 136, 144, 147; activities while waiting in, 63; strategies to avoid, 64, 152. See also congestion traffic police, 13, 38, 52, 63–64, 93, 103n3; highway police, 89; lack of respect for, 52, 64. See also road rage traffic rules (codes of conduct), 7, 14, 16, 38, 52, 63, 65, 117, 145; ignoring (disrespect of), 13, 16, 48, 52, 60, 63, 90, 93, 110, 117; (in)formal codes of conduct, 5, 16–17, 48, 56, 102; vernacular rules and practices, 2, 14, 17, 48, 152, 163. See also queues, speeding trams, 12, 17, 22, 116, 162, 163, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175–77, 179, 181, 182, 183n3, 240 transients, 138, 147, 149; visitors, 5, 22, 78, 124, 139, 223. See also tourists transit, 7, 20, 48, 51, 110, 162, 180, 209, 212; as meaningful ‘passage’, 20; transit motorways, 31, 35; transit planning, 180; public transit, 136, 139, 145–46, 179; transit routes, 209–10, 212, 214; transit spaces, 7–8, 162, 178, 216; transit stops, 17, 55; vehicular transit, 182

254Index transition, 12, 14, 18, 30, 32, 35, 40, 42, 70, 76, 130, 137, 139, 164, 182, 218, 224, 229–31, 237–43 passim; losers of, 12, 14, 18, 41, 218; transitology, 9, 225; winners of, 12, 95, 130 transport, 2, 5, 7, 23, 32, 37, 48, 96–97, 114, 141, 156, 171–72, 198, 206, 210, 212, 225, 229, 236, 240; transport experts, 227; transport infrastructure, 32–33, 141–42, 150, 169; (intermodal) transport systems, 137, 139, 149, 168, 205; long-haul transport, 206, 212; transport modes, 2, 5, 11, 18, 66–67n5, 139; transport planning, 138–40; transport policies, 33, 42, 138–41 passim, 145; road transport, 240; transport routes, 218; slower modes of transport, 6; socialist transport legacies, 9, 225. See also public transport trees, 59, 140, felling of, 36, 197, 240; providing shade, 197 trolleybuses, 146, 162–83 trucks, 11, 39, 100. See also lorries trust, 5, 21, 79, 81, 83, 167, 241; personaltrust systems, 241 tunnels, 16; underpasses, 117, 210 Ukraine, 22, 162–63, 164–65, 168, 181, 183n2, 212–13, 240; Ukrainians, 214 unemployment, 73, 76, 113, 187, 207; the unemployed, 72, 78–81, 83, 166 urban planning, 122, 137, 145; carenabling urban planning, 48, 223, 225; urban planners, 16, 227, socialist urban planning, 119 urban sprawl, 22, 46, 63, 107, 111, 119–20, 128–29, 197 urban studies, 9, 137, 225 urbanism, 139; comparative urbanism, 9; ‘dromological’ urbanism, 180; entrepreneurial urbanism, 218; informal urbanism, 119; New Urbanism, 179–81; postsocialist urbanism, 223; smart urbanism, 180; socialist urbanism, 109; splintering urbanism, 109; turbo urbanism, 46 US, 9–10, 23, 50, 137, 140, 142, 183n8, 226–27, 238–39; engineering standards, 238–29; highway engineering, 238;

traffic engineers, 7; traffic narratives, 7; urban planning paradigms, 48, 225 Uzbekistan, 8, 186, 191, 199; decommunization in, 186, 188–90 vehicles, 5,7, 11, 15, 35, 38–39, 56, 61, 106, 117, 210–14 passim, 219n5; assistance vehicles, 40; fast vehicles, 7, 13; heavy vehicles, 11; high-status vehicles, 95; motorized vehicles, 11, 51, 146, 209, 223, 242; public transport vehicles, 17–18, 22, 166, 170, 176, 180, 240; rise in registered vehicles, 2, 143; vehicles of social distinction, 52; Western vehicles, 37 vehicular traffic, 6–7, 15, 116, 139, 182; reducing communication, 7; rapid increase in, 15; thwarting conviviality, 6 velocity, 7; pedestrian velocity, 7; vehicle velocity, 7 waiting, 12, 17, 34, 41, 48, 54, 73, 113, 117, 163–67 passim, 173, 179–82 passim, 240; directed waiting, 163, 178–80; low status of, 165, 168; waiting at public transport stops, 12, 22, 162–69 passim, 171–80 passim, 240; waiting as resistance, 166; waiting as resource, 182; small talk while, 22, 163; social interaction while waiting, 162–63; waiting in traffic, 63, 117; waiting islands, 179, 181; wait times, 162–64, 175, 180; waiting as ‘wasted’ time, 162, 165, 176 walking, 17, 19, 47, 53, 59, 61–62, 66–67n5, 79, 81, 137, 139, 140, 145–52 passim, 174, 197–98, 201; jaywalking, 7, 16; low status of walking, 197, 224; on-foot mobility, 140, 153; walking as slow mode of mobility, 20, 223; walking as ‘undesirable’, 224; walkability, 140, 146, 150–51. See also pedestrians wayfinding, 18, 186–201, 234; wayfaring (Ingold), 196, 198, 200 West, the (capitalist), 1–2, 9–11, 16, 21, 31–32, 38, 89, 128, 214, 217, 224–25; not being a monolithic entity, 224 women, 14, 51–57 passim, 62, 73, 98, 110, 143, 165–66, 172, 175 youth, 31, 41, 72–84 passim, 149 Yugoslavia, 9, 49–50