Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies
print


Breadcrumb Navigation


Content

Workshop Regensburg

The post-socialist street: rising car mobility in comparative perspective

06.10.2016 at 16:30  – 08.10.2016 at 15:00 

The Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies hosts the international workshop "The post-socialist street: rising car mobility in comparative perspective" in Regensburg, Thursday 6 to Saturday 8 October 2016.

The three-day workshop is organized by Prof. Dr. Ger Duijzings (Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies & University of Regensburg) and Dr. Tauri Tuvikene (Centre for Landscape and Culture, Tallinn University; visiting researcher at Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography).

Venue: Haus der Begegnung (Restaurant "Vitus"), Hinter der Grieb 8, 93047 Regensburg

Life on city streets has always enjoyed great interest amongst scholars, philosophers, and artists. Rightly so, as the urban street triggers unexpected and unpredictable encounters: the urban social fabric is, as it were, woven by people moving around, accompanied by others or transporting stuff from A to B, on foot, using animal power or public transport, or vehicles such as bicycles, cars, trucks, and buses. Yet, where these various forms and modes of mobility meet, there is inevitably ‘friction’, resulting from differences in speed, weight, maneuverability and symbolic value of the vehicles used (see for example Henderson 2013; Katz 1999; Truitt 2008). Hence the street does not only facilitate movement (Blomley 2011), it is also a site of multiple colliding mobilities that need to be negotiated and regulated. Despite the global spread of street signs, traffic regulations, and engineered devices, traffic often ‘looks’ and ‘feels’ very different in cities around the world (Edensor, 2004; Miller, 2001). These differences are due to the variety of conditions: the cultural environment and the geographic terrain or climate, the quality of roads and the composition and density of the built environment, the vehicles used and the regulations imposed by authorities, the urban demography in terms of ethnicity and class, and the social and cultural perceptions towards various modes of mobility.
For this workshop we propose to reflect on traffic interaction and street life in post-socialist central and eastern Europe, as ‘friction’ has been particularly intense here due to the sudden and explosive rise of car ownership and car mobility after 1989. Here, but also in other (still) socialist countries such as China, political changes have led to radical transformations in the way people move around, as former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility such as public transport and bicycles have been marginalized and replaced by a culture of privately owned cars. The sudden rise in car mobility in these (former) socialist countries is still an underexplored topic, especially when it comes to understanding the social and cultural aspects of these transformations in the everyday life of post-socialist cities (Burrell and Hörschelmann, 2014; Siegelbaum, 2011). This workshop therefore seeks to advance our empirical and conceptual understanding of the post-socialist street.
The discussion is framed around two related phenomena: how the post-socialist street is the site of an unrivalled growth in car mobility but is also becoming the venue of renewed political engagements, where claims to shared public spaces and visions for urban futures are again articulated and contested against the background of the recent socialist past. Seen the large Critical Mass cycle protests in Budapest, Bucharest and other east European cities, the demand for alternative and more sustainable forms of mobility is on the rise, as it has been for some time already in traditional car dominated countries such as the USA, Germany, and Japan. The analysis and comparison of these transformations, interactions, intersections, and political engagements with regard to (car) mobility in post-socialist contexts, is what this workshop tries to achieve.
Three keynote speakers with strong expertise in the rise of car mobility in the ‘traditional’ car (and car producing) countries USA, Germany, and Japan will offer the historical and comparative framework needed: these countries had their own specific trajectories in terms of introducing, accommodating and domesticating cars in society and in public spaces. Accepted keynote speakers are Kurt Möser (Karsruhe Institute of Technology) discussing Germany, Peter Norton (University of Virginia) the US and Joshua H. Roth (Mount Holyoke College, US) Japan. Following the keynote lectures we will extend the discussion around these specific historical cases to the post-socialist context.
The workshop seeks to address the following issues but is not limited to these: interaction in public spaces and on streets and conflicts between road users; the negotiation and regulation of differential speeds and flows; official and informal approaches to mobility and immobility, mooring and fixity; cultural perceptions of ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ in traffic; social identity and inequality in traffic; socialist and national path-dependencies of current traffic conditions; political and media discourses and their role in changing the parameters of public space and traffic interaction; the promotion and regulation of car ownership and mobility through legal provisions and forms of law enforcement; etc.

Program
6 October 2016
16:30 Arrival and registration
17:30 Welcome address by Prof. Dr. Ulf Brunnbauer and introduction by conveners
18:00 Keynote lectures 1 and 2
• Peter Norton (University of Virginia) – Strange utopia: selling the motor age in the USA
• Joshua H. Roth (Mount Holyoke College) – How the shared road survived professional drivers in postwar Japan
20:00 Reception
7 October 2016
8:30 Morning coffee
9:00 Keynote lecture 3
• Kurt Möser (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) – Seven imaginary images of the transition of GDR streets 1989-1995
10:00 Session I: Spaces of conflict and contestation
• Costanza Curro (University College London) – ‘Changing everything fast’? Immobility in the streets of Tbilisi
• Gabriel Jderu (University of Bucharest) – Streets as maps of power: bodies, motorcycles, and cars in Bucharest’s auto-mobility system
11:00 Coffee break
11:30 Session II: Cars and road building
• Mariusz Czepczyński (University of Gdańsk) – Street policy and politics of the street. Plans, demands and transformations of streets of Gdańsk Metropolis
• Hikoyat Salimova (HafenCity University) – The development of urban infrastructure in Tashkent: the case of new roads construction around major bazaars
• Oleg Pachenkov (European university at St.-Petersburg/CISR), Irina Shiribokova (St.-Petersburg State University) – A fear of being “unjust” and a danger of being “post-political”: dilemmas of urban consultants in post-socialist cities
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Session III: Reimagining urban mobility
• Anna Nikolaeva (Royal Holloway, University of London) – Envisioning the future of mobility in Astana and Almaty
• Joanna Kusiak (Institute of Urban and Regional Development/Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts) – The vehicles of ideology: cars and the Polish right wing
• Katalin Tóth (Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich) – I love Budapest. I bike Budapest? Politics and culture of cycling in Budapest after 1989
15:30 Coffee break
16:00 Session IV: Informality and economic and cultural hierarchies
• Elana Resnick (University of Michigan) – The daily hazards of cleaning Sofia
• Lela Rekhviashvili (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig) – Stoyanshiki: Tbilisian informal parking guards at the bottom of the urban economy
• Jeremy Morris (University of Birmingham) – Automobile masculinities and neoliberal production regimes among Russian blue-collar men
20:00 Conference dinner
8 October 2016
8:30 Morning coffee
9:00 Session V: Public transport and infrastructures in trouble
• Wladimir Sgibnev (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig) and Tonio Weicker (Technical University, Berlin) – Infrastructures as fluidities: how marshrutkas help us to overcome static conceptions of road-based mobility service provision
• Andrey Vozyanov (University of Regensburg) – Life at the tram stop: waiting and communication in post-socialist Ukraine and Romania
• Lela Rekhviashvili (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig) – Fieldnotes on marshrutkas in Bishkek
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Session VI: Pedestrians
• Tauri Tuvikene (Tallinn University) – Tunneling pedestrians: rule-breaking and rule-making by walkers
• Sabina Maslova (Gran Sasso Science Institute) – Pedestrianization in Moscow: recent developments of non-car mobilities in post-socialist monocentric city
• Liviu Chelcea and Raluca Popescu (University of Bucharest) – The post-socialist enclosure of sidewalks: cars, pedestrians and the shrinking infrastructures of walking in Bucharest
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Final discussion (until 15:00)
Comments by Luminiţa Gaţejel, Kurt Möser, Peter Norton, and Joshua Roth.


Responsible for content: GS OSES/Hesse