Public space, memory and protest during post-socialist transformation: The emergence of Piaţa Universităţii (University Square), Bucharest, as a space of protest

Authors: Young, C., Light, D. and Dumbrăveanu, D.

Pages: 75-88

DOI: 10.4324/9781315603018_5

Abstract:

From the ‘Orange’ and ‘Ukrainian’ revolutions in Maidan Square, Kiev, in 2009 and 2014 (Beissinger 2011; Way 2014), through marches supporting tolerance and equality for lesbians, gay men and other sexual dissidents in Polish cities (Binnie and Klesse 2013; Binnie 2014), to residents of St. Petersburg, Russia, exercising their ‘right to the city’ to protest against inappropriate urban development (Dixon 2010), and citizens of Belgrade/Beograd resisting the Milosevic regime in 1996–97 (Jansen 2001), public space has become a vital arena for various forms of protest in post-socialist cities across the former Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. These apparently ‘public’ spaces within cities have come to play a central role in complex processes of developing civil society and democracy in the context of the post-authoritarian, or even semi-authoritarian, socio-political systems which emerged after 1989–91. However, while much research has worked to unpick the role of urban public space in various movements espousing a ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1968, 1996; Mitchell 2003; Harvey, 2008) and international social movements such as ‘Occupy’ (Kilibarda 2012; theme issue of Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies 2012, 5; Uitermark and Nicholls 2012) in a Western, capitalist context, relatively little is known about how public space has emerged as a site of protest in a post-socialist setting, even though some of those societies could now be considered capitalist and even ‘Western’. As Dixon (2010) suggests, such struggles are a part of post-socialist societies’ efforts to create new polities and identities.

https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/30649/

Source: Scopus