RC21 Conference - Inequalities and the City

Organised by: Yvonne Franz (Urban Sustainability Living Lab, University of Vienna, Austria) and Harutyun Vermishyan (Yerevan State University, Armenia)

(How) can the concept of the post-socialist city continue to provide an innovative analytical lens through which to understand new and old socio-spatial inequalities? More than three decades after the collapse of socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe, the concept of the post-socialist city remains a central yet contested framework for urban studies. While it has enabled scholars to trace the enduring legacies of state socialism in urban governance, spatial organization, and socio economic structures, it also risks simplifying a transitional narrative that overlooks the evolving complexities of everyday urban life and local economy as well as the differences of perception amongst various societal generations in these regions.

Several authors have challenged the temporal and ideological assumptions embedded in the ‘post-‘prefix, calling for either abandoning (Müller and Trubina 2020) or reinventing it (Ringel 2022). Slaev and Hirt (2022) have argued for a nuanced understanding of planning cultures in post-socialist contexts. Similarly, Hirt (2013) has highlighted the hybrid nature shaped by both neoliberal reforms and residual socialist structures, which merit continued academic engagement with the ‘post’prefix. Also, Chelcea (2025) sees a strength in pluralistic, open-ended understandings of post-socialism. Key concerns are questions of autonomy and dependency as well as an underdeveloped dialogue between the g/Global E/east and g/Global W/west. Investigations into transnational capital flows and how they shape urban futures in post socialist regions (see Aruri 2024) are still very much needed.

Crowded out and crowded in: development, displacement and property disuse in Tirana
Dr. Liam O’Farrell

The Housing Space Divide: Path Dependence in the Provision of Living Space in Former State-socialist Countries in International Comparison
Dr. Bence Kováts & Prof. Sebastian Kohl

Remaking Józsefváros: identity, politics and the long shadow of Socialism in the in the gentrifying Budapest
Dr. Hanna Szemzö & Dr. Sandra Guinand

Beyond the “Post-”: Sevastopol as a Critical Case of Militarized Urbanism in a Post-Socialist City
Mr. Oleg Zubchenok

Oral: #19-1/2

Time: 09:00

Venue: HS 16

Post-Communist Temporalities, Hybrid Planning, and Housing Inequality in Yerevan
Ms. Heghine Pilosyan

Studying Urban Change through Multiple Conditions of ‘Post’: Class, Race and Moral Economies in East Berlin and Warsaw
Dr. Urszula Wozniak

Beyond the “Post․․․”: Ontologies of Urban Orders in Armenian Small Cities
Dr. Aram Vartikyan, Prof. Kerstin Krellenberg, Dr. Julia Wesely & Ms. Milena Sarmakyan

Reconfiguring Responsibility after Mass Privatisation: Housing Governance across Post-Socialist Cities
Dr. Elena Batunova & Ms. Albina Davletshina

Oral: #19-2/2

Time: 11:00

Venue: HS 16

Urban Labs are increasingly popular modes for co-producing transdisciplinary knowledge on key urban issues. Particularly in the field of urban sustainability transformations, actors from research and practice have argued that social innovation and experimentation are required to address complex sustainability challenges and the structural inequalities at their core.

Here, the messy context of “the urban” serves to re-frame the pristine image of the laboratory, while the complex realities of urban dwellers transgress epistemic and heuristic boundaries of a controlled experiment. Acknowledging that the starting points, goals, foci, institutional set-up and spatial-temporal configurations of Urban Labs over the world are highly heterogeneous, the roundtable discussion focuses particularly on university-based Urban Labs. This is due to their underlying promise of establishing a new social contract between universities and cities; where hierarchies of knowledge and practice are questioned and re-worked to become fruitful for transformative change. Yet, their impacts, in terms of the change they produce, including their ability to address structural inequalities, remain limited and uncertain. What, then, can be learnt across Urban Labs to strengthen knowledges about their enabling conditions as well as their (transformative) impacts?

In the context of evolving research on enabling conditions for university based Urban Labs, this roundtable also recognises how academic discourses on Urban Labs are currently strongly biased towards Western understandings. This is particularly concerning as numerous Urban Labs from the East and South hold profound experiences across teaching, research and extension, and provide ample conceptual, methodological and practical entry points to exchange, learn from, and learn across. Moreover, although being firmly contextualised in their localities, many Urban Labs are deeply entangled in global-local networks: be it through international research projects and funding streams, participation in multilateral city alliances, and engagement with the localisation of global sustainable development agendas, among many other dimensions.

The roundtable discussion therefore brings into conversation experiences from emerging and established Urban Labs associated with universities across diverse geographies such as Armenia, Brazil, the UK and Austria. It seeks to curate cross-learning in multiple directions, making explicit their local, and in particular their translocal dimensions and connections.

The roundtable discussion will address the following topics:

• Contributions of Urban Labs from Southern, Eastern, and Western cities towards pluralising global and translocal city networks and alliances
• Innovative co-learning methodologies and critical pedagogies within and between Urban Labs
• Roles and responsibilities of Urban Labs in addressing (in-)justices and inequalities in university-city relations
• Long-term experiences of resourcing and institutionalizing Urban Labs
• Social and material (transformative) impacts of Urban Labs

Workshop: RT 11

Time: 14:00

Venue: HS 21

The roundtable discussion is organised with co-funding from the Urban Studies Journal.

Organised by: Hugo Lopez, Cristian Olmos Herrera, Juliana Goncalves, and Caroline Newton

This panel invites contributions that interrogate and experiment with the methodological and pedagogical dimensions of academic engagement for collective urban action. It brings together scholars and practitioners who use research and education as sites for cultivating solidarity, recognition, and transformative spatial practices. In light of the conference’s theme, “Inequalities and the City. Old Issues, New Challenges”, the session foregrounds the ways in which persistent and emerging urban inequalities are not only analysed but actively challenged, disrupted and politicised, through participatory, embodied, and co-creative modes of inquiry.

Urban inequalities manifest differently across Global North, South, and East contexts, yet share common roots in colonial legacies, neoliberal policies, and exclusionary planning practices. This panel explicitly seeks to centre voices and methodologies from the Global South and East, recognising how innovative approaches to urban research and pedagogy often emerge from contexts of resource constraints and social movements fighting for spatial justice.

In many contexts, participatory approaches have been institutionalised, often losing their transformative edge and becoming procedural rather than political. This panel seeks to recover the radical potential of engagement by exploring situated pedagogies and collaborative methodologies that operate beyond extractive research or consultation logics. We invite reflections on how design studios, artistic and critical research, and spatial practices can become forms of collective rehearsal, prefigurative action and concrete utopias , sites where recognition, resistance, and relational learning are enacted.

Central questions include:

• How can collaborative methodologies challenge rather than merely document urban inequalities?
• What forms of co-making and co-becoming can unsettle traditional hierarchies between expert/participant, teacher/learner, researcher/community and simultaneously challenge the colonial dimension of knowledge production?
• How can relational and sensory methodological innovations from the Global South(such as decolonial mapping, community storytelling, performative documentation, or film) inform and transform urban research practices globally, contributing to more ethical, inclusive, and transformative urban knowledge?
• What does it mean to “learn solidarity and justice” through spatial research and practice in contexts shaped by different stories of injustice and inequality?

The panel particularly encourages papers that present methodological innovations (including visual, narrative, sonic, or embodied approaches) that challenge dominant Western academic frameworks and that reflect critically on the ethics, politics, and pedagogy of engagement.
Contributions may include case studies of collaborative projects, decolonial and feminist practices, speculative methodologies, or theoretical explorations of recognition, care, and relationality in spatial research.
By bringing together perspectives from different contexts and traditions, the session aims to contribute to an emerging transdisciplinary discourse on engaged urban approaches.

Challenging commercial gentrification: engaged urban research strategies for inclusive traditional retail markets
Dr. Myfanwy Taylor & Prof. Sara Gonzalez

Teaching and learning “post” socialist urbanism
Ms. Shushan Abrahamyan, Ms. Armine Ghalamdaryan & Dr. Julia Wesely

GUIDE FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCHING FEMINIST URBANISM. Towards learning about cities from an intersectional genderm perspective
Prof. Anabella Roitman et al.

Improving Cairo’s Rooftops through Collaborative Design? Lessons Learned from a Design-Build with a Sudanese Community School in Boulaq al-Dakrour
Dr. Ayham Dalal & Dr. Juliana Canedo

Embodiments of Concrete Utopias and the Practice of Liberation Pedagogy: an experimental research and artists’ intervention in Jakarta’s Urban Kampung
Dr. Prathiwi Widyatmi Putri et al.

Oral: #47-2/2

Time: 15:30

Venue: HS 32