Ger Duijzings (Regensburg): “If cars could walk: postsocialist streets between circulation and conviviality”
Abstract: In this talk, Ger Duijzings will present some of the key ideas of a new volume edited with geographer Tauri Tuvikene (Tallinn University) on street life in postsocialist cities. Starting point is the explosion of private car mobility from the 1990s onwards, with case studies documenting the tensions between ‘mobility’ and ‘sociability’ in cities like Bucharest and Prishtina. The talk will reflect on what this ‘car invasion’ has meant for the urban fabric of cities — with demands of uninhibited flow for motorised vehicles colliding with the need for dwelling and slow-paced and pedestrian sociability and conviviality. The talk will also address the relevance of defining these streets as ‘postsocialist’, looking at historical path-dependencies that connect current phenomena to the socialist past and highlighting the differences with the so-called ‘west’, which has shaped recent mobility patterns.
Kevin Kenjar (Rijeka): “Renaming Memory Lane: Street Naming Practices in Sarajevo from the Ottoman Era to the Post-Socialist/Post-War Present”
Abstract: This lecture outlines broad trends in the practice of (re-)naming streets and squares in Sarajevo over the course of the city’s history. While it is well known that the renaming of streets and squares often goes hand in hand with a change in regime, particularly when the heroes venerated and the values extolled by the old regime in the urban linguistic landscape are seen as ill-fitting to the new one, this lecture moves beyond that, placing the practice of commemorative naming itself in its own historical context. In tracing street naming practices from the Ottoman period to the present, this lecture addresses pre-commemorative naming practices in Sarajevo as well as the advent of what is called here a “meta-commemorative” approach to street naming.
Zoom Link: https://uniregensburg.zoom.us/j/61273172388pwd=ZjduMUVxc0ZaUkZ6OFl6R0dMRVhwUT09
(Meeting-ID: 612 7317 2388, Passcode: 495317)
