Our project leader, Prof Ger Duijzings will give a public lecture on Thursday, 23 February 2023, in Kosovo National Library in Prishtina, starting 1.30 pm:
“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.