Ethnographies of urban change: introducing homelessness and the post-socialist city

Ferenčuhová, Slavomíra, and Petr Vašát. 2021. ‘Ethnographies of Urban Change: Introducing Homelessness and the Post-Socialist City’. Urban Geography 42 (9): 1217–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.1930696.

Slavomíra Ferenčuhová and Petr Vašát are guest-editors of the special issue of Urban Geography on homelesness and the post-socialist city. This issue turns the attention to cities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in an attempt to discuss homelessness and social change through these cities’ specific historicity and their story of transition from state-socialism to a, mostly, neoliberalized global economy.

In the introduction, the editors show how this endeavor opens inspiration and new perspectives on:

Relying on research in various spatial and temporal contexts, authors in the special issue inquire into an alternative politics of living in current (post-socialist) cities.

They shed light on how homelessness and the lives of people who struggle with housing precarity codefine change, and how they become active agents of urban transformation.