Urban Margins and Global Interdependencies: New Insights from Eastern Europe

Urban Marginality, Racialisation, Interdependence: Learning from Eastern Europe, edited by Filip Alexandrescu, Ryan Powell, and Ana Vilenica, offers a timely and conceptually rich intervention into ongoing efforts to de-centre and reorient global urban studies. The volume responds to the relative marginalisation of Eastern European urban experiences in Anglophone academic debates, aiming to reposition the region as a generative site for theoretical development and comparative reflection.

Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, urban studies, and engaged art, the volume foregrounds three interconnected conceptual lenses—marginality, racialisation, and interdependence. Through a series of empirical case studies from across Eastern Europe—including Czechia, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Kosovo—the contributors interrogate how urban inequalities are produced, reinforced, and contested in relation to broader processes of post-socialist transformation, state restructuring, racial capitalism, and geopolitical realignment.

Rather than adopting existing theoretical frameworks uncritically, the contributors engage in a process of re-grounding and rethinking key urban concepts through Eastern European contexts. Notable interventions include critical reflections on racialised residential capitalism, eviction and displacement as racialised urban processes, and the dynamics of infrastructural marginalisation in war-affected and post-industrial urban settings. The volume also questions the limits of "postsocialism" as a temporal or conceptual frame, advocating instead for historically grounded and relational approaches that attend to both continuities and ruptures in urban governance and everyday life.

A central theme throughout the book is the challenge of addressing racialisation within a region often considered "race-blind" in both scholarly and policy discourses. By drawing attention to the racialised dimensions of housing, segregation, citizenship, and mobility—particularly in relation to Roma communities, migrants, and displaced populations—the volume contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to theorise race and urban marginality beyond the Global North/South binary. At the same time, it offers a sustained critique of conceptual models that detach the region from its socialist legacies or flatten its internal diversities through geopolitical shorthand.  

Importantly, Thinking from the East does not seek to displace dominant urban theories, but rather to place them in dialogue with alternative genealogies and empirical realities. The emphasis on interdependence—epistemic, material, political—allows for a multidirectional exchange between East and West, North and South, contributing to the broader project of globalising urban studies in a way that is attentive to histories of marginalisation and modes of resistance.

This volume will be of interest to scholars working on urban inequality, critical race studies, post-socialism, housing, and the politics of knowledge production. By foregrounding the significance of Eastern European urban experiences and theoretical insights, it challenges hierarchies of knowledge within the field and opens new directions for critical urban scholarship.

/Ana Vilenica