Is there a post-communist city? Are there post-communist urban geographies? What holds together the scholars interested in post-communist urban geographies in general and in the Tartu workshop in particular? What post-communist urban topics are acknowledged by the fellow scholars? What could be the ways towards more inspiring, challenging and influencing studies about post-communist urban geographies?

Browsing through the Tartu workshop papers, a rich variety of empirical contexts emerges - many issues, cities and societies. The papers and presentations have been organized and presented according to the academic conventions: they consisted of mostly empirical analysis with some conceptual discussion and the specific research questions were answered. In their micro-context the papers and presentations accomplish well their set tasks and advance our knowledge about post-communist urban geographies. Many presentations find their ways into printed publications, too. So far so good, nevertheless, I raise three concerns. Possibly the comments may sound to a certain extent unfair but they come from aside by more of an outsider than of an insider in this field of study.

First, too much of research regarding post-communist urban geographies has too little academic ambitions, It merely fills the empirical gap to know a bit more what is taking place around us. Such research does not (want) to contribute to general development of human geography, not to talk about social science in general.

There is a risk of descriptive naivety if the empirical context attracts most of the scholars in the field. Much more should be done to advance the key geographical notions of space, place, scale, border and environment and those of social science through the research about post-communist urban context.

Second, too much of research regarding post-communist urban geographies is far too conventional in its methodologies. Obviously, it is legitimate to utilize the commonly accepted modes to gather material such as statistical databases organized by the public authorities, quantitative semi-structural surveys, theme interviews, content analysis of policy documents and media, etc., and to analyze such material accordingly with quantitative and qualitative methods. However, there is a fear that such approach quite mechanically repeats what has been done during decades in other study contexts and other Fields of study. The results indicate a smaller or bigger difference between the post-communist urban geographies compared to other (often "Western") urban geographies. Some theories and models are slightly improved but not much new and cutting-edge is created. Much more should be done to advance methodological openness and sharpness of post-communist urban geographies.

Third, the notion of "post-communist" or-post-socialist" is not addressed properly and this leads possibly into a vicious circle. The utilization of this ontologically problematic meta-category ("post-communist") makes the scholars to stay in their continuously changing empirical setting without critical reflection. There is a risk that the post-communist scholars become a closed and increasingly self-referencing academic community. 15 such poorly definable category of "post-communism" enough to indicate the coherence among the scholars? Or is such category a large flexible umbrella that actually is without cover: it does not provide shelter but it is possible to have a strong empirical hold on it? Much more should be done to advance the academic debate about the ontologies of post-communist urban geographies.

On the ontology of the "post-communist"

Let me start with the third question, about the ontology of the post-communist urban geographies. This is obviously a difficult one because it is about the fundamentals of the group of scholars gathered around a specific topic, in this case in the Tartu workshop. The question regarding a post-communist city is challenging. To define something "post-communist" means that there is a nonpost-communist city that is conceptually and empirically separable and separated from a post-communist city.

The concept 'post-communist" itself is tightly bound into temporal dimension. First, it indicates a change: transition and transformation of something that was earlier not a post-communist city (i.e. a communist city). Secondly, the concept "post-cornmunisr also bears within it a rather peculiar challenge. Can all communist cities become at certain moment post-communist cities? When a former communist city is transformed into a post-communist city? Is a today's post-communist city "doomed' to be categorized as a "post-communist city" for ever?

Such simple problematization of the category "post-communist" (city, urban, geography, etc.) is tightly connected to ontological, epistemological and methodological standing points of the scholars interested in post-communist urban geographies. To verify the existence and character of the study topic, a multitude of methods and theories can be utilized.

In the Tartu workshop an ontological smoothness runs between the papers and presentations without particular attention. There are papers utilizing positivist views and methods. For them there is an empirically evident post-communist context, therefore it can be studied and it is true. The post-communist city (or urban context, change, geographies, etc.) is a transforming entity having something from the communist past and something from a non-communist city, society, etc. Since the post-communist is separable from the non-postcommunist (often mentioned in the text in simple terms such as "the Western"), their difference is that what should be studied and what is interesting in the study, according to the scholars. The empirical research verifies the current existence of a post-communist city, its difference to the "Western model", The debate of the "essence" of any meta-category would be a waste of precious research resource and at best lead into a non-scientific metaphysics.

Among the Tartu workshop, some papers quite much oppose this above mentioned group of papers in regard to methods and theories. These papers bear other notions of, for example, social constructivism, i.e. discourses regarding how people understand the post-communist city and how such notion or issues related to post-communism are constructed. In addition, in a couple of papers is understood that "a post-communist city" cannot be seen directly. Nevertheless, with concepts and research the truth out there ("the essence of a post-communist city") can be approached. However, generally among the papers quite common seems to be a pragmatic viewpoint. The post-communist city is out there, so let's study with selected methodology: the goals define the usage of methods. Post-communist city (urban context; change; geographies; etc.) is, and it is studied.

On the impact of the studies regarding the "post-communist" urban issues

Let me continue with the second concern that is about the relevance of the studies regarding "post-communist" urban issues. It is about the themes in studies about the post-communist urban issues in general and in the Tartu workshop papers in particular.

We can agree practically that if a paper or a research report contains notions about "post-communist urban", then it is about post-communist urban. In this case, what are then the topics that are mostly acknowledged by the fellow (and not-so-fellow) academic scholars? An easy, politically slightly incorrect and academically a bit twisted way is to lean on the most significant contemporary "meta-scholars", i.e. scholars guiding indirectly and directly the scholars in their research. Among the most used meta-scholars are the 151 Web of Knowledge by Thomson Reuters and the Scholar by Google They include, among many things, information what scholars have studied and what other scholars' work they have used. Such databases indicate, for example, how many people (most often academic scholars) have cited certain texts (most often peer-reviewed academic articles and books)_ l am fully aware that the multi-national commercial enterprise Google does not tell exactly what journals, books and researches are included in its Google Scholar beta version and what period it covers. I am also aware of this very anglo-america centric mode of counting the references. However, as it goes today, such search engines are increasingly utilized in studying the coverage, impact and relevance of scholars and study topics.

To know how academic scholars themselves are interested in the "post-communist urban" topics, I utilized the search engine Google Scholar (version beta, at 13 September 2009) with the search words "post communist urban" and "post socialist urban". In the following I discuss briefly the results, i.e. what titles and topics have been mostly used by scholars when they discuss about "post-communist urban" and/or "post-socialist urban". Obviously, when one looks at the total amount of citations, the research published earlier has potentially more citations because it has been available for longer time.

There are (on 13 September 2009) well over one thousand academic works dealing with post-communist and post-socialist urban issues. I organized around 100 most utilized academic papers and other researches into order following the amount of citations. Of the titles 41 have been cited at least one hundred times, 14 titles have over three hundred citations and three titles have over one thousand citations. The top three can be mentioned here in detail: Juan J. Linz & Alfred Stepan, 1996, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (2586 citations); Nancy Fraser, 1997, Justice interrupts: Critical Reflection of the Postsocialist" Condition (1371 citations); Janos Kornai, 1992, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (1160 citations).

Out of ten most cited titles, eight are books. This indicates that issues discussed at length raise the interest of the fellow scholars in social science. The books allow also to treat the background of the issues discussed, reflect properly on earlier debates and to construct the argument solidly. The most cited books are monographs, not edited compilations of articles. In the ranking from 11 to 40, the amount of articles and books is quite even, including also edited books, This indicates that emerging issues and sharp shorter presentations can attract the academic attention as well. As mentioned, such mode of counting cites raises the ranking of older publications, by older meaning those published in the 1990s. In fact, the most cited book published in the 2000s got the ranking number 16 (Mark Mode Howard, 2003, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe, 283 citations). The most 'recent" article got the ranking number 30 (F Wu, 2000, The global and local dimensions of place-making: remaking Shanghai as a world city, in Urban Studies, 136 citations).

The most widely cited (over 500 cites) academic research on postcommunist/socialist urban issues has broader viewpoint on society, especially on its political and economic change. The study of the urban context is not for the context itself but a way to approach broader societal issues, often analyzing various post-settings in comparative mode. Urban is and is used as a setting in which broader changes take place. In such works - most of them are broader monographs - the aim is to advance current theories about the post-communist and the post-socialist urban change and not merely repeat of what has been done earlier or just to illustrate the -post-communist" empirical peculiarities vis-a-vis the West.

Browsing through those nearly 40 academic works cited between 100 to 500 times appears three key aspects. First, a significant number of articles and books deals empirically with Russia and China, Especially research regarding post-communist China and its urban context is rapidly gaining attention by the academic scholars. The works that focus on (Central) Eastern Europe are also listed but their share is less evident and not so rapidly rising than that of China and Russia. Second, broader politics and economy in wider scale is even more evident as topics of studies. These political issues are about governance, democracy, political lives, party-systems and voting, etc, Economic issues are more broadly about market transition, also regarding theoretical approaches and debates. Third, the first specifically urban focused research appears as well However, in most of them the post-communist/socialist aspect is only a small piece of the broader urban issue. The main issue is about planning, infrastructure, technology or place-making. The few articles dealing with one or two cities are about rising Chinese cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing.

From these mostly cited works in the Google Scholar it appears that the postcommunist/socialist issue has the largest interest and academic impact when the post-communist/socialist (urban) context is used to elaborate broader theories of larger societal concepts such as democracy, market, institutions, and networks. Descriptions or comparisons of what has happened in one city or in one country and how it differs from the Western or the non-post-communist context does not gain much attention by the broader academic audience.

The above mentioned remarks may sound too critical regarding the post-communist urban geographies as in the most cited works urban geography (-ies) was rarely in the main focus. To balance this, the impact of the post-communist urban geography can also be looked at how it contributes to the development of any academic discipline, whether we talk about geography, sociology, political science, just to name a few.

In the context of the Tartu workshop, most of the participants are geographers, so geography could then be used as the reference. Of the most cited works in geography (over 500 citations) none of them are related to post-communist urban geographies. Judging the contributions of the post-communist urban studies from this point of view could sound unfair because geography has existed as a research topic "forever" but the post-communist urban issues only about two decades, However, the development of the key concepts in human geography (space, place, scale, border and environment) has been extremely important and vital for the past two decades, actually in the same period when one has talked about post-communist/socialist urban issues.

Unfortunately, among the key texts and debates advancing human geography there are not those deriving from the post-communist/socialist urban studies. From conceptual point of view it is suite surprising because the postcommunist/socialist context has been, and still is, a very fruitful example of possibilities to break down the binary thinking (West/East) that could and should eliminated as the fundamental problem of modern human geography and social science in general. The velocity of transformation in the post-communist/socialist contexts could and should have risen issues about space, place and scale, not to talk about borders and environments. For some reason, the aims and contributions of post-communist/socialist urban scholars to the general development of human geography have been and still are very modest. This raises the issues about the strategies and practices of studies regarding post-cormmunist/socialist urban issues. A topic not elaborated in this essay is the practical and applied impact of studies regarding post-communist urban realms. However, because there is no international database for applied research in local language and citations do not indicate the impact and usefulness of such research, this important aspect is omitted from this essay. However, the growing importance of the angloamericacentric viewpoint about the significance of the academic research means that increasingly all research is published in English and for the selected English-speaking audience of the fellow scholars in the field of post-communist urban studies.

On the methodology of the "post-communist" urban studies

The methodological question about the post-communist urban studies is directly linked to the above mentioned necessity to address post-communist urban context from the ontological point of view. Is there a post-communist urban context? I assume most scholars in this field do not hesitate in answering positively to this question. From a practical point of view, the post-communist urban context can be defined temporally following that of communism. In many Central Eastern European countries this took place from the late 1980s onwards. Such pcitically-temporally defined starting point can be found for other countries as well from Africa to Asia from the 1970s onwards. North Korea, Cuba and few other examples show that post-communism is still to appear in certain places.

Such generalizing notion has also its challenges. Any categorization is to generalize and as it is known, there were differences in the communist systems and their urban outcomes in spatial and temporal terms, even within one country. Therefore there has been a change from cities under communisms/socialisms to cities under post-communisms/socialisms. Transition in urban context was a topic both empirically and conceptually debated in the 1990s (see, for example, Musil, 1993, Changing urban systems in post-communist societies in Central Europe: Analysis and prediction... in Urban Studies]; Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe & Ivan Szelenyi (Eds.), 1996, Cities After Socialism. Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies; John Pickles & Adrian Smith (Eds. ), 1998, Theorising Transition: The Political Economy of Post-Communist Transformations). The debate on the ontology of post-communism (urban) condition has not followed to the same extent to the 2000s.

Now, the context of post-communist urban geographies is somehow too loosely taken for granted despite the rich variety of epistemological standing points towards the study topic as such. The post-communist urban scholars based on the positivist-empirist viewpoint agree that there is an empirically verifiable post-communist urban condition. Therefore for them the debate about the ontology of post-communist urban would be of metaphysics out of the realm of science The methods used follow the line of argument: statistical methods whose explanatory power comes from the generally agreed rules.

The post-communist urban scholars based on realist and critical realist approaches are more critical towards the directly empirically verifiable post-communist urban condition, Nevertheless, they derive to the essence of it through general theoretical elaboration in which human actors and structure(s) influence on each other, Therefore the most common method is to somehow combine intensive and extensive research with basic qualitative (a' la theme interview) and quantitative (a' la survey) methods.

With the collapse of the communist system the more structuralist understanding of the post-communist system, whether in terms of economy or political-cultural system, would be politically naive_ This challenge is evidenced when looking at some authors of traditional critical geography reflecting on the neoliberalist political economy in the post-communist urban condition. More practice-oriented critical geographers take a pragmatic position to address the problems of the post-communist cities at the street level.

Even the post-communist urban scholars based on constructivism rarely if at all fully conceptualize the ontology they address. For them the post-communist urban condition may be a discourse made to be taken for granted, a metanarrative made to replace the communist one or a representation of continuous transition and its curiosities. The socially constructive dimension is presented in their studies but not critically scrutinized what is beyond such discourses. Again, the fascinating empirical context drives their attention to a merely pragmatic standing point. The studies of representation remind those addressed in human geography already in the late 1980s or early 1990s, for example, in the landscape geography.

Open conclusions

Now, my argument is not to make studies about the post-communist urban condition fancier by simply saying that "do check what is done in contemporary human geography!" Nevertheless, interesting and opening methodologies are plenty today such as hybrid geographies, non-representational and more-than-representational approaches, actor-network theory, postcolonial feminism, etc.

My argument is that lo address the ontological challenge of the post-communist urban is needed to shake it profoundly. New methodologies, methods and viewpoints are needed for that. New methodologies and methods are also mode to get new insights into broader concepts in human geography and to get involved in the broader themes in social science. They are also a way to be more reflective in practice about the society that is today called by some scholars the post-communist/socialist. These are some ways towards more inspiring, challenging and influencing studies about (post-communist) urban geographies.

Written on 13 September 2009.

Free to be distributed / debated / criticized / neglected. For questions: jussijauhiainen@utu.fi