Michael Gentile

Urban Geographies of Hesitant Transition: Tracing Socioeconomic Segregation in Post-Ceauşescu Bucharest

Scholars have raised concerns about the social costs of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and geographers are particularly interested in the spatial expressions and implications of these costs, including apparently increasing residential segregation. Applying a range of segregation measures to 1992 and 2002 census data, this contribution studies socio-occupational residential segregation in Bucharest. The conclusion is that Bucharest was relatively socio-spatially mixed at both times; in fact, a modest, yet fully legible, decreasing overall trend is observable. This is at odds with many popular assumptions of the past 20 years.

Patterns of Socioeconomic Segregation in the Capital Cities of Fast-Track Reforming Postsocialist Countries

Socioeconomic disparities have been rising on both sides of the Atlantic for the last forty years. This study illuminates the relationship among economic inequality, other contextual and institutional factors, and socioeconomic intraurban segregation in Eastern Europe. We draw our empirical evidence from the capital cities of so-called fast-track reforming postsocialist countries: Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The analysis consists of two stages. First, we use the traditional indexes of segregation to assess the global levels of socioeconomic segregation in the case cities. Second, we investigate the global patterns and local geographies of socioeconomic residential intermixing and introduce a typology of neighborhoods based on the socio-occupational composition of their residential tracts. Despite rapidly growing income inequality, the levels of socioeconomic segregation in the postsocialist city are either low or very low. The scale of segregation differs between the cities and the patterns of residential intermixing in the large cities of central and Eastern Europe are fundamentally different from those found in the Baltic states. The results lead to two important conclusions. One is that the link between socioeconomic distance and spatial distance in postsocialist cities is moderately sensitive to the level of economic inequality and to other contributory factors. The other key finding is that inertia effects have offset the immediate catalyzing effect of economic liberalization, globalization, and growing socioeconomic inequality on the patterns of segregation, at least in the first decade after the collapse of socialism.

West oriented in the East-oriented Donbas: a political stratigraphy of geopolitical identity in Luhansk, Ukraine

Building on data from a survey (n = 4000) conducted in the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk in late 2013, this article explores the link between national identity and foreign policy preferences in the Donbas, suggesting that they are increasingly conflated in distinct geopolitical identities. Descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic regression are used to compare the characteristics of pro-West and uncertain individuals with those of the pro-Russian/Soviet individuals, with preferences on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union (EU) accession underlying this distinction. The results show that geopolitical identities in Luhansk have a complex political stratigraphy that includes demographic, socioeconomic, cultural, and attitudinal components. The pro-West constituency is younger, not Russian but often including members of other ethnic groups, well educated, more tolerant toward sexual minorities, generally more satisfied with life, and it also speaks better English. Conversely, those with pro-Russia/Soviet geopolitical identities are older, Russian, low educated, less fluent in English, intolerant, and unsatisfied with their lives. Uncertainty is more randomly distributed among social groups, indicating different underlying causes related to the source of the respondents’ uncertainty.

The “Soviet” factor: exploring perceived housing inequalities in a midsized city in the Donbas, Ukraine

In this paper, I revisit the role of Soviet legacy factors in explaining today’s housing inequalities in a midsized post-Soviet city by investigating social, demographic, economic and geographic determinants of perceived housing quality. Building on a sample survey dataset (n = 3,000) that brings together both Soviet legacy effects and more universal influences on housing inequality, it is shown that various aspects of Soviet housing policy can be traced as well-preserved legacies today. The survey was conducted in 2009 in Stakhanov, Ukraine, and the method of analysis is binomial logistic regression. By capturing both the social costs attributed to the post-Soviet transition crisis as well as the underlying legacy factors inherited from the Soviet epoch, the findings suggest that any analysis of housing inequalities or residential segregation in the post-socialist city must come to terms with the impacts of socialist-era economic priorities on the urban social landscape.

Neighbourhood reputation in the Soviet city and beyond : Disassembling the geography of prestige in Ust’-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan

This paper revisits the geographical legacy of socialism in the urban areas of the former Soviet Union. Building on research on housing and socio-spatial differentiation under and after socialism, this will be achieved by examining an important component in the spatial differentiation of the city, namely neighbourhood reputation. The analysis is based on survey data (n = 1515) from the city of Ust’-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan; a combination of descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic regression are deployed in order to shed light on the factors that are associated with the reputation of the neighbourhoods in which people reside. The results show that the Soviet system manufactured its own brand of socio-spatial distinction, which reflected the priority hierarchies built in the socialist planned economy. Education, age and, most importantly, area of employment appear to have been ‘rewarded’ with prestigiously located housing.

The Post-Soviet Urban Poor and Where They Live: Khrushchev-Era Blocks, “Bad” Areas, and the Vertical Dimension in Luhansk, Ukraine

Using a combination of descriptive and multivariate regression methods applied on a sample survey (n = 4,000) conducted in Luhansk, Ukraine, during Fall 2013, this article investigates demographic, socioeconomic, housing-specific, and geographical factors that predict urban poverty in countries undergoing the economic, political, and institutional transition from state socialism to the market with a specific focus on Ukraine. By doing so, it contributes to the literature on poverty under and after transition, which has a strong position within economics, and to the literature on the spatial expressions of poverty after state socialism, which is particularly prominent within geography. Inspired by Amartya Sens notion that poverty contains an irreducible absolute core, as well as a relative component, this article makes use of a poverty index based on multiple thresholds that reflect the respondents’ capabilities to meet different needs. A fascinating result of this exercise is that poverty under transition is not only predicted by such classical factors as sex, personal and parental education, and socio-occupational status but also by housing-specific details such as location in vertical space and by classical geographical factors such as relative horizontal location and neighborhood prestige. Accordingly, this article responds to recent calls for increased sensitivity toward the third dimension of space in contemporary urbanism, at the same time making a substantial contribution to our hitherto incomplete knowledge of the patterns and sources of urban poverty and inequality in postsocialist transition.