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Postdoctoral Research Fellow Maja Babic

We are gladly introducing our new Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Maja Babic. Her reasearch project title is Creating Urban Identities: Where Socialist Heritage Meets the Present.

Annotation:

Since the fall of state-socialism in 1989, the fervent socio-political, economic, and cultural transformation defined the creation of new urban identities in the former Eastern Bloc. Once impenetrable socialist lands nowadays stand key factors in the scholarly study of twentieth- and twentyfirst- century events. However, while architectural historians study the Cold War architecture, and researchers in sociology and anthropology inquire into the present-day creation of identities and space, the link between the two periods, as well as an inquiry into contemporary urban negotiations of the state-socialist past, remain understudied and call for further examination.

To remedy this gap, Creating Urban Identities will inquire into the debates on state-socialist legacy in the Czech Republic, with a particular focus on the creation of post-socialist identities as pertaining to socio-political and cultural heritage. Specifically, this project will probe into the conversion of cities from socialist to capitalist and will inspect the creation of new urban identities in the aftermath of economic and political restructuring. Creating Urban Identities will seek to identify actors in the process of post-socialist societal shift—citizens, politicians, architects, and intellectuals—in an effort to connect the individual to whole, and vice versa. Finally, to weave the bonds between the past and present, this project will examine the role of collective memory and processes of memorialisation to analyse the problematic and agency of contemporary users of socialist urban heritage.

To conduct the analysis of the relationship between the state, its cities, and their people, as well as to examine the arising social and cultural pluralities unfolding in post-socialist spaces, this project will utilize transdisciplinary methodologies and will use theories from the fields of architecture, history and anthropology, sociology, and political science. Creating Urban Identities will study the existing scholarship, archival materials, newspapers and journals, and will entail an extensive oral history component and case-studies. The value of this project stands paramount in the contemporary political and cultural moment: in the era of rising nationalism, an analysis of state-socialist heritage and its role in present-day urban transformations expands the understanding of societal processes and their staunch links with the ever-present past.