Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia

by Alexander; Catharine

• ISBN13: 9781844721153
• ISBN10: 1844721159
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-08-15
• Publisher: UCL Press

Summary

P Capturing a unique historical moment, this book examines the changes in urban life since the collapse of the Soviet Union from an ethnographic perspective, thus addressing significant gaps in the literature on cities, Central Asia and post-socialism. /P P It encompasses Tashkent, Almaty, Astana and Ulan-Ude: four cities with quite different responses to the fall of the Soviet Union. Each chapter takes a theme of central significance across this huge geographical terrain, addresses it through one city and contextualizes it by reference to the other sites in this volume. The structure of the book moves from nostalgia and memories of the Soviet past to examine how current changes are being experienced and imagined through the shifting materialities, temporalities and political economies of urban life. Privatization is giving rise to new social geographies, while ethnic and religious sensibilities are creating emergent networks of sacred sites. But, however much ideologies are changing, cities also provide aconstant lived mnemonic of lost configurations of ideology and practice, acting as signposts to bankrupted futures. EM Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia /EM provides a detailed account of the changing nature of urban life in post-Soviet Asia, clearly elucidating the centrality of these urban transformations to citizens' understandings of their own socio-economic condition. /P

Table of Contents

Preface

Contributors

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Introduction

Astana: materiality and the city

Almaty: rethinking the public sector

Tashkent: three capitals, three worlds

City of migrants: contemporary Ulan-Ude in the context of Russian migration

The creation and revitalisation of ethnic, sacred sites in Ulan-Ude since 1990s

The Homeless of Ulan-Ude

New subjects and situated interdependence: after privatisation in Ulan-Ude

Index

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