MRG member prof. Ryan Powell collaborated with colleagues from Italy and Romania and edited a new interdisciplinary book dealing with urban marginality as a multi-faceted process of urban transformation:
Alexandrescu, F., Powell, R. and Vilenica, A. (Eds) (2025) Urban marginality, racialisation, interdependence: Learning from Eastern Europe. (London: Routledge).
Authors in the book book engage with the question of what is the broader international significance of urban experiences, transformations and knowledge production within the cities of Eastern Europe. And why do we need to talk about it now? This volume explores new patterns and drivers of urban marginality and racialisation, and at the same time connects these to wider problematics of 鈥渁dvanced capitalist鈥 cities, as well as to postsocialist and anti-colonial urbanisms. The fourteen chapters contribute to a more nuanced understanding of global urbanism that decentres dominant Anglophone conceptualisations. Contributions focus empirically and theoretically on Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine.
I have learned so much from the outstanding urban scholarship of Eastern European colleagues, but there remains an intellectual neglect of the region. We hope that this book can help address that and provincialize understandings of contemporary urbanism by re-connecting, re-theorizing and re-historicizing explicitly from the East.
Professor Ryan Powell
Book co-editor and MRG member
The book is recommended for students and scholars of urban marginality, race and postsocialism in Eastern Europe and beyond, but will also be of interest to activists involved in housing and urban justice as well as in broader struggles towards the anti-racist city.
You can preview the content of the book through the publisher website linked below.
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