Project description
Urban activism in post-socialist countries
In recent decades, many nations in the Balkan region have undergone a transition from socialist to market economies, including the transfer of many businesses and services from public to private ownership. The radical restructuring of public spaces has given rise to numerous grassroots initiatives advocating for greater citizen participation in urban planning. Funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the ReCitYu project aims to explore cases of urban activism in the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina by investigating the different ways grassroots groups have reacted in opposition to urban restructuring and privatisation. The study will offer theoretical insights into how grassroots groups form and operate, and how they are influenced by the European integration process.
Objective
Over the last decade citizens of the Western Balkans region, an area interested by the enlargement of the European Union (EU), have increasingly been advocating for inclusion in decision-making affecting the restructuring of their urban habitat. This emerging activism addresses the so-called “Right to the City” (RTC), defined as the collective right to intervene to reshape the urbanisation process. A variety of citizen initiatives emerged, brought about by grassroots groups reclaiming, through different tactics, the citizens’ right to participate in decisions related to urban planning and the use of public space. These bottom-up demands have been echoed by both the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda (2016) and the European Union’s Pact of Amsterdam (2016), which called for a global commitment to sustainable urban development to be accomplished in cooperation with local communities and civil society actors.
By bridging Critical Citizenship Studies with Social Movement Studies and Europeanization theories, this comparative research explores the dynamics of urban activism in the post-Yugoslav space. It examines the diverse ways in which RTC groups have responded to projects of urban restructuring of their cities and to the on-going privatisation of the public space resulting from the transition of former Yugoslav republics from socialist to market economies. By employing qualitative methods for collecting and analysing empirical data, specifically in-depth semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation as well as analysis of primary and secondary sources, this project aims at providing new theoretical insights useful in understanding how citizens in post-socialist countries enact their citizenship today. Moreover, the research illuminates the extent to which urban grassroots initiatives are shaped both by their embeddedness in European social movement networks and by the opportunities and constraints offered by the EU enlargement process.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
8010 Graz
Austria