Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands Memories, Cityscapes, People

“This book stands out among the studies of urban environments in post-socialist East-Central Europe. Featuring four historically interconnected borderland conurbations – Wrocław, Lviv, Chernivtsi, and Chişinău, it constitutes a welcome contribution to the steadily growing, yet still rather sparse research on cities that were deprived of their historical, ethnically diverse population following the cataclysms of twentieth century history and today have to deal with the legacy of Nazism, Communist dictatorship, and interethnic violence. The essays included in the volume investigate the cities’ contemporary involvement in this vanished historical diversity. They also raise a series of important questions: What are the driving forces behind the observable commitment to emphasize a multicultural heritage? Is it merely a product of opportunism in the competition for investment and prestige? A way to tame the traumatic past? Or is it born out of the hope that the engagement with otherness will lead to the emergence of inclusive identities, civic values, and tolerance?
The individual chapters in the volume are written by specialists in a range of disciplines: architecture, ethnology, heritage management, history, and sociology. Thus, the book offers a richness of methodological approaches. Moreover, it is elegantly theoretically framed by a lucid introduction that invites comparisons and combines the conceptualization of borderland, cosmopolitan sociality, and hybridity with proposals drawn from the field of memory studies.”—Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Professor in Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University
"This book is at the very cutting edge of scholarship on east-central Europe’s borderland cities and their memory cultures. Taking an invariably open but critical approach, the chapters in the volume not only reveal much about the attitudes of the inhabitants of the cities in question towards the complex, multicultural past, but also provide important insights into the vagaries of urban memory and mythologization more broadly. The book represents the best in contemporary memory studies in that it is theoretically rich, but also empirically well-grounded and methodologically rigorous. The way the various chapters operate across disciplines—as good scholarship in the fields of both memory and urban studies should—is also a particular strength. This volume represents compulsory reading for anyone interested in borderland cultures, urban memory and narratives of cultural diversity."
Dr Uilleam Blacker, Associate Professor in Comparative Russian and East European Culture, University College London