Everyday life in the socialist city

European Association for Urban History - 11th International Conference on Urban History

29.08.2012-01.09.2012, Prague

Specialist Session - S 26:
Everyday life in the socialist city

Session Organizers:
Jana Nosková (Institute of Ethnology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Brno, Czech Republic), Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, Barbora Vacková, Lucie Galčanová (Faculty of Social Studies Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic)

Since the 1970s, the notion of ‘everyday life’ in social sciences has been strongly associated with studies and theorizations of the ordinary, routine, daily practices and situations, as Crow and Pope (2008) point out in their editorial foreword to the special issue of the Sociology Journal (Sociology and Everyday Life). In the urban context, such repeated and seemingly insignificant actions and trajectories help to (re)produce or transform urban spaces and their meanings, often in very creative ways. Our session aims at opening the questions about the character of everyday life in the specific context of ‘socialist’ cities in the Central and Eastern Europe (understood as cities/towns in a country with a state socialist regime prior to the transformations following the fall of the Berlin Wall). We wish to discuss examples from various cities and countries, explaining the specific activities, relationships, rhythms and trajectories that the urban users developed in these cities, to reflect the differences and similarities of these patterns with the forms appearing in the cities in the rest of Europe, and to follow the changes in everyday life along the period of state socialism. The main goals of the session are, on the one hand, to discuss the interconnections between the forms of everyday urban life and the economic, political and social characteristics of the period, and, on the other hand, to search for examples of challenging, contesting and disrupting the routine, or defining the everyday situations in creative ways by the urban dwellers.

Although the theme is not strictly new in the field of urban history, the specificity of the socialist everyday urban life and daily (re)production or contestation of urban space, has not been given much attention, especially not in a comparative perspective.

We would like to welcome papers based on archival and/or oral history research, focusing on life in big cities, as well as describing little towns. Topics include (but are not limited to):

- everyday life in the public/private spaces
- urban rhythms and routines and their disruptions
- work, leisure, and consumption in urban environment
- representation of socialist home – dwelling forms for socialist family
- socialist ideology in public/private spaces
- celebrations and festivities (mass public and private celebrations) and their connection to public/private spaces

Please submit paper proposals through the conference website at: www.eauh2012.com/sessions/call-for-paper-proposals/

Deadline: 15 November 2011