Welcome to concrete-eye, a new forum intended primarily (but hardly exclusively) for discussing issues of spatiality – architectural, urban, natural, inbetween -, society, and justice within Eastern and Central Europe and beyond.
Our hope is to map, investigate – and when necessary, change, defend, improve, care for, transform – the physical and cultural forms of built and unbuilt space in our region. We would like to transmit and cultivate information in a multinational, English-language platform on scholarship and activism on critical urban studies, spatial justice, social aspects of the built environment outside of current hierarchies, hegemonies, paradigms.
To begin, we are suggesting several possible questions facing our region that remain insufficiently addressed in transnational analysis and action. Our list is anything but exhaustive, but we hope it can serve as a prompt or stimulus.
issue 1:
hyper/turbo-marketization, absolute dominance of market actors in urban spatial relations; self-reinforcing hegemonies of corporate interests and ideological privatism; weakness, atomisation of civic sector or social movements – within and across national borders
issue 2:
presence of the still-unsettled totalitarian past: physical traces of 20th-century genocides, harsh ambiguities of pre-1989 legacy; open questions of preservation, built memory, physical erasure, commemoration; need for an ethical responsibility towards historical discomfort
issue 3:
political corruption, authoritarianism, “polypore” state orders; undemocratic legacy in policymaking: spatial and otherwise; collusion between public authorities and financial elites (both global/local)
issue 4:
spatial/environmental injustices, physical/architectural forms of social exclusion; need for critical academic practice, direct involvement, voice-giving for unhoused/racialised/ excluded on a fully equal basis
issue 5:
the ignored future and its urgent questions for urban social orders: demographic change vs. xenophobia, climate justice vs. socially fair decarbonization; matching specific regional memory/history with global paradigms, emergence of new social actors both human and non-human
concrete eye 