Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-Socialist City

摘要

Iron Curtains is one of the most engaging and at the same time most thorough monographs on post-socialist urbanism that I came across in the past years. Although the book is based on a single case study of Bulgarian capital Sofia, Sonia Hirt skillfully addresses many of the key problems that have been raised in the scholarly debates since the 1990s. These include questions about post-socialist cities representing (or not) a particular type of city, about the transitional character of their forms, about the roles that the local historical situation and the international influences, respectively, play in defining ongoing urban transformations, or about the long-discussed association between modernity and socialism and the usefulness of the theories of post-modern urbanism for describing post-socialist cities. What is more, these complex theoretical questions are discussed in a very accessible way, partly because they appear interwoven with the narration of the fascinating story of Sofia.