Urban revolutions are institutional and spatial

Warning to national governments: urban centres are political cauldrons. If “Petrograd achieved the February Revolution”, as Trotsky said, giving birth to a system that survived seven decades, “then it died in similar locations” (Harloe 1996: 1).

Communism and capitalism both came to the USSR and CEE through capital cities, offering an unprecedented opportunity to study the interactionbetween national and urban political economy. Although institutional responses varied in the transition of each country, one unexpected discovery appeared. Communism did not just destroy markets. It recast the shape of cities, and, with it, their productivity as primary engines of growth. Not only did socialist cities appear in unlikely locations, with Russia an extreme example, but the location of economic activities within cities also changed as density shifted to the periphery. Political ideology and the central state, not individual initiative, powered the urban economy.

To analyse the unwinding of this long legacy, the challenge is neither to oversimplify (Harloe 1996: 2) nor to overlook the broader context of global forces during the transition (Sharafutdinova 2021: 1). Along with institutions, ideas are potent travellers, and the timing of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Washington Consensus, which trumpeted a neoliberal economic reform agenda, is highly relevant in terms of national choices on privatization and deregulation.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a debate raged between radical reformers and gradualists about the pace of market transition. The privatization of real estate, as a high-value asset, was a contentious and protracted process (Åslund 2007).