ABSTRACT
As islands of modernity, Central and Eastern European cities experienced critical changes during the twentieth century. The most important of these are urbanization, suburbanization, the development of mass housing, the establishment of new capitals and the construction of new cities during Stalinism. Significant regional features of urban development are the reconstruction of cities after the Second World War, the evolution of specific forms of collective housing and the socialist realist style in architecture. Rural areas also experienced significant and regionally specific changes that allow for a cross-border comparison (land reforms, re-settlement of areas deserted in 1945, collectivization, cooperatives, transformation of the countryside into a leisure-time area, etc.). The chapter aims to assess the impact of planning and of spontaneous developments in shaping these transformations. It also addresses whether aspects of ‘rurbanization’ (or the influence of rural life on urban society and vice versa), which have been described in vivid detail for both the Balkans and the Soviet Union, can also be observed in other countries of the region; which shape the phenomenon might have taken there; and how it can be interpreted within the broader context of both internal and cross-border migration.
