Mapping Modernities: Geographies of Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge Series in Human Geography, 6)

When the communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989/91, there was a revived interest in a region that had been largely neglected by western geographers. Mapping Modernities draws on the resulting work and other original theoretical and empirical sources to describe, interpret and explain the place and spatial order of modernities in Central and Eastern Europe since 1920, to give a theoretically underpinned, regional geography of the area. The book interprets the geography of Central and Eastern Europe from 1920 - 2000 in terms of spatiality and modernity. It details the individual and collective development of places produced within the three modernising projects of Nationalism, Communism and Neo-liberalism. These ideologies are seen as three geo-historical, time/space conjunctions of modernity competing for the hegemonic imposition of order onto the maelstrom of ideas, people and events in the central-eastern territories of Europe. Within each geo-historical period, localities, regions, states, Europe and the globe are systematically debated as constructed and contested places. Spatial modernity theorises an experience of time and space mediated through place. Place is conceptualised as bounded, multi-scalar meaningful, relational space. Place expresses individual and environmental development in ideas and practices. Spatial modernity directs attention to the multi-scalar properties of place, place particularities and place relations that are embedded in socio-cultural and locational attitudes and values. Geographical space, modernity and spatial modernity Marches and disputed borderlands: what and where are the lands of which we speak? The Nationalist Project: the assertion of ethnic nationality in modernity The production of localities in nationalist modernity The production of states and regions in nationalist modernity The Marchlands in European and global space The Communist Project: the assertion of collective development and competing global modernities The production of localities as an experience of communist modernity The production of the Party-state and its regions The production of Eastern Europe in the European and global spaces of competing modernities The Neo-liberalist Project: the assertion of self-development and from geo-politics to geo-economics in global modernity? The production of localities in transition The production of regions in transition The production of states in transition The Marchlands in the production of the New Europe Central and Eastern Europe as Marchlands in the global spatial modernity of the 1990s When the communist governments of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and 1991, there was a revived interest in a region that had been largely neglected by western geographers. Mapping Modernities draws on the resulting work and other original theoretical and empirical sources to describe, interpret and explain the place and spatial order of modernities in Central and Eastern Europe since 1920, to give a theoretically underpinned, regional geography of the area. The book interprets the geography of Central and Eastern Europe from 1920 to 2000 in terms of spatial modernity. It details the individual and collective development of places produced within the three modernising projects of Nationalism, Communism and Neo-liberalism. This text draws on research carried out since 1989/1991 to describe, interpret and explain the place and spatial order of modernities in Central and Eastern Europe since 1920, to give a theoretically underpinned, regional geography of the area Alan Dingsdale. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [303]-317) And Index. Geograhers have always been interested in people, space and environment.