Abstract
The exploration of post-socialist suburbanization begins with the juxtaposition of the trajectories, patterns, and underlying forces of urbanization and suburbanization under socialism and capitalism. These two opposing systems produced their own logic of urban space generation shaped by the systems' contrasting approaches to setting the balance between the public and private realms.
In the next section we relate post-socialist suburbanization to the urban experience in other world regions and argue that the ongoing spread of suburbanization across the globe is a concomitant development of the broader processes of globalization linked with the expansion of capitalism as a dominant socio-economic order on a planetary scale. In this sense, we interpret the similarity in spatial outcomes as a result of the social practices of firms, households, and governments under the ever more homogenized political, economic, and cultural conditions of global capitalism.
In the post-socialist countries of Europe, these practices have produced highly dispersed and fragmented patterns of metropolitan growth, which has seriously undermined the prospects of sustainable development and should, therefore, become a key concern in managing the future evolution of cities in Central and Eastern Europe.