1Articulating neo-liberalism: Diverse economies and everyday life in ‘post-socialist ’ cities

The language of power is itself “urbanizing ” but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. … one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization (de Certeau, 1984: 95-96) Introduction: neo-liberalism and ‘post-socialism’ Since the collapse of state socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s across East-Central Europe (ECE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU), city and national governments in the region have attempted to reconstruct city-regions through a rapid process of engagement with the global capitalist economy. The largest city-regions (invariably capital cities and their hinterlands) hav