The collapse of state socialism and the transition to democracy and a market economy have significantly impacted urban spaces in Eastern Europe. Public squares and streets have become more open, reflecting diverse lifestyles and attitudes. However, alongside this democratization, new forms of exclusion and segregation have emerged. Gated communities, fenced and guarded housing estates, and even entire districts now restrict public access in many cities. Shopping malls, another result of privatizing urban spaces, are semi-public areas where access is tightly controlled by commercial interests. Additionally, hostile architecture, such as anti-homeless spikes, is increasingly used in public spaces like benches, parks, and transportation to exclude certain groups. This paper examines the rise of both visible and invisible barriers in post-socialist cities, focusing on urban development strategies in Poland and East Germany. It explores how these changes reflect broader trends in urban segregation and access restriction.

New York is a city spanned and united by great bridges, 19th- and 20th-century avenues and boulevards, and a far-reaching, albeit long under-funded, 24/hour a day, rattling elevated and underground municipal “Subway” system. New York, however, is also a city of “walls”— barriers both tangible and intangible: rivers and waterways separate New York City’s five component boroughs. In parts of the city, topography long relegated wealthier neighborhoods to the heights of ridges and palisades and lower-income ones to the sprawling lowlands and rough-and-tumble docklands below. Not least, invisible but no less impenetrable walls of class, ethnicity, and race formed an ever-changing checkerboard that continues to divide neighborhood from neighborhood and, not infrequently, street from street. Fifty years ago this summer, author Robert Caro published his lengthy, classic biography of Robert Moses, the long-serving, unelected, consummate bureaucrat who, over the early- and mid-20th century, exerted near-total control over the conception, building, and construction of the transportation and recreational infrastructure, public housing, harbors, and airports of New York City and its surroundings. More than a half-century later, Moses’s legacy remains real and still contentious and Caro’s book a foundational text of biography and of urbanism. The proposed presentation will begin with a consideration of the project best remembered by critics of Moses: the mass evictions of residents and mass demolition of housing to make room for a super-highway bisecting NYC’s populous borough of the Bronx—an unscalable wall that divided the Bronx in half, sending it into a downward spiral from which it still hasn’t recovered and transforming it from a place of lower-middle-class opportunity into the poorest urban county in the United States. The presentation will then briefly examine other proposed and realized projects of the era of Moses’s uninterrupted “rule” (including the one that led to his dramatic downfall, the visible and invisible walls they created, the public reactions they conjured, and selected implications they offer for contemporary cities worldwide.

Spatial segregation, driven by demographic shifts, political history, and social and economic inequalities, has intensified in Bulgaria since the post-socialist transformation of the 1990s. Today, with most Bulgarians living in urban areas, growing economic and social disparities have led to the construction of new “walls” and “borders” within the urban fabric. This paper explores the complex nature of spatial segregation in Bulgaria, analyzing old and new forms of segregated communities and the internal and external drivers of the process. Addressing these issues requires a comprehensive and holistic approach that promotes intercultural dialogue, reduces discriminatory attitudes and stereotypes, and improves access to public services, transport, and affordable housing in marginalized neighborhoods. Aligning urban planning policies with the New Leipzig Charter (2020) is crucial for creating more equitable and inclusive “urban places” for all Bulgarian citizens.