extra-medium  introduction  news projects publications personal contact disclaimer [ Post-Socialist Transition ] It has been 20 years since the political changes in Central and Eastern Europe - a time span long enough to look back onto and evaluate. Furthermore, a stage of the transitional process has already terminated with the end to the accumulation of capital and privatization of state property. The end of this phase more-or-less coincides with the current recession that struck most post-socialist countries with exponential impact, due to their absent structural reforms. Contemporary urban phenomena in cities of the former Eastern Block should be understood as results of continuous development rooted in the socialist past and leading through different stages of post-socialist transition. Instead of marking a strong borderline between the period of socialism and the post-socialist era, one should look at the patterns of continuity to better understand the processes that determin spatial and social qualities of these cities. Hungarian sociologist, Iván Tosics mentions that the transition from socialism to capitalism is a long process, with an intermediate stage, the free market system, before arriving to the regulated market society. The turning points between these periods have major importance in shaping the post-socialist city. First the establishment of the market-based system through privatization and decentralization, as the key processes of change from the state-dominated, over-regulated, bureaucratic society into the free-market system; secondly the efforts to gain back some public control over the unregulated market processes by the introduction of new public policies and the reform of the institutional structure. Some of the changes happened very rapidly, for example the political and economic transition from single-party socialist states to democracies and market economies. Other domains, as the legal system -adjustments to the constitution and the introduction of a new, EU-conform legal framework- and municipal systems, took longer to transform. And, forming a third category, certain qualities -social norms for example- are yet to meet contemporary western standards, some not even developing towards those. To describe the process, Tosics says: it took 6 months to introduce the market economy, 6 years for the political transformation to happen and will take 60 years for social awareness to completely change. In the early 1990s it was rather assumed that the transition from a centrally-managed state-owned socialist economy within the context of a single-party system towards a market economy and a democratic civil society, would project cities in Central and Eastern Europe rather uniformly along a linear trajectory, which would result in their convergence through time towards the spatial-structural and functional characteristics of European cities in advanced market economies. Such thinking, however, neglected the path dependency of Eastern European cities. It has to be taken into account that post-socialist urban development is highly affected by the different pre-socialist and socialist legacies of each and every city.