I investigate mechanisms of the development of a socialist city, city community, and citizenship, and the later dissolution of those components of a socialist city into the realities of a different socio-economic formation. I test the analytical potential of the categories of the mode of production in, primarily, its Marxian version, and in its later modifications by Lefebvre, on the realities of the street and the city. I start with the very industrial production mode, through the public and private space organization and appropriation, and up to the ideological and psychological motions organized by, and expressed through, the collective consumption-production of space and time. I analyze the mutual community–infrastructure evolution in the city of Severodonetsk in Eastern Ukraine, founded in the 1930s, with the focus on the role of the city-forming street in it named after Lenin. I investigate the multi-layered process of the transformation of the rhythms of production and leisure preset by the city-forming enterprise which gives the start to the street, into the spatial and symbolic structures of urban space. I then follow the transformation of these structures into the rhythms, and eventually the content, of the urban commonality, identity, and shared social emotions. I trace the story of the street and the correspondent transformations within the city through the period of the dissolution of the USSR, till the latest events of the ongoing social unrests and the civil war in Ukraine, and precisely in Severodonetsk. I explore the way in which the urban space / time organization and the correspondent communal living patterns influence the course of war and attitudes of the participants and the civilians.
About the presenterOlena Leipnik
Dr. Olena Leipnik is lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Sam Houston State University, Texas. Her research interests include culture and sociocultural transformations in the post-Soviet countries.