Urban transitions
“The concept of transnationalization combines observations about the processes and structures of the transnationalization of the economy and finance with observations about migration. Social realities with new qualities are emerging and they cannot be described with the traditionally categories of locality. Hybrid cultures and new identities are developing beyond notions of assimilation and, in the sense of a diaspora-like life-style, marginalization and they are characterized by ‘operating between different worlds.’ How do migrants construct and reconstruct their lives, which are embedded in more than one society, in the urban metropolises?
We can observe changed circumstances, lives and identities that oscillate between separate countries, cultures and environments and, at the same time, we see how individuals combine these elements on a local level. Therefore, location should only be thought of in the plural, as a transit space within which many locations multiply themselves and which cannot be explained adequately by means of an essentialistic concept of culture. The terms hybrid spaces, sociospheres or ‘third spaces’ are attempts that seek to define and understand urban space as a site of activities for a changing number of subjects, who frequently engage with the territory for a short period only.
In this respect transnational spaces provide information about new spatial correlations between locality and globalization. They indicate that the relationship between geographic and social space is experiencing modifications.”
“The metropolitan corridor between Berlin, Moscow and St. Petersburg not only facilitates the exchange of goods between the markets of Eastern and Western Europe with convoys of articulated lorries rolling along its transit routes; it also boasts railway links, mobile telephone networks and Internet access.
The corridor consists of a chain of privileged locations superimposed on an industrial area that bears all the hallmarks of socialist modernisation and is experiencing increasing disintegration in the wake of transformation and global structural change. Transit spaces are interfaces where provincial communities encounter the world of Nike, Nokia and CNN. They are new urban locations in which the explosive potential that resides in the juxtaposition of new inequalities and the lack of simultaneity in Eastern Europe are all too apparent.
Selected places along this corridor will be used to illustrate the contours and the cracks that will emerge in the radically altered urban fabric of Eastern Europe…”
Source: Bauhaus Dessau