Tauri Tuvikene

Research Area 1

Stay at EEGA: three weeks in May 2018

Tauri Tuvikene, PhD, is a researcher at Tallinn University in Estonia. His research deals with comparative urbanism in relation to post-socialist cities and comparative methods, on which he has published in IJURR, Current Sociology and Eurasian Geography and Economics. He also works on the practices and regulations of urban mobility in socialist and post-socialist cities, using Tallinn, Estonia as a case study, on which he has published most recently in Geography Compass. His doctoral dissertation at UCL Geography analyses the politics of car parking. Tuvikene is currently carrying out a post-doctoral research project on urban walking and its relation to the different embodiments of law. He is also co-editing two collections: Post-socialist Urban Infrastructures (Routledge) and Post-Socialist Street: Vehicles, Movements and Frictions (Berghahn).

The primary aim of the visit to IfL-Leipzig is to work collaboratively with co-editors on the book „Post-socialist Urban Infrastructures“. Post-socialist Urban Infrastructures critically elaborates on an often forgotten aspect, but one of the most essential, of contemporary urban life, namely infrastructures, and links them to a discussion of post-socialist transformation. Contributions dealing with housing infrastructures, green infrastructures and transport infrastrcuture seek answers to two overarching questions: How does infrastructure help to explain post-socialist urban transformation? And what does post-socialist urban transformation add to the conceptualisation of infrastructures? Apart from finishing the book, the work in the course of the visit involves drafting an article with current working title Post-socialist urban infrastructures: in what sense different from socialism and if necessarily better?, which grows out from the authors’ workshop that took place in Tallinn on 10-11 August 2017.