Urban resilience: an instrument to decode the post-socialist socio-economic and spatial transformations of cities from Central and Eastern Europe

A widely used concept, urban resilience, cannot remain a metaphor or just a theoretical view on the ability of cities to overcome perturbations, but it also needs to be operationalized and to become a useful tool in deciphering the complex and very dynamic urban realities. The present study investigates the resilience of 76 selected cities from Central and Eastern Europe from the point of view of socio-economic indicators (socio-economic resilience), as well as from the point of view of morphological and functional indicators (spatial resilience). The methodology is quantitative, based on statistical analyses which link the socio-economic evolution of the cities to the spatial one in order to observe the disturbances. The results show us a territory of Central and Eastern Europe at several speeds. The differences exist because of a differentiated structural change that took place after the collapse of communism (depending on the proximity or distance to the border with Western Europe), but also linked to the existence of different socio-economic resources (Western cities vs Eastern cities of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria), based on their different history and the trajectory taken since the fall of communism.