The Return of Czernowitz: Urban Affect, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Place-making in a European Borderland City

In a borderland city in Ukraine emerging from Soviet socialism on the edge of Europe, a cultivated urban affect of Hapsburg-era Europeanness fosters political orientations and attachments to place that are based on particular visions of the past. Affective emotions of an agentive nature situate individuals in a specific place and potentially create feelings of belonging, making urban space a site of politicized place-making and self-making. Affective experiences of space mediate the twin processes of producing material urban space and constructing the meanings of that space, revealing the extent to which political formations generate affect and how affect is a political form itself. Affectivity and the urban landscape interactively shape politicized subjectivities and considering them together reveals how affect can be transmitted in the course of everyday life.