Urban Reviewers and the Non-Post-Socialist Municipalism in Poland and Pre-2022 Ukraine

The article aims to describe various social actors of urban processes in Central and Eastern Europe, here referred to as “reviewers”: members, supporters, allies, and opponents of local municipalist movements. It seems that these movements can hardly be described as post-socialist, as they are rather influenced by various contemporary global trends, and the context of the state socialist past is only an additional variable that modulates these characteristics to a limited extent at best. The paper is based on the analysis of social movements from four cities: Warsaw and Krakow, Poland, as well as Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine. The study described in the paper is based on a literature review, field research based on observation of urban events, and semi-structured in-depth interviews with the above-mentioned urban reviewers, such as activists, journalists, and policy analysts. The research was conducted in 2021–22, in the case of Ukrainian cities a few months before the start of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Particular emphasis is placed on the description of the national activist network the Urban Movements Congress from Poland and the March for Kyiv demonstration from Ukraine.