Published 18. 9. 2025

Call for papers for a panel on the transformation of city centers at the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) conference

Panel „Downtown Revisited“ Summary

This session examines three decades of neoliberal urban planning through the lens of new understanding of city centers in Europe. It invites comparisons between post-socialist and Western contexts, reflecting on the role of global capital, public interest, and the shifting nature of democratic urban governance.

Presentation

How have the last three decades of urban transformation reshaped the idea and materiality of the city center in post-socialist and Western European contexts? This session seeks to take stock of neoliberal urban planning through a historical lens, focusing on the emergence and contestation of new urban cores—“downtowns”—as key sites where global capital, local governance, and public space intersect.

Emerging from the postwar modernist vision of “The Heart of the City,” postmodern critiques in the 1980s shifted urban discourse toward contextualism, layered urbanity, and community-centered planning. Yet by the 1990s, especially in post-socialist Europe, the implementation of urban centers increasingly fell under the influence of private investors, as public institutions weakened and market-based planning took hold. What has been gained—and what has been lost—in this shift?

This session invites papers that explore the evolution of neoliberal planning paradigms since the late 20th century, focusing on new central districts as crystallizations of changing governance structures, investor-state relations, and the (in)visibility of public interest. In line with the central theme of the conference the session encourages comparative approaches that highlight both convergences and divergences across cities in Europe and beyond—and that reflect on the broader global urban networks in which these developments are embedded.

Key questions include:

• How did the modernist concept of a city center transform across different political and economic regimes in the last four decades?
• In what ways did public and private actors shape the transformation of central urban spaces?
• Can recent developments, such as Manhatization, city branding or overtourism, be seen as part of a global trend toward the weakening of democratic urban governance?
The session aims to:
• Reassess the history of neoliberal urban development in Europe through a comparative and critical lens;
• Explore the role of city networks, international investors, and planning expertise in shaping urban cores;
• Investigate the extent to which cities have maintained—or abandoned—the ideal of the public city.

Relevant themes include (but are not limited to):

• The evolution of city centers: from modernist social cores to financialized downtowns;
• Relationship between postmodern and neoliberal urbanism
• Citizen participation and its erosion in urban planning processes;
• Case studies of resistance, contestation, or successful regulation of urban transformation;
• The role of urban design competitions, zoning plans, and strategic land sales;
• Global influences and city networks in the making of “new urban hearts.”
By gathering diverse case studies and critical reflections, the session aims to deepen our understanding of how urban centers have been made—and remade—under neoliberalism and to identify new ways of thinking about the public interest in contemporary urbanism.