Imperial nostalgia in the era of post-socialist urban change

This paper discusses the spatial restructuring of Balkan cities and their imperial metropoles in relation to imperial nostalgia during early twenty-first century processes of Europeanization. Emerging as two distinct historiographical trends in the 1990s, New Habsburg and New Ottoman History both operated within the epistemological boundaries of the post-socialist Zeitgeist. Relegating structural analysis to the margins, their exploration of imperial diversity reproduced ahistorical visions of city life. The cosmopolitan urban subject was reconstituted in sanitized historical districts that accompanied international capital. Valuable as studies of cosmopolitan belonging, nostalgic imperial histories nevertheless aligned with neoliberal processes of Europeanization. Their markers of historicity were nodes of accumulation for investors and urban entrepreneurs, with mixed results. The Europeanization of Rijeka, Belgrade, Vienna, and Istanbul harnessed academic and popular histories alike, funnelled to the tourism and real-estate sectors. After 1989, imperial history entered the realms of postmodern and postsocialist urban change as their constitutive component.