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Often framed in the public discourse as Europe's ultimate Other, Muslims have been heftily debated and vastly problematized as violent, unfaithful suspect citizens, unwanted immigrants, part of a bad diversity, and refusal of modernity. Taking the Muslim Other into consideration, we explore young Muslim(‐looking) passengers' everyday Othering encounters within the (im)mobile spaces of public transport that entangle their bodies with different imaginaries, histories, emotions, and affects. Employing qualitative research methods in a cross‐national and interurban study in Amsterdam, Tallinn, Leipzig, and Turku, which offer different dimensions of diversity, size, and history, important for understanding European cities in their complexities, we present public transport as a cross‐cultural meeting place with socio‐spatial negotiations of difference to study everyday travel experiences of 74 young Muslim(‐looking) passengers. We highlight how Othering discourses become part of their everyday travel experiences. In so doing, we investigate multiple modes through which the Muslim Other is (re)produced and Othering is lived out in the networks of their everyday embodied, that is, sensorial, corporeal, and affective, experiences of public transport. In this way, we critically position public transport at the intersection of what it means to experience European cities through riding public transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructures from different time periods, installed for different purposes in often discordant political and economic systems, function alongside one another in contemporary cities. While infrastructures attracted a great deal of attention in geographical research, the "East" of Europe has still largely been left out, as the studies mostly focused on the global North and the global South. This paper, thus, takes on two challenges by intersecting an infrastructural lens with the re‐conceptualisation of post‐socialism. First, following calls from comparative urbanism and the postcolonial turn in urban studies and geography to work beyond usual suspects, the paper expands the territorial scope of infrastructure research. Second, the paper takes the critical edge of the aforementioned calls by offering new ways of attending to infrastructures through relations to the (socialist) past. Taking a threefold approach of expanding, learning, and challenging from a more‐than‐North/South perspective, this paper analyses post‐socialist infrastructuring by highlighting inequalities, such as the introduction of individual measuring of heat, using green spaces as boosterist urban governing, and turning transport to a consumer good. Instead of centralising the present or the "Western" best practice, the paper investigates to what extent it is possible to take elements of the (socialist) past and develop them into forward‐looking measures. The paper shows the need to incorporate questions of social justice and equity – perspectives which were more central for infrastructural provision under socialism – into the ways in which infrastructures are planned, made, and used today. While infrastructures have attracted a great deal of attention in geographical research, the "East" of Europe has still largely been left out, as studies have mostly focused on the global North and the global South. This paper intersects an infrastructural lens with the re‐conceptualisation of post‐socialism. Taking a threefold approach of expanding, learning, and challenging from a more‐than‐North/South perspective, this paper analyses post‐socialist infrastructuring by highlighting inequalities, such as the introduction of individual measuring of heat, using green spaces as boosterist urban governing, and turning transport to a consumer good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates the intersection of post‐socialism and mobility to not only widen the scope of “new mobilities paradigm” into “off the map” regions but also to highlight new insights for research on mobility by challenging the assumed borders between past and present and between “East” and “West,” as well as those between different mobilities. This paper discusses post‐socialist mobilities via three topics—modernity, freedom and citizenship—which are evident in automobility and beyond. Modernity denotes a mobile “modern age,” with mobility referring to freedom to move—both of which are then tied to the ways in which individuals are governed as citizens. By analysing the constellations of different mobilities vis‐à‐vis shifting power relations between state and citizens, as they are raised in the emerging research on post‐socialist mobilities, the aim of the paper is to stress the many similarities in terms of practices and regulations of mobility across the often‐assumed boundaries between socialist, post‐socialist, and “western” conditions. While the starting point for the paper is changing patterns of automobility and its governing, the paper also makes references to other mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to critically assess the study of post-socialist cities with respect to comparative urbanism. Even though comparative urbanism has challenged the division of the world into largely incommensurable regional containers, where some regions are sources of theory while others remain in the periphery of thinking, post-socialist cities have remained doubly excluded: neither centre nor periphery, neither mainstream nor part of the critique. This article introduces three ways in which post-socialism has and could be perceived: as a container, as a condition and as a de-territorialized concept. It is argued here that seeing post-socialism as a de-territorialized concept that would apply to particular aspects of cities and societies rather than territorialized units in general would allow cities regularly seen as post-socialist to be incorporated into global urban theorizing, while distinctive local histories and experiences still remain analytically present. The article cautions researchers against area-based imaginations of urban theorization, instead arguing in favour of an approach that sees cities first and foremost as ordinary while some aspects could be claimed to be post-socialist. Tallinn is used here as a site from which to draw examples for this mainly literature-based conceptual analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban research has long related informality to a lack of state capacity or a failure of institutions. This assumption not only fails to account for the heterogeneous institutional relations in which informality is embedded, but has also created a dividing line between states. Whereas some states are understood to manage urban development through functioning institutions, others, in this view, fail to regulate. To deconstruct such understandings, this article explores informal practices through a multi-sited individualizing comparison between three case studies of water governance, parking regulation and dwelling regimes in Bafatá (Guinea-Bissau), Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), respectively. Our approach to understanding informality starts from the negotiation and contestation of order between differently positioned actors in the continuous making of states. From this point of view, informality is inherent in the architecture of states --emerging through legal systems, embedded in negotiations between and within institutions, and based on conflicts between state regulations and prevailing norms. Tracing how order takes shape though negotiation, improvisation, co-production and translation not only highlights how informality constitutes a modus operandi in the everyday workings of the state in all three cases, but also provides a way to talk across these cases, i.e. to bring them together in one frame of analysis and overcome their presumed incommensurability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often framed in the public discourse as Europe's ultimate Other, Muslims have been heftily debated and vastly problematized as violent, unfaithful suspect citizens, unwanted immigrants, part of a bad diversity, and refusal of modernity. Taking the Muslim Other into consideration, we explore young Muslim(‐looking) passengers' everyday Othering encounters within the (im)mobile spaces of public transport that entangle their bodies with different imaginaries, histories, emotions, and affects. Employing qualitative research methods in a cross‐national and interurban study in Amsterdam, Tallinn, Leipzig, and Turku, which offer different dimensions of diversity, size, and history, important for understanding European cities in their complexities, we present public transport as a cross‐cultural meeting place with socio‐spatial negotiations of difference to study everyday travel experiences of 74 young Muslim(‐looking) passengers. We highlight how Othering discourses become part of their everyday travel experiences. In so doing, we investigate multiple modes through which the Muslim Other is (re)produced and Othering is lived out in the networks of their everyday embodied, that is, sensorial, corporeal, and affective, experiences of public transport. In this way, we critically position public transport at the intersection of what it means to experience European cities through riding public transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]