INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.13286 993 — DILUTED POST-SOCIALISM: Urban Policymaking in East Germany, Poland and Ukraine Łukasz DrozDa Abstract More than three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post-socialist framework prevalent in the academic world is raising more and more questions. The three most serious doubts have to do with: (1) the time that has elapsed since the collapse of the state-socialist system, which means that local urbanization has been influenced by factors other than just this period; (2) the unclear geographical boundaries of the post-socialist world; (3) the questionable way of defining certain issues as rooted in post-socialism. The aim of the article is to describe the impact of the state-socialist experience on the current state of urban affairs and related policies, using the opinions of practitioners instead of those of academic researchers or document analysis, and five cities as examples: Leipzig, Germany; Krakow and Warsaw, Poland; Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine. It seems that today we should rather speak of diluted post-socialist experiences that parallel in a more indirect way processes rooted in the pre-socialist past and non-socialist events in the post-1989–91 period modulated by various critical junctures and external factors specific to individual cases. The data sources used include a review of the literature and the author’s own field research conducted in 2021 and 2022. Introduction Authors describing the former Eastern Bloc more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes still tend to refer to this region as post-socialist. 1 This is understandable because of the common experience of states that functioned in a state-socialist form over different periods between 1917 and 1991. However, interest in the topic of post-socialism itself seems to be waning, as evidenced by the decreasing number of publications on the topic (Bajerski, 2020) and the fact that it does not fit into the prevailing division in contemporary social sciences focused on the global north and south (Tuvikene et al., 2019). This is happening even though some authors point to the potential of postcolonial theory (Chari and Verdery, 2009; Sjöberg, 2020; Koobak et al., 2021; Vilenica, 2023) or produce analyses of the relations between the states of the global south and the state-socialist regimes in Eastern Europe (Stanek, 2020). Nevertheless, the actual importance of cities in the former sphere of influence of state socialism is not diminishing, as they make up a large part of today’s urban areas. According to Wikipedia (2023), so-called post-socialist cities account for no 1 Being aware of the limitations and doubts attached to the use of certain terms to denote the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union, I assume that post-socialism and post-communism denote the same phenomenon. In this article I therefore use the term ‘state socialism’ throughout, which emphasizes the importance of the bureaucratic institutions of the former Eastern Bloc states and the distance that separates this political system from various theoretical concepts of socialism and/or communism. © 2024 The auThor(s). InternatIonal Journal of urban and regIonal research publisheD by John Wiley & sons lTD on behalf of urban research publicaTions limiTeD. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The author would like to thank the following people for their valuable comments and help in conducting the research and recruiting the interviewees—Matthias Bernt, Evgeniya Dulko, Grzegorz Gajda, Franziska Görmar, Marek Grochowicz, Karol Kurnicki, Nataliya Novakova, Aleksander Palikot, Wladimir Sgibnev, Iryna Sklokina, Kuba Snopek and Maria Tymoshchuk—as well as all other helpful interviewees, advisors, IJURR reviewers and editors for their suggestions. Field research in Ukraine was funded by the mobility grant awarded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (PPN/WYM/2019/1/00020). Field research in Germany was funded by the grant ‘Dubious post-socialism—urban policy making in Central and Eastern Europe’ awarded by the University of Warsaw from the program ‘New Ideas in the Priority Research Area V’ (IDUB-622-136/2022).