Confronting Suburbanization: Urban Decentralization in Postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe, First Edition. Edited by Kiril Stanilov and Luděk Sýkora. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The Challenge of Postsocialist Suburbanization Luděk Sýkora and Kiril Stanilov Introduction Since the collapse of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), cities in the former socialist countries have entered a period of dramatic transformation. One of the most important processes in the ensuing frenetic rearrangement of urban space has been the dispersal of urban functions beyond the edges of the compact city, into territories that experienced very little development during the socialist years (Sailer-Fliege, 1999; European Academy of the Urban Environment [EAUE], 2003; Hirt and Kovachev, 2006; Borén and Gentile, 2007; Stanilov, 2007a). There is widespread evidence that, since the mid-1990s, suburbanization has become the predominant mode of urban growth in postsocialist metropolitan areas (Kok and Kovács, 1999; Hamilton, Dimitrowska-Andrews, and Pichler-Milanović, 2005; Pichler-Milanović, 2005; Tammaru, 2005; Tosics, 2005; Tsenkova and Nedović-Budić, 2006; Hirt, 2007; Leetmaa and Tammaru, 2007; Novák and Sýkora, 2007; Ouředníček, 2007; Stanilov, 2007a; Sýkora and Ouředníček, 2007; Leetmaa, Tammaru, and Anniste, 2009; Krisjane and Berzins, 2011; Szirmai, 2011) and has a visible presence in medium- sized cities as well (Timár and Váradi, 2001; Parysek, 2004; Kotus, 2006; Matlovič and Sedláková, 2007; Marcińczak, 2012). Furthermore, studies suggest that postsocialist suburbanization is characterized by fragmented spatial patterns broadly associated with urban sprawl and 1 COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL