The Role of Multiculturalism in the Discursive Rescaling of an Eastern European City

Eastern European cities have been going through complex transformations in the wake of the revolutionary year 1989. Their restructuring has been marked by an abrupt transition from the centralized economy and totalitarianism of the communist period to the free market economy of new capitalism and democracy, under pressures for regionalization and globalization. The article looks at how City Hall texts (available in print and in digitalized form on the City Hall website) draw upon a historically rooted discourse of regional multiculturalism, constantly rearticulating it with EU neoliberal discourses of economic growth and competitiveness, participatory democracy, and interregional cooperation. The texts are thus seen as part of an ongoing strategy employed by the local authorities to rescale the city of Timisoara, the capital of the Banat region (near the western border of the country), as an emerging multicultural regional centre and a pole of mobility. This process is taking place against the backdrop of the recontextualization of the region's historic identity in academic texts produced by local (mostly) intellectuals, who are concerned with a reassessment of the concepts of 'Central Europe' and interculturalism in the postcommunist context.