How do imperial legacies continue to shape contemporary identity and urban governance? Focusing on Chișinău, Abigail Karas examines how planning categories selectively mobilise historical narratives, shaping both perceptions of the past and visions of the city’s future.
Inwiefern prägen imperiale Vergangenheiten heute noch Identität und Verwaltung von Städten? Am Beispiel von Chișinău untersucht Abigail Karas, wie planerische Kategorien historische Narrative selektiv bedienen und damit sowohl die Wahrnehmung der Vergangenheit als auch Visionen für die Zukunft der Stadt beeinflussen.
The Republic of Moldova has long occupied a distinctive position at the intersection of empires. As a historical borderland shaped by Ottoman, Tsarist, Romanian, and Soviet rule, Moldova offers a particularly revealing case for examining how changing political regimes and contested state projects have reconfigured collective identities and historical narratives over time. This layered historical experience makes Moldova an especially valuable context for understanding how multiple and at times competing forms of belonging are produced and negotiated through the intertwined processes of territorial governance, collective memory, and identity formation. Rather than inheriting a singular fixed identity, Moldovans continually negotiate a layered set of historical experiences, where imperial legacies are selectively mobilised in contemporary processes of heritage-making.
Heritage is never a neutral record of the past. It is produced through processes of selection and interpretation that determine which histories become visible and which are pushed to the margins. My research examines how imperial and anti-imperial historical imaginaries are negotiated within local practices of heritage-making and urban development, focusing on the ways in which Moldova’s pre-colonial, colonial, and Soviet inheritances have contributed to identity formation and policymaking since the country’s independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991. In my work I pay particular attention to the symbolic and practical functions of urban branding and place-making, exploring how these strategies operate both as mechanisms for economic development and also through which particular visions of the city are constructed and governed. This is because the built environment is not simply the material result of historical processes; it actively participates in shaping social memory, political legitimacy, and claims to urban ownership. In this context, urban branding policies represent more than market-oriented strategies aimed at attracting investment or tourism. They also establish narratives about which aspects of the city are valuable and worthy of preservation.
In Moldova, these processes of heritage-making are complicated by the coexistence of the above-mentioned competing historical attachments, shaped by imperial, national, linguistic, and local experiences, each of which offers a different lens through which the past can be claimed. This occasionally leads to tensions, for example, in debates over language education, the discourse surrounding any potential unification with Romania, or in relations between the country’s autonomous Gagauz region (home to an Orthodox Christian, Turkic-language speaking minority) and the central government in Chișinău. Within these debates, local and ethnic identities intersect with questions of geopolitical orientation, whether toward Russia or the European Union. These competing attachments do not remain confined to political discourse, they are also materialised within public commemorative practice and, crucially, in urban space. The city provides an important site through which these competing historical claims can be traced, as different layers of political authority, spatial organisation, and collective memory become embedded in the urban fabric.
The City as Archive
My research situates contemporary urban identity practices within the historical evolution of urban space, treating the city itself as an archive through which the layered legacies of empire, state socialism, and post-socialist market transformation can be examined. Rather than treating urban development and planning history as a linear succession of replaced spatial orders, I approach historical cadastral surveys (documents which define property boundaries), successive master plans, zoning schemes, street networks, land-use patterns, and building typologies as interacting spatial layers. These materials reveal the city’s development not to be a simple progression from one political system to another, but a continual process of interruption, adaptation, and coexistence. Earlier spatial arrangements frequently remain embedded within contemporary urban structures, continuing to influence how the city functions and how it is governed.
Planning categories inherited from previous political systems continue to shape investment decisions, administrative practices, and interpretations of urban value. For example, street networks established under previous imperial administrations continue to organise circulation patterns centuries later, while property boundaries created through earlier cadastral systems remain embedded within contemporary ownership regimes and influence present possibilities for construction and redevelopment. In the capital Chișinău, the contemporary landscape therefore reflects overlapping forms of authority and identification produced through the successive forms of rule that the country experienced. These earlier spatial regimes should be understood as active components of the city’s present functioning rather than as archaeological remnants of previous eras. They organise movement, regulate development, structure administrative decision-making, and influence contemporary understandings of what constitutes valuable urban space.
The New General Urban Plan
These dynamics are especially visible in this year’s announcement by the city’s mayor Ion Ceban of plans to formulate a new General Urban Plan for Chișinǎu, which is intended to guide municipal development until 2040 (the previous plan, approved in 2007, was in effect until 2025). The proposed framework divides the city into four principal development zones: the historic city centre, inner residential neighbourhoods, peripheral districts, and suburban territories. At first glance, these categories appear to represent a technical administrative framework designed to coordinate investment, infrastructure provision, conservation policy, and future redevelopment. However, these classifications also selectively activate particular historical narratives and embed specific interpretations of the city’s past into contemporary planning practice as each of these four zones articulates a specific historical narrative about the city’s development.
The area designated as the ‘historic centre’ largely corresponds to the urban district consolidated during Russian imperial rule, characterised by its orthogonal street grid and significant nineteenth-century Tsarist architectural heritage, alongside important interwar Romanian structures (an interactive map is available here). In contrast, areas preserving elements of earlier pre-imperial road networks and urban morphology, with an irregular street pattern that follows the contours of the landscape and which are classified as ‘inner residential neighbourhoods’, occupy a less prominent position within official heritage imaginaries, despite containing a number of recognised heritage objects. This distinction reveals that the category of ‘historic’ does not necessarily refer simply to chronological age. Instead, it reflects particular narratives about statehood, urban modernity, architectural value, and cultural significance.
Beyond the centre, ‘peripheral districts’ are predominantly associated with Soviet spatial planning, characterised by industrial zoning, standardised housing estates, and modernist principles of urban organisation. Meanwhile, ‘suburban territories’ incorporate former independent villages gradually absorbed into the expanding municipality, alongside newer forms of low-density residential development associated with post-independence market transformations. These spatial categories therefore correspond to different phases of urban growth structured by distinct political and ideological regimes, which continue to shape how Chișinău is understood.
The current General Urban Plan project consequently performs more than the administrative classification of existing urban space. It re-inscribes successive imperial and post-imperial spatial orders onto the contemporary city under the appearance of objective technical planning. Categories such as ‘historic centre’, ‘periphery’, and ‘suburb’ may feel neutral or technical, but they are not. They are built on assumptions about what counts as ‘heritage’ or ‘modern’, actively producing particular understandings of space by determining where conservation efforts will be concentrated, where investment will be prioritised, and which forms of urban development will be considered desirable. Planning categories are therefore inherently performative. In making these choices, they shape the future by selectively activating certain historical narratives while obscuring others. The apparently neutral language of urban administration contains deeper assumptions about heritage, modernity, and legitimate forms of development. Through these classifications, Chișinău’s experience of various forms of imperial rule are institutionalised within contemporary governance practices, demonstrating how historical layers continue to structure the physical city and also the political processes through which urban futures are imagined and produced.
Title picture: Abigail Karas.
