How does a disruption originating at one scale become spatially manifest at another? Systemic rupture and cascading effects offer a way of understanding how change propagates through interconnected urban systems, with post-socialist transformation as the central empirical lens — political and economic restructuring interacting with demographic change, infrastructure, governance and housing over time.

Linear cause-and-effect explanations give way to feedback loops and multiple temporalities. Architects and planners can intervene without assuming straightforward relationships between an intervention and its anticipated outcome.