1st Edition
Urban Planning During Socialism Views from the Periphery
Urban Planning During Socialism delves into the evolution of cities during the period of state socialism of the 20th century, summarizing the urban and architectural studies that trace their transformations.
The book focuses primarily on the periphery of the socialist world, both spatially and in terms of scholarly thinking. The case study cities presented in this book draw on cultural and material studies to demonstrate diverse and novel concepts of ‘periphery’ through transformations of socialist cityscapes rather than homogenous views on cities during the period of state socialism of the 20th century. In doing so the book explores the transversalities of political, economic, and social phenomena; the places for everyday life in socialist cities; the role of professional communities on production and reproduction of space and ecological thinking.
This book is aimed at scholarly readership, in particular scholars in architecture, urban planning, and human geography, as well as undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students in these disciplines studying the urban transformation of cities after World War II in socialist countries. It will also be of interest for planning officials, architects, policymakers and activists in former socialist countries.
Revisiting urban planning during socialism: views from the periphery.
An introduction.
Jasna Mariotti and Kadri Leetmaa
PART I
Urban planning, politics and power: relations in the periphery
1 Urbanising the Virgin Lands: at the frontier of Soviet socialist planning
Gianni Talamini
2 From Breslau to Wrocław. Urban development of the largest city of the Polish “Regained Lands” under socialism
Agnieszka Tomaszewicz and Joanna Majczyk
3 Dreaming the Capital: architecture and urbanism as tools for planning the socialist Bratislava
Henrieta Moravčíková, Peter Szalay and Laura Krišteková
4 The Yugoslav Skopje: building the brutalist city, 1970-1990
Maja Babić
5 From reverse colonial trade to antiurbanism
Budapest’s frustrated urban renewal between 1950 and 1990 in the face of the Soviet world order’s anomalous centre-periphery relations
Daniel Kiss
PART II
Architects and urban planners in the socialist city: roles and positions in the periphery
6 Passive agents or genuine facilitators of citizen participation? The role of planners under the Yugoslav self-management socialism
Ana Perić and Mina Blagojević
7 The influence of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War on the growth and decline of the peripheral town of Valga/Valka
Kadri Leetmaa, Jiří Tintěra, Taavi Pae and Daniel B. Hess
8 The role of architects in fighting the monotony of the Lithuanian mass housing estates
Marija Drėmaitė
PART III
The non-politics of everyday life in spatial peripheries during socialism
9 Courtyards, parks and squares of power in Ukrainian cities: planning and reality of everyday life under socialism
Kostyantyn Mezentsev, Nataliia Provotar and Oleksiy Gnatiuk
10 Planning urban peripheries for leisure: the plan for Greater Tallinn, 1960–1962
Epp Lankots
11 Gldani: from ambitious experimental project to half-realised Soviet mass-housing district in Tbilisi, Georgia
David Gogishvili
PART IV
Ecology and environment in the socialist periphery
12 New ecological planning and spatial assessment of production sites in socialist industrial Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) in the 1960s–80s
Nadezda Gobova
13 Peripheral landscapes: ecology, ideology and form in Soviet non-official architecture
Masha Panteleyeva
14 Conceptions of ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’ during socialism in Albania: an ecofeminist perspective
Dorina Pojani and Elona Pojani
Biography
Jasna Mariotti is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. Her research focuses on the relationship between urban history, planning and architecture in the 20th and 21st centuries, linking two main themes. The first one focuses on architecture and urban planning under the influence of political organizations and mechanisms of production of space in socialist and post-socialist countries. The second one relates to the architecture of mass housing in particular to the spontaneous and planned practices of transformation of housing estates and changing notions of habitation. Her current research is funded by the EPSRC and The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Previously she was architect and urban designer in WEST 8 Urban Design and Landscape Architecture in Rotterdam.
Kadri Leetmaa holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Tartu, Estonia. Currently she works as the Head of the Department of Geography and the Associate Professor of human geography at the Centre for Migration and Urban Studies at the University of Tartu. She is the member of the Scientific Board of the Leibniz-Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany. Her research topics include urban geography under and after socialism, inequalities in urban and rural space, urban planning and housing policies affecting inequalities, migration, residential preferences, neighborhood change, inter-ethnic contacts in society and space.
