Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T09:10:09.108Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Actually-Existing Success: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Specificity of (Still-)Socialist Urbanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2018

Michał Murawski*
Affiliation:
School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London

Abstract

A quarter century following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies, many of the dwellings, utilities, and public spaces built by these regimes continue to be cherished by their inhabitants and users. This has only increased as post-socialist urban landscapes undergo an ever-intensifying process of neoliberal “re-privatization,” de-planning, and spatial as well as economic stratification. Scholars, however, continue to produce accounts emphasizing how socialist cities and buildings, as well as the audacious social goals built into them, failed. This article provides a critical overview of recent literature on built socialism and identifies a tension between two parallel ethnographic and historical narratives. One argues that built socialism failed, because it was too obsessed with the economy and industry and neglected every other aspect of social life. The other pins the blame for failure on built socialism's alleged fixation with aesthetic or discursive realms and its corresponding neglect of the economy. The article closes by suggesting pathways for comparative scholarship that consider built socialism in terms of not only collapse and disintegration, but also success and endurance; not simply of either economy or aesthetics, but also of their reciprocal inter-determination and co-dependence. We must look beyond the lens of imported theories and consider “vernacular” or “emic” concepts rooted in the specificities and singularities of the socialist city itself.

Type
Architectural Politics
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abram, Simone and Weszkalnys, Gisa. 2013. Elusive Promises: Planning in the Contemporary World. London: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Akinsha, Konstantin, Kozlov, Grigorii, and Hochfield, Sylvia. 2014. The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Richard. 2015. Russia: Modern Architectures in History. London: Reaktion.Google Scholar
Andrusz, Gregory, Harloe, Michael, and Szelenyi, Ivan. 1996. Cities after Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies. London: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 2016. Introduction. Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, 3: xxixxvi.Google Scholar
Attwood, Lynne. 2010. Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Bach, Jonathan. 2015. Collecting Communism: Private Museums of Everyday Life under Socialism in Former East Germany. German Politics & Society 33, 1–2: 135–45.Google Scholar
Bach, Jonathan. 2017. What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Beech, Nick. 2017. Social Condensation in the Metropole: Locating the First New Left. Journal of Architecture 22, 3: 488511.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and other Writings on Media. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bittner, Stephen V. 2008. The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow's Arbat. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Bocharnikova, Daria and Harris, Steven E.. 2018. Second World Urbanity: Infrastructures of Utopia and Really Existing Socialism. Journal of Urban History 44, 1: 38.Google Scholar
Bokov, Anna. 2017. Soviet Workers’ Clubs: Lessons from the Social Condensers. Journal of Architecture 22, 3: 403–36.Google Scholar
Bouzarovski, Stefan, Sýkora, Luděk, and Matoušek, Roman. 2016. Locked-in Post-Socialism: Rolling Path Dependencies in Liberec's District Heating System. Eurasian Geography and Economics 57: 624–42.Google Scholar
Boym, Svetlana. 2010. Ruins of the Avant-Garde: From Tatlin's Tower to Paper Architecture. In Hell, Julia and Schönle, Andreas, eds., Ruins of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Buchli, Victor. 2000. An Archaeology of Socialism. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Buchli, Victor. 2017. The Social Condenser: Again, Again and Again: The Case for the Narkomfin Communal House, Moscow. Journal of Architecture 22, 3: 387402.Google Scholar
Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and Catastrophe the Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Castillo, Greg. 2008. East as True West: Redeeming Bourgeois Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, 4: 747–68.Google Scholar
Castillo, Greg. 2010. Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Charley, Jonathan. 2017. Molodoi Chelovek, My Origins Lie in the Past, but I Am from the Future. Journal of Architecture 22, 3: 555–66.Google Scholar
Chelcea, Liviu. 2003. Ancestors, Domestic Groups, and the Socialist State: Housing Nationalization and Restitution in Romania. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 4: 714–40.Google Scholar
Chelcea, Liviu. 2006. Gentrification, Property Rights and Post-Socialist Primitive Accumulation (Bucharest, Romania). In Enyedi, György and Kovacs, Zoltan, eds., Social Changes and Social Sustainability in Historical Urban Centres: The Case of Central Europe. Pecs: Hungarian Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Chelcea, Liviu and Druta, Oana. 2016. Zombie Socialism and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Eurasian Geography and Economics 57, 4–5: 521–44.Google Scholar
Chibireva, Natalia. 2005. Airbrushed Moscow: The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. In Leach, Neil, ed., The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chytry, Josef. 1989. The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Katerina. 2011. Moscow: The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Collier, Stephen J. 2011. Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Colton, Timothy J. 1998. Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Crawford, Christina. 2017. From Tractors to Territory: Socialist Urbanization through Standardization. Journal of Urban History 44, 1: 5477.Google Scholar
Crowley, David. 2008a. Looking Down on Spaceship Earth: Cold War Landscapes. In Crowley, David, ed., Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970. London: V&A.Google Scholar
Crowley, David. 2008b. Paris or Moscow? Warsaw Architects and the Image of the Modern City in the 1950s. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, 4: 769–98.Google Scholar
Crowley, David and Reid, Susan E.. 2010. Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Crowley, Stephen. 2015. Monotowns and the Political Economy of Industrial Restructuring in Russia. Post-Soviet Affairs 32, 5: 397422.Google Scholar
DeHaan, Heather D. 2013. Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Dobrenko, Evgeny. 2007. Political Economy of Socialist Realism. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Dunn, E. and Verdery, K.. 2011. Dead Ends in the Critique of (Post)socialist Anthropology: Reply to Thelen. Critique of Anthropology 31, 3: 251–55.Google Scholar
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1933. Moskva vo vremeni’. Literaturnaia Gazeta, 11 July: 3.Google Scholar
Fehérváry, Krisztina. 2009. Goods and States: The Political Logic of State-Socialist Material Culture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 2: 426–59.Google Scholar
Fehérváry, Krisztina. 2013. Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Ferenčuhová, Slavomíra and Gentile, Michael. 2016. Introduction: Post-Socialist Cities and Urban Theory. Eurasian Geography and Economics 57, 4–5: 483–96.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
French, Richard Antony and Hamilton, F. E. Ian. 1979. The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy. London: Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Glaeser, Andreas. 2011. Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldhoorn, Bart and Meuser, Philipp. 2009. Capitalist Realism: New Architecture in Russia. Berlin: Dom.Google Scholar
Goldzamt, Edmund. 1956. Architetektura zespołów śródmiejskich i problemy dziedzictwa. Warszawa: PWN.Google Scholar
Górczyńska, Magdalena. 2016. The Property Restitution in Warsaw: Renaissance or Decline of Pre-War Buildings? Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 31, 2: 367–86.Google Scholar
Groys, Boris. 2008. Art Power. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Groys, Boris. 1992. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Steven E. 2013. Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Hatherley, Owen. 2015. Landscapes of Communism: A History through Buildings. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Hirt, Sonia. 2012. Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-Socialist City. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Hirt, Sonia. 2013. Whatever Happened to the (Post)socialist City? Cities 32, 1: 2938.Google Scholar
Holston, James. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hommels, Anique. 2005. Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban Socio-Technical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Humphrey, Caroline. 2002. Does the Category ‘Post-Socialist’ Still Make Sense? In Hann, C. M., ed., Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Humphrey, Caroline. 2005. Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11, 1: 3958.Google Scholar
Jackson, Steven J. 2014. Rethinking Repair. In Gillespie, Tarleton, Boczkowski, Pablo, and Foot, Kirsten, eds., Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jansen, Stef. 2014. Hope for/against the State: Gridding in a Besieged Sarajevo Suburb. Ethnos 79, 2: 238–60.Google Scholar
Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: “Normal Lives” and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. New York: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Jeevandrampillai, David, Carroll, Timothy, Shackleford, Julie, and Parkhurst, Aaron. 2017. The Material Culture of Failure: When Things Do Go Wrong. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Kotkin, Stephen. 1997. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kruglova, Anna. 2017. Social Theory and Everyday Marxists: Russian Perspectives on Epistemology and Ethics. Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, 4: 759–85.Google Scholar
Krylova, Anna, 2014. Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament. Contemporary European History 23, 2: 167–92.Google Scholar
Kulić, Vladimir. 2012. An Avant-Garde Architecture for an Avant-Garde Socialism: Yugoslavia at EXPO ’58. Journal of Contemporary History 47, 1: 161–84.Google Scholar
Kulić, Vladimir. 2017. The Builders of Socialism: Eastern Europe's Cities in Recent Historiography. Contemporary European History 26, 3: 545–60.Google Scholar
Kulić, Vladimir, Thaler, Wolfgang, and Mrduljas, Maroje. 2012. Modernism in-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia. Berlin: Jovis.Google Scholar
Kusiak, Joanna. 2012. The Cunning of Chaos and Its Orders: A Taxonomy of Urban Chaos in Post-Socialist Warsaw. In Grubbauer, Monika and Kusiak, Joanna, eds., Chasing Warsaw: Socio-Material Dynamics of Urban Change since 1990. Frankfurt: Campus.Google Scholar
L'Hereux, Marie-Alice. 2015. The Twentieth Century City: Socialist, Capitalist, Modern. Review of Urban Cultural Studies 2, 3: 295304.Google Scholar
Laszczkowski, Mateusz. 2016. “City of the Future”: Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana. London: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis, or, the Love of Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lebow, Katherine. 2013. Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lemon, Alaina. 2009. Sympathy for the Weary State? Cold War Chronotopes and Moscow Others. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 4: 832–64.Google Scholar
Le Normand, Brigitte. 2014. Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Lewin, Moshe. 1985. The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. 1970. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Mawdsley, Evan. 2003. The Stalin Years. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Maxim, Juliana. 2009. Mass Housing and Collective Experience: On the Notion of Microraion in Romania in the 1950s and 1960s. Journal of Architecture 14, 1: 726.Google Scholar
Meuser, Philipp and Zadorin, Dimitrij. 2016. Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR, 1955–1991. Berlin: DOM.Google Scholar
Miyazaki, Hirokazu and Riles, Annelise. 2005. Failure as an Endpoint. In Ong, Aihwa and Collier, Stephen J., eds., Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Molnár, Virag. 2013. Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Moravánszky, Ákos and Hopfengärtner, Judith. 2016. Re-Humanizing Architecture, New Forms of Community, 1950–1970. Vol. 1. East-West Central. Berlin: Birkhäuser.Google Scholar
Moravánszky, Ákos and Kegler, Karl. 2016. Re-Scaling the Environment: East West Central—Re-Building Europe, 1950–1990. Vol. 2. East-West Central. Berlin: Birkhäuser Verlag.Google Scholar
Moravánszky, Ákos and Lange, Torsten. 2016. Re-Framing Identities, Architecture's Turn to History, 1970–1990. Vol. 3. East-West Central. Berlin: Birkhäuser.Google Scholar
Morris, Jeremy. 2015. Notes on the ‘Worthless Dowry’ of Soviet Industrial Modernity: Making Working-Class Russia Habitable. Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 7, 3: 2548.Google Scholar
Murawski, Michał. 2013. Palaceology, or Palace-as-Methodology: Ethnographic Conceptualism, Total Urbanism and a Stalinist Skyscraper in Warsaw. Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Science 5, 2: 5683.Google Scholar
Murawski, Michał. 2017a. Introduction: Crystallizing the Social Condenser. Journal of Architecture 22, 3: 372–86.Google Scholar
Murawski, Michał. 2017b. Palace Complex: A Stalinist ‘Social Condenser’ in a Capitalist City. Journal of Architecture 22, 3: 458–77.Google Scholar
Murawski, Michał. n.d.a (forthcoming 2018). Marxist Morphologies: A Materialist Critique of Brute Materialities, Flat Infrastructures, Fuzzy Property, and Complexified Cities. Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology.Google Scholar
Murawski, Michał. n.d.b. (forthcoming 2019). The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw, and a City Transfixed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Murawski, Michał and Rendell, Jane, eds. 2017. Re-Activating the Social Condenser: A Century of Revolution via Architecture, 1917–2017. Special issue of Journal of Architecture 22 (3).Google Scholar
Mykhnenko, Vlad and Turok, Ivan. 2008. East European Cities—Patterns of Growth and Decline, 1960–2005. International Planning Studies 13, 4: 311–42.Google Scholar
Nowakowski, Stefan. 1988. Miasto polskie w okresie powojennym. Warsaw: PWN.Google Scholar
Ortner, Sherry B. 2016. Historical Contexts, Internal Debates, and Ethical Practice. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, 2: 2939.Google Scholar
Paperny, Vladimir. 2006. Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Phillips, Andrea. 2017. Reclaiming Participation: Arts Centres and the Reinvention of Social Condensation. Journal of Architecture 22, 3: 522–31.Google Scholar
Reeves, Madeleine. 2014. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Culture and Society after Socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Reid, Susan E. 2012. Everyday Aesthetics in the Khrushchev-Era Standard Apartment. Etnofoor 24, 2: 78105.Google Scholar
Rendell, Jane. 2017. Arry's Bar: Condensing and Displacing on the Aylesbury Estate. Journal of Architecture 22, 3: 532–54.Google Scholar
Ringel, Felix. 2015. Post-Industrial Times and the Unexpected: Endurance and Sustainability in Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, 1: 5270.Google Scholar
Rogers, Douglas. 2010. Postsocialisms Unbound: Connections, Critiques, Comparisons. Slavic Review 69, 1: 115.Google Scholar
Schlögel, Karl. 1993. Shadow of an Imaginary Tower. In Adkins, Helen, ed., Naum Gabo and the Competition for the Palace of Soviets, Moscow, 1931–1933. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie.Google Scholar
Schwenkel, Christina. 2015. Spectacular Infrastructure and Its Breakdown in Socialist Vietnam. American Ethnologist 42, 3: 520–34.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sigalin, Józef. 1986. Warszawa 1944–1980: z archiwum architekta. Vol. 2. Warszawa: PWN.Google Scholar
Smith, Mark B. 2010. Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Snopek, Kuba. 2015. Belayevo Forever: A Soviet Microrayon on Its Way to the UNESCO List. Berlin: Dom Publishers.Google Scholar
Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. 2003. The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. 2016. Soviet Debris: Failure and the Poetics of Unfinished Construction in Northern Siberia. Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, 3: 689721.Google Scholar
Stanek, Łukasz. 2011. Henri Lefebvre on Space Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Stanek, Łukasz. 2012. Introduction: The ‘Second World's’ Architecture and Planning in the ‘Third World.’ Journal of Architecture 17, 3: 299307.Google Scholar
Stanek, Łukasz. 2014. Team 10 East: Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art.Google Scholar
Stanek, Łukasz. 2017. Collective Luxury. Journal of Architecture 22, 3: 478–87.Google Scholar
Stanilov, Kiril. 2007. Taking Stock of Post-Socialist Urban Development: A Recapitulation. In Stanilov, Kiril, ed., The Post-Socialist City: Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe After Socialism. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.Google Scholar
Stark, David. 1996. Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism. American Journal of Sociology 101, 4: 9931027.Google Scholar
Thelen, Tatjana. 2011. Shortage, Fuzzy Property and other Dead Ends in the Anthropological Analysis of (Post)socialism. Critique of Anthropology 31, 1: 4361.Google Scholar
Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Todorov, Vladislav. 1991. Introduction to the Political Aesthetics of Communism. Textual Practice 5, 3: 363–82.Google Scholar
Trybuś, Jarosław. 2012. Warszawa Niezaistniała. Warszawa: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana.Google Scholar
Varga-Harris, Christine. 2015. Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Verdery, Katherine. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Srdjan Jovanović and Linke, Arman. 2017. Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act. Berlin: Green Box.Google Scholar
West, Harry G. and Raman, Parvathi. 2008. Enduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. New York: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Weszkalnys, Gisa. 2010. Berlin, Alexanderplatz: Transforming Place in a Unified Germany. New York: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Yurchak, Alexei. 2005. Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zarecor, Kimberly Elman. 2011. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Zarecor, Kimberly Elman. 2017. What Was so Socialist about the Socialist City? Second World Urbanity in Europe. Journal of Urban History 44, 1: 95117.Google Scholar
Zerilli, Filippo. 2005. Sentiments and/as Property Rights: Restitution and Conflict in Postsocialist Romania. In Svasek, Maruska, ed. Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe. New York: Berghahn.Google Scholar