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The Builders of Socialism: Eastern Europe's Cities in Recent Historiography

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Steven E.Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 416 pp. (hb), $60, ISBN 978-1-4214- 0566-7.
KatherineLebow, Unfinished Utopia: Howa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013), 256 pp. (hb), $45, ISBN 978-0-8014-5124-9.
BrigitteLe Normand, Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 320 pp. (pb), $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8229-6299-1.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2016

VLADIMIR KULIĆ
VLADIMIR KULIĆ*
Affiliation:
Florida Atlantic University, 111, East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301, USA; vladakulic@gmail.com
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Extract

When the angry homeowners of a popular Seattle neighbourhood recently decided to rise in protest against the impending changes in the urban development code, they claimed that their chief goal was to protect the district from turning into an ‘Eastern Bloc city’. If the City Council allowed the new legislation to pass, reported The Seattle Times, Seattle was ‘in danger of becoming the Soviet Warsaw or East Berlin of the Pacific Northwest’. ‘I've been to Poland’, one protester said, ‘I know what they [Polish cities] look like. They're bleak. They're dead.’

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Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 545 - 560
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 See ‘Angry neighbors demand halt to ‘Eastern Bloc’-like cityscape in Seattle’, The Seattle Times, 7 June 2015, available on-line at: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/homeowners-demand-halt-to-stalinist-looking-cityscape/, accessed 13 Oct. 2015.

2 See Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

3 See Krylova, Anna, ‘Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament’, Contemporary European History 23, 2 (2014), 167–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Examples demonstrating this trend are numerous and include the books by Karl Qualls on Sevastopol, Heather DeHaan on Gorky, Alan Barenberg on the gulag/industrial city of Vorkuta, Steven Bittner on Moscow's Arbat neighborhood and Mark B. Smith on the construction of Soviet housing.

5 Telling in this respect is this assessment by Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, the Italian Marxist architectural historians: ‘the results and contradictions of the Soviet model are valid only as point of reference for anyone who wishes and knows how to elaborate a political strategy that, from the errors and conditioning of the past, may draw ideas for surpassing them’. See Tafuri, Manfredo and Dal Co, Francesco, Modern Architecture, vol. 2 (Milano: Electa Editrice, 1976), 305 Google Scholar.

6 See Castillo, Greg, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

7 See: Stanek, Łukasz, ‘Architects from Socialist Countries in Ghana (1957–67): Modern Architecture and Mondialisation’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, 4 (Dec. 2015), 416–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Stanek, Łukasz, ed., ‘Cold War Transfer: architecture and planning from socialist countries in the “Third World”’, special issue of The Journal of Architecture 17, 3 (2012)Google Scholar.

8 See Beyer, Elke, Hagemann, Anke and Zinganel, Michael, eds., Holidays after the Fall: Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia (Berlin: Jovis, 2013)Google Scholar.

9 See Fehérváry, Krisztina, Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

10 See Schwenkel, Christina, ‘Traveling Architecture. East German Urban Designs in Vietnam’, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 2, 2 (2014), 155–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For New Frankfurt see Henderson, Susan R., Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Initiative, 1926–1931 (New York: Peter Lang, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Red Vienna see Blau, Eve, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

12 See Krylova, ‘Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament’.

13 For a recent overview of the career of Oskar Hansen, Poland's leading neo-avant-garde architect, see Kędziorek, Aleksandra and Ronduda, Łukasz, eds., Oskar Hansen: Opening Modernism. On Open Form, Art and Didactics (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2014)Google Scholar.

14 See Köhler, Thomas and Müller, Ursula, eds., Radically Modern: Urban Planning and Architecture in 1960s Berlin, exhibition catalog (Berlin: Wasmuth, 2015)Google Scholar.

15 See Brown, Kate, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

16 See Buck-Morss, Susan, Dream World and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Ma: The MIT Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

17 See http://www.secondworldurbanity.org/