This edited collection explores the problem of space under socialist regimes in the twentieth century. Bringing together contributions from international scholars with expertise in the architectural, urban, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century socialism, the book includes examples from China, Africa, Mongolia, Eastern Europe and the USSR. The volume reflects on how developments in the field over the past two decades have altered our understanding of how such spaces were constructed (both literally and discursively), how they could become sites of contested meanings, and how they were perceived outside the socialist world. Moreover, the volume is concerned with how scholarly approaches associated with post-colonialism, global history, gender history, and the temporal and sensory turns have reconfigured our knowledge of, and approach to, the history of socialist space.
Chapter "Global Bridges, Local Ruins? Re-thinking Socialist Spaces Through the Experience of Non-aligned Enterprises" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via Springerlink.
Chapter 1: What, When and Where was Socialist Space?(Marcus Colla and
Paul Betts).- Part I. Making Socialist Space.- Chapter 2: Visualizing
Stalinist Space: The 1951 Geographical Atlas of the USSR for Secondary
Schools(Nick Baron).- Chapter 3: Room to Experiment: Housing Newlyweds
during Chinas Early Reform Era(Jennifer Altehenger).- Chapter 4: Listening
to East Berlin: Can a Soundscape be Socialist?(Bethan Winter).- Part II.
Globalising Socialist Space.- Chapter 5: Global Bridges, Local Ruins?
Re-thinking Socialist Enterprises as Portals of Globalisation(Anna
Calori).- Chapter 6: The Reordering of Space and References: Eastern
European Geologists in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1960-1970s(Justyna
Turkowska).- Chapter 7: Building the Space of Internationalism: Socialist
Assistance to Mongolia in the 1950s-1970s'(Nikolay Erofeev).- Chapter 8: A
World of Their Own: Vietnamese Students in Late SocialistPoland(Thuc Linh
Nguyen Vu).- Part III. Building, Rebuilding and Destroying Socialist Space.-
Chapter 9: Performing Universality: Building Norms and the Circulation of
Theatre Architecture in the RSFSR(Ksenia Litvinenko).- Chapter 10: A
Monument to Friendship: Socialist Modernity and the Reconstruction of
Tashkent, 1966-1975(Marcus Colla).- Chapter 11: Moscows Khrushchevki in
Flux: Reflections on the Imminent Demolition of Twentieth Century Socialist
Housing(Ekaterina Mizrokhi).- Part IV. Epilogue.- Chapter 12: Space
Exploration: The Coordinates of History. An Afterword(Catriona Kelly).
Marcus Colla is Associate Professor of Modern European Political History at the University of Bergen, Norway. Previously, he was the Mark Kaplanoff Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. His first book, Prussia in the Historical Culture of the German Democratic Republic: Communists and Kings, was published in 2022. Further publications have appeared in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, History and Theory, Journal of Contemporary History, Central European History, European Review of History, German History, and Contemporary European History.
Paul Betts is Professor of Modern European History in St Antonys College at the University of Oxford, UK. He has published widely on modern European history, including most recently Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War II (2022), and a co-written volume entitled Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (2023). He has also co-edited seven volumes, among them Religion, Science and Communism in Cold War Europe (2016), with Stephen Smith.
