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

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 ofeithereconomyoraesthetics, 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.

Waste and postsocialism in Estonia: Becoming European through the management of rubbish

“…Tauri Tuvikene (2016) brings forward this debate by arguing that nowadays postsocialism does not only refer to a particular condition or region, but has evolved into a de-territorialized notion referring to processes of neoliberal privatization, spatial de-planning and fragmentation, and economic stratification. Along this line, Michał Murawski (2018) argues that postsocialism remains a generative term and ought to be retained and supplemented to capture how socialist modernity continues to affect the global present. In short, postsocialism can travel far as a concept, if focusing on the political substance of the concept and decoupled from historical and geographical categories; helping then to understand how radical experiences of change in transnational standards and socio-technical regulations were simultaneous to a retreat of the state and the dismantling of welfare systems.…”

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

“…For instance, Tallinn does not merely mirror transition and postsocialism: we can recognise other materialisations of change, related to obduracies, scales, temporal horizons, material rhythms, social orientations and idiosyncratic ways of building an urban system. Further, the adoption of neoliberal initiatives and rationalities across the region has intersected with local politics, histories and legacies to the point that even if the 'socialist' Tallinn has undergone intense erosion, many of the dwellings, utilities and public spaces built by these regimes continue to be cherished by their inhabitants and users (Bodnár 2000;Collier 2011;Murawski 2018).…”

“…The built environment is one of the main legacies of socialism and its ideology of dwelling (Buchli 1999;Fehérváry 2013;Murawski 2018). For the Soviet regime, architecture and urban planning were considered to be important instruments of social engineering.…”

“…For the Soviet regime, architecture and urban planning were considered to be important instruments of social engineering. To that end, socialist states adopted many modernist design and planning principles, so that the socialist city is characterised by visual monotony, compactness, grand scale of public projects, infrastructural thinking, oversupply of industrial and undersupply of commercial functions, and special typologies such as mikrorayons, boulevards, memorials, metros, high buildings and social condensers (Czepczynski 2008;Hirt 2013;Murawski 2018). The beautification of these cities was then a lower priority than public health and social equality, and central planning was monocentric, functional, strictly zoned, with mass housing favouring residential mixing and meant to provide equal access to transport, recreation and public services (Szelenyi 1996).…”

Marxist morphologies

“…Landed property, then, has somehow-with notable exceptions-remained the domain of the village anthropologist, 6 while anthropological inquiry into emergent forms of property has bypassed the built matter of the city, focusing instead on more abstract concerns located in the loft ier reaches of the superstructure. Th is blind spot is all the more remarkable given the overwhelmingly urban character of almost all formerly socialist societies globally and given the fact that the urbanization of these societies-and the ensuing construction of socialist urbanity-constitutes one of state socialism's most consciously articulated projects and, from a purely quantitative perspective, one of its most tangible achievements (Murawski 2018).…”