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"Based on research in previously closed Soviet archives, this book sheds light on the formative years of Soviet city planning and on state efforts to consolidate power through cityscape design. Stepping away from Moscow's central corridors of power, Heather D. DeHaan focuses her study on 1930s Nizhnii Novgorod, where planners struggled to accommodate the expectations of a Stalinizing state without sacrificing professional authority and power. Bridging institutional and cultural history, the book brings together a variety of elements of socialism as enacted by planners on a competitive urban stage, such as scientific debate, the crafting of symbolic landscapes, and state campaigns for the development of cultured cities and people. By examining how planners and other urban inhabitants experienced, lived, and struggled with socialism and Stalinism, DeHaan offers readers a much broader, more complex picture of planning and planners than has been revealed to date."--Dust jacket.
Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making. Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects, living laboratories that tested alternative spatial models. As a result, Spatial Revolution answers important questions of how the first Soviet industrialization drive was a catalyst for construction of thousands of new enterprises on remote sites across the Eurasian continent, an effort that spread to far-flung sites in other socialist states—and capitalist welfare states—for decades to follow. Thanks to generous funding from Emory University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
"An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper"--
When communism took power in Eastern Europe it remade cities in its own image, transforming everyday life and creating sweeping boulevards and vast, epic housing estates in an emphatic declaration of a noncapitalist idea. The regimes that built them are now dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to postrevolutionary Kiev, the buildings remain, often populated by people whose lives were scattered by the collapse of communism. Landscapes of Communism is a journey of historical discovery, plunging us into the lost world of socialist architecture. Owen Hatherley, a brilliant, witty, young urban critic shows how power was wielded in these societies by tracing the sharp, sudden zigzags of official communist architectural style: the superstitious despotic rococo of high Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces, and secret policemen’s castles; East Germany’s obsession with prefabricated concrete panels; and the metro systems of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space that went further than any avant-garde ever dared. Throughout his journeys across the former Soviet empire, Hatherley asks what, if anything, can be reclaimed from the ruins of Communism—what residue can inform our contemporary ideas of urban life?
This open access book focuses on the formation and later socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in the Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It also explores claims that a distinctly “westward-looking orientation” in their design produced housing estates that were superior in design to those produced elsewhere in the Soviet Union (between 1944 and 1991, Estonia was a member republic of the USSR). The first two parts of the book provide contextual material to help readers understand the vision behind housing estates in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These sections present the background of housing estates in the Baltic Republics as well as challenges and debates concerning their formation, evolution, and present condition and importance. Subsequent parts of the book consist of: demographic analyses of the socioeconomic characteristics and ethnicity of housing estate residents (past and present) in the three Baltic capital cities, case studies of people and places related to housing estates in the Baltic countries, and chapters exploring relevant special topics and themes. This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and advocates interested in understanding the past, present, and future importance of housing estates in the Baltic countries.
Placing Stalinism in its international context, The Stalinist Era explains the origins and consequences of Soviet state intervention and violence.
"Based on research in previously closed Soviet archives, this book sheds light on the formative years of Soviet city planning and on state efforts to consolidate power through cityscape design. Stepping away from Moscow's central corridors of power, Heather D. DeHaan focuses her study on 1930s Nizhnii Novgorod, where planners struggled to accommodate the expectations of a Stalinizing state without sacrificing professional authority and power. Bridging institutional and cultural history, the book brings together a variety of elements of socialism as enacted by planners on a competitive urban stage, such as scientific debate, the crafting of symbolic landscapes, and state campaigns for the development of cultured cities and people. By examining how planners and other urban inhabitants experienced, lived, and struggled with socialism and Stalinism, DeHaan offers readers a much broader, more complex picture of planning and planners than has been revealed to date."--Jacket.
Rosemary Wakeman provides a sweeping history of "new towns"--those created by fiat rather than out of geographic or economic logic and often intended to break with the tendencies of past development. Heralded throughout the twentieth century as solutions to congestion, environmental threats, architectural malaise, and cultural anomie, today they are often seen as sad, pernicious, or merely suburban. Wakeman shows that hundreds of such towns sprang from templates and designs not only in North America and across Europe but around the world, revealing how different cultures dreamed of (re)organizing themselves. Wakeman also illuminates the missteps and unanticipated results of the initial optimistic choices and impulses.
Unfinished Utopia is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society.Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"—but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.