Please join us in congratulating Sonia Hirt (Virginia Tech) for winning Honorable Mention in the 2013 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies for her book, Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-Socialist City (Wiley-Blackwell). The award will be presented at this year’s ASEEES conference in Boston, November 21-24, 2013.
First of all, many thanks to both Virág and Juliana for their generous and thoughtful reviews, as well as to Steve and Daria for their invitation and for making this discussion possible. There are a growing number of excellent scholarly studies that tackle the built environments of the Second World, and we are honored that Modernism In-Between is the first to be discussed here. Continue reading
The book offers a thoughtful and fascinating survey of the diverse architectures of socialist Yugoslavia. While each postwar socialist state defies attempts at easy categorization, the former Yugoslavia probably remains the most bewilderingly idiosyncratic of all. As a rare occurrence, the country was largely self-liberated in World War II. It was a close ally of the Soviet Union until it abruptly broke with the communist bloc in 1948 to later become a leading player in the Non-Aligned Movement. Its economy was socialized and planned but also promoted workers’ self-management and market mechanisms. As a result, it had a well-developed consumer culture while its citizens were also relatively free to travel. Continue reading
Modernism In-Between: the Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (Vladimir Kulic, Marjore Mrduljas, Wolfgang Thaler, 2012) is a truly excellent book, with luminous and eloquent writing about a stunning body of architecture. An overview of some its many accomplishments should start with the images: abundant, colorful, of impeccable quality, and, most importantly, making available for an English readership, perhaps for the first time in such abundance and combination, a dizzyingly rich corpus of buildings.
Our first book discussion will begin on Wednesday, September 18. It will feature the recently published book, Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (Berlin: Jovis, 2012) by Vladimir Kulić, Maroje Mrduljas, and Wolfgang Thaler.
In this beautifully illustrated book, the authors explore how the architects and urban planners of socialist Yugoslavia mediated a range of aesthetic, geopolitical, and national ideologies in rebuilding and forging the urban spaces of post-World War II Yugoslavia. The result was a modernism that was situated “in-between” multiple and often conflicting tendencies, at once quintessentially Yugoslav in its diversity and innovation, and representative of the larger tensions that informed socialist architecture and urban planning throughout the Second World. Indeed, the theme of “in-betweenness” is central to our study of urbanity in the Second World, making this book an ideal starting point for discussion. Juliana Maxim (University of San Diego) and Virág Molnár (The New School) will lead this first discussion. Readers are invited to submit comments to the posts below.
Second World Urbanity: Between Capitalist and Communist Utopias, is a scholarly project that explores the history of conceiving, building, importing, and inhabiting socialist cities past and present from Cuba to Yugoslavia and Russia to China. Initiated by historians Steven Harris and Daria Bocharnikova this project brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines to reflect on the specificity of urban design and its uses in the Second World. Our goal is to shatter a common image of the socialist cityscape as necessarily dull and grey, and offer a revised understanding of its limitations and achievements. The project is envisioned as a series of informal conversations, virtual and offline meetings, and a conference followed up by the publication of the selected essays.
The first meeting of our project, a virtual conference, was held July 30-31, 2012. Participants who submitted paper proposals posted additional comments on the overall project and individual paper proposals, and continued the conversation through video-conferencing on Google+ Hangouts. The next stage of our project is a major conference to be held in either spring or fall 2014, to be followed by the publication of a conference volume.
If you have questions and comments about the project, please drop us a line at swurbanity@gmail.com or post a comment on this blog.
All the best,
Daria and Steve
