Relire la ville socialiste ; : Introduction
To understand what is called the post-socialist, the post-soviet city, it is still necessary, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, to reread what was the socialist city, all the more so as the debate has arose again since the 1990s. There are three main ways to understand what means the relationship between an ideology ("socialist") and a spatial reality ("city"). The first one deals with the ideology which underlined the urban development, in the Soviet Union, and further in the rest of the Eastern Block. But this field is not very fertile, because the Marxist literature tells more about the relationship between rural and urban worlds than about what should be the nature of the socialist city. The second level is thus made of what was made and written in the sphere of town planning and architecture in those countries. The third level of understanding the socialist city is made of the literature in social sciences, which allows to understand what were the urban specificities of the real socialism. This was already done in 1979, and again after 1989, with new points of view. Today the debate about the socialist city is not only academic ; in new democracies, in city under economic pressures, political local or national elites, economic stakeholders, inhabitants, public opinion look at this stage of urban development differently. The papers gathered in this special issue of Histoire Urbaine show different aspects of this topic in such countries as Germany, Armenia, Romania, Russia. ; Pour comprendre ce qu'on appelle la ville post-socialiste, ou post-soviétique, il est encore nécessaire, vingt ans après la chute Rideau de fer, de relire ce qu'était la ville socialiste, d'autant plus que le débat est réactualisé depuis 1990. Il y a trois manières de comprendre la manière dont une idéologie (le socialisme) et une réalité spatiale (la ville) étaient liées. La première interroge l'idéologie qui sous-tendait le développement urbain en URSS puis dans le reste du bloc de l'est. Mais ce champ n'est guère fertile, ...
