Suchergebnisse

Introduction: Socialist and Post-Socialist Urbanisms / Lisa B. Welch Drummond and Douglas Young -- Part 1: Housing Experiences and Life Trajectories -- From Socialist Moderns to Urban Poor: Gender and the Housing Question in Post-Reform Vinh City / Christina Schwenkel -- From ABC to Post-Industrial Suburb: Living in a Vision / Bo Larsson (Translated from Swedish by Aidan Allen) -- The Rise and Fall of Collective Housing: Hanoi between Vision and Decision / Lisa B. Welch Drummond and Nguyen Thanh Binh -- Wrestling with the Soviet State: A Life History of Housing in Leningrad / Thomas Borén and Michael Gentile -- Part 2: Planning and Architecture: Designing Socialist and Post-Socialist Urbanisms -- Only Visions: The Case of South City, Prague / Steven Logan -- Phnom Penh During and after Socialism: Permanence and Reshaping of the Urban Centrality / Gabriel Fauveaud -- Planning for "Renaissance": Vanguard Urbanism in Addis Ababa / Jesse McClelland -- Recuperate, Recycle, Reuse: Adaptive Solutions for the Socialist Architecture of Bucharest / Laura Visan -- The Paradox of Preserving Modernism: Heritage Debates at Alexanderplatz, Berlin / Markus Kip and Douglas Young -- Part 3: Governance and Social Order -- China's "New" Socialist City: From Red Aesthetics to Standard Urban Governance / Carolyn Cartier -- Property Relations and the Politics of the Suburban Living Place in the Post-Communist City: Transition Stories from Tirana, Albania / Marcela Mele and Andrew E.G. Jonas -- Urban Natures in Managua, Nicaragua / Laura Shillington -- The Reshaping of Post-Socialist Hồ Chí Minh City: Leisure Practices and Social Control / Marie Gibert and Emmanuelle Peyvel -- Mapping Khujand: The Governance of Spatial Representation in Post-Socialist Tajikistan / Wladimir Sgibnev -- Conclusion / Douglas Young and Lisa B. Welch Drummond.

Critical Reflections draws together the multi-disciplinary research of scholars working in/on cities across Southeast Asia. The fourteen essays collected in the volume are organised into three thematic sections: (re)conceptualisation, competition and intervention. Collectively, these reflections contribute to and interrogate the expanding urban and regional studies literature. The volume constitutes a critical corrective to the existing literature which all-too-often seeks to diagnose contemporary urban trends everywhere from a small number of, mostly Western, "paradigmatic cases". Yet, while acknowledging the increasing interconnectedness and shared global orientation of most cities in Southeast Asia, the volume is wary of positing an equally generalising regional model. Individually, these essays attend to the diversity of contemporary urban experiences in Southeast Asia

This paper makes the case for a "socialist modernism" to understand the development of Alexanderplatz by the regime of the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s. We propose that the socialist era development on Alexanderplatz was staged as the realization of the modernist vision. At the same time, the 1960s design of Alexanderplatz also includes distinctive 'socialist' features, notably the emphasis on centrality and visually dominant tall structures that are in striking contrast to the (Western) high modernist canon. The paper consists of two parts: First we consider the GDR conception of urbanism and the development of the city centre. Alexanderplatz was in many ways the pinnacle of such conception that built on the modernist legacy and imported Soviet ideas of city building. Second, we look at Alexanderplatz through a historical lens. We argue that the GDR development built on the experience of previous modernist development plans for Alexanderplatz in the late 1920s. While Alexanderplatz was to demonstrate the unique socialist capacity to realize the promises of modernity, "Alex," as the square is colloquially termed, also contrasts with stylizations of the "socialist city" as proposed by Sonia Hirt or Iván Szelényi.