A presentation of the catalogue “Unbuilt. Visions for a New Society 1986 – 1994” will be held tomorrow, May 22nd at 6PM at the Museum of Estonian Architecture, Tallinn.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Continue reading
The controversies and legacy of the last three decades of the Soviet Union prior to perestroika have not rendered a simple overarching theory. The Tallinn Summer School in Social and Cultural Studies will bring together leading scholars and PhD students who are interested in discussing the Soviet Union from late 1950s to early 1980s, covering the period that has been labelled the time of “thaw” and “stagnation” but also “mature” or “late” socialism.
We write to inform you about “Mapping Visaginas: An International Summer School on Sources of Urbanity in Post-Industrial Cities” that we are organising in Visaginas, the satellite town of a former nuclear power plant in north-eastern Lithuania, from 20 Sept – 3 Oct 2015 within the frame of the DAAD Go East Programme.
The third conference of the Second World Urbanity project “Living Cities of the Second World” will be held in St. Petersburg (Russia) on February 27-28, 2015! Bart Goldhoorn, the architect and editor of the journal Project Russia will give a keynote lecture “Recycling Second World Urbanity” on February 27 at 18.00.
I’m quite thankful for this discussion, which I think is important and which invites reflection on my own work in ways that, I hope, will be productive for others. In conducting research for my book, Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power (University of Toronto Press, 2013), Continue reading
The socialist version of the master plan is the general’nyi plan, or general plan (GenPlan for short). It is important to insist on terminology here. Socialist general plans—and the intimated processes required to instantiate them—differ measurably from so-called capitalist master plans in scope of ambition and temporal persistence. Continue reading
In the course of exploring the planning and architecture of any given city, scholars are often eager to reproduce an image of its Master Plan, if one is available. Such a document immediately offers the scholar’s audience a snapshot, bird’s-eye abstraction of the city with which to orient themselves. Continue reading
6 & 7 February 2015
Birkbeck College, University of London
Supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, The Wellcome Trust (Small Grant in the Humanities), The Society for the Social History of Medicine, and The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
On behalf of the whole editorial team, the authors and photographers, I want to thank Daria and Steven, for presenting and discussing our book on your forum, and Anne, Carmen, and Igor and for their three reviews with competent and constructive feedback.
I would like to start with thanking Carmen, for acknowledging the visual structure and partly ‘artful’ concept of the book, although not explicitly discussed in the text. Indeed, we had long argued and then consciously chose a publishing house that would go for any design we wanted – as long as we could afford it within our limited financial resources. Continue reading
