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EAUH Conference 2018

Sessions

Session M31 - East Meets West: Urban History and the Cold War

Coordinators: Laura Kolbe (laura.kolbe@helsinki.fi), Rosemary Wakeman (rwakeman@fordham.edu)

Read Session abstractIn both eastern and western Europe, post-war urban development took place under similar conditions. The Second World War caused immense physical destruction across the continent. Reconstruction and modernization went hand in hand in cities in both East and West. In the late 1940s and 1950s, housing shortages led cities to subsidize large-scale housing blocks. Other problems in the 1950s and 1960s were urban transportation, new forms of commerce and consumerism, and the planning of new city centers. In East and West, the war fostered large-scale planning and strengthened the power of governments and municipal authorities. The scale of urban growth through the 1960s made the need for renewal obvious. All this provided opportunities to reform architecture and infrastructure. New planning ideals were heavily influenced by the United States and the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War. This political dimension is often unmentioned in conventional histories of postwar urban planning. Yet the reconstruction and modernization of cities took place through the specific political-economic practices associated with the Cold War divide.

In this session we wish to open up the significant outcomes of the Cold War period, and the ways western and eastern architects, urban planners, policymakers created connections across the Iron Curtain. Our purpose is to understand how post-war urban reconstruction and modernization were invented within the political and economic context of the Cold War and the ideals of urban form in both East and West. Western achievements in housing and transportation were welcomed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, as was modernist architecture. Western planners worked with their counterparts in the East to develop innovative ideas in urban planning. There was an increasing flow of information across East and West, as well as tourist groups and international delegations passing through the Iron Curtain. Exchanges took place in other spheres of urban cultural and social life. Yet these collaborations were overlaid with the ideological rhetoric of the Cold War. How much did this political dimension impact the way urban planning and modernization were understood and implemented?

This session invites papers on the influence of the post-war political context and Cold War on urban reconstruction and modernization in western and eastern Europe. The flows of professional knowledge and information between East and West and their impact on how urban planning and modernization were imagined and implemented. Comparisons of post-war modernization policies, their impact on urban planning, and how these were politically instrumentalized in both East and West. Case-studies of individual architects, urban planners and policymakers, and their influence across the East-West divide. Examples of cooperation between cities in the East and West. Comparative case-studies of urban reconstruction and renewal projects in East and West.
Keywords: urban planning; reconstruction; eastern Europe; western Europe; Cold War

Friday 31st August 2018
  Room 21 09.00-10.30, 11.00-12.30, 14.00-15.30

 

PAPERS

Suburban Bungalow and Socialist Block of Flats – Postwar Working-class Welfare and Housing in Detroit (USA) and Lodz (Poland)
Agata Zysiak

The East-West Mediatization of Urbicide. Representations about Warsaw's Ruins in Poland and in Switzerland (1945-1950).
Matthieu Gillabert

Hidden appropriation and neglected continuity: The urban development of Stettin / Szczecin as an entangled Cold War history
Joerg Hackmann

The historic city as an asset: urban heritage, knowledge transfer, and tourism policy under state socialism in Budapest
Erika Szívós

The Ford Foundation’s American-Yugoslav Project
Tracy Neumann

Cold War narratives and not-so-“hot” realities: Constantinos A. Doxiadis and the Athens Center of Ekistics
Lefteris Theodosis

Urban Stability between East and West? Finnish-Soviet City Twinning Program as a Part of Friendship and Neutrality Policies at the Baltic Sea in 1969-1989
Laura Kolbe

Hamburg’s „Policy of the Elbe“: Reconnecting to Eastern Europe across the Iron Curtain
Christoph Strupp

The I-462 Housing Typology: A Tool for Urban Modernisation in the Soviet World
Nikolay Erofeev, Mohamad Sedighi

Park Inside, Outside Nature The importance of the Swedish models for the development of Slovenian post-war housing estates
Martina Malešić

Opposing Urban Systematization in Ceausescu’s Romania: Counter-discourses and Networks of Solidarity across the Iron Curtain
Corneliu Pintilescu