How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western EuropeFootnote 1, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013.Footnote 2 The papers range geographically from Britain to the Soviet Union and cover topics as diverse as post-war reconstruction and alternative communities in the 1970s. Their respective approaches are informed by an interest in the way societies have been imagined in discourses and reshaped in spatial settings. Moreover, the papers move beyond case studies, urban history's classic genre, and can therefore facilitate synthetic reflection. It is our hope that, in so doing, we can make urban history more relevant to contemporary European historians in general.
Cities are central to the history of European societies after 1945. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the eastern, southern and southeastern parts of the continent underwent rapid and massive urbanisation. In western and northern Europe, suburbanisation led to the growth of conurbations rather than cities, but this trend never went as far as in the United States, and was in fact soon counterbalanced by a reinvigoration of many inner-city neighbourhoods. Urban spaces were a crucial testing ground for government planners, welfare practitioners and commercial developers. They were sites of political protest in 1968 and 1989, as well as during the uprisings against communist rule in the 1950s and the protests against urban redevelopment in the 1970s and 1980s. They attracted intense attention from the media, which focused on poor and ethnically diverse ‘problem’ areas, new ‘alternative’ spaces and the lives of ‘ordinary’ people. Moreover, after the wartime and post-war hardships, millions of urbanites or suburbanites developed and pursued their own preferences in a more favourable context and with government support, including to some extent in the Eastern Bloc. Thus, different forces were involved in redefining and reshaping European cities, leading to varied outcomes. Present-day urban societies, although preferring to commemorate their more ancient pasts, bear witness to this complicated recent history, just as they are experiencing further and no less dramatic changes.
These crucial developments have hitherto not been sufficiently researched and conceptualised; neither have they been incorporated into interpretations and narratives of European history since 1945. Modern urban history still tends to concentrate on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While this is beginning to change, the predominance of studies set in particular cities and a frequent focus on municipal planning leave broader issues of social and cultural history underexplored. In turn, contemporary European historians have thus far not shown great interest in cities. This is evident in the available surveys, which concentrate either on political and intellectual history or offer broad-sweep surveys of social trends.Footnote 3 What both approaches leave out is the micro-level of societies, particularly how they were shaped in spatial settings. Furthermore, surveys of social trends pay scant attention to the ways in which societies were represented and imagined – cultural processes which influenced urban policies and thus had demonstrable social effects. Finally, broad-sweep histories of societal ‘Europeanisation’, such as Hartmut Kaelble's, tend to underrate the complexity of European societies in the plural, which could assume very different shapes depending on their location in space and time. Urban histories can thus serve as useful correctives as well as important building blocks for a future social and cultural history of contemporary Europe that is more complex and diverse.
This said, several recent attempts at synthesising the urban history of twentieth-century Europe warrant mention. Leif Jerram's Streetlife shows how major trends and shifts had tangible spatial repercussions, how dictatorial intervention repeatedly met with a certain resilience by urban societies and how women, consumers of culture and sexual minorities accessed, shaped or created the spaces they desired. A point of particular relevance to the period since 1945 is Jerram's qualified yet spirited defence of the often derided planners and architects, who, he argues, strove to fulfil a broad popular demand for domestic privacy.Footnote 4 In a comparative article, Hartmut Kaelble has identified a number of ‘specificities of the European city in the twentieth century’, among which the following are especially important here: limited urban growth, the influence of planners and municipal governments, the significance of an older urban past and the strong attachment to central areas as residential spaces, which were consequently preserved and revitalised from the 1970s.Footnote 5 Kaelble's bird's-eye view results in an aggregated picture of ‘the European city’ as a site of cohesion, continuity and managed change. While this is certainly defensible in comparison to other regions of the world, the final chapters in Friedrich Lenger's comprehensive Metropolen der Moderne are more attentive to intra-European differences such as that between Western European suburbanisation and the greater density of cities in the Eastern Bloc. Moreover, Lenger displays a sharper sense than Kaelble for historically contingent changes such as the unexpectedly rapid recovery of urban societies from wartime destruction, the subsequent advent of mass immigration and the emergence of various protest movements in East and West alike.Footnote 6
Lenger's sense for contingency is shared by the contributions to this special issue. In the late 1940s, extant plans notwithstanding, it was difficult to predict just how fundamentally European cities were to change over the subsequent two decades. In turn, hardly any observers around 1960 anticipated that the significance of an older urban past and the attachment to central areas, rightly stressed by Kaelble, would soon become such a widely accepted principle, to an extent even in the Eastern Bloc. Explaining these transformations and shifts is only possible if broader discourses pertaining to cities and a variety of groups attempting to shape them are taken into account. In so doing, we attempt to historicise rather than condemn the attitudes of planners, architects and government officials, as suggested by Jerram, while also including those of urban sociologists, intellectuals and activists. These attitudes had very ‘real’ consequences, which is why historians of urban societies need to take them seriously. In addition to introducing the individual articles, the following sections offer some clues towards an overarching narrative that is both specifically urban and more broadly relevant to social and cultural historians. It is attentive to diversity and contingency while integrating the growing volume of detailed information and literature. The first two sections treat either side of the Iron Curtain, with an eye on both differences and commonalities, beginning with ‘the West’; the third section offers a more methodological discussion of different approaches to the study of urban societies since 1945.
I
An integrated yet complex narrative of Western European urban societies since 1945 needs to begin with a reconsideration of the immediate post-war years. The period can certainly be viewed as marked by a reversal of urbanisation, due to the terrible human and material toll of the Second World War and the subsequent breakdown of infrastructure and provision. But it is perhaps more apt to speak of a particular type of urban society. This urban society was, firstly, characterised by an individualism that often blurred the lines between crime and legitimate self-help, as the prominence of black marketeering shows.Footnote 7 The post-war years were, secondly, a period of intense historical awareness. Precisely because the discontinuities in the urban experience were so marked and local cohesion so elusive, the attachment to the respective city's past was strong. Hence the massive efforts to reconstruct, under most difficult conditions, buildings and squares that had been destroyed, without which Munich or Nuremberg would look very different today.Footnote 8 Thirdly, older social groups and identities retained or even regained their importance, for much the same reasons. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, bourgeois elites, for instance in Bremen, once again marshalled political power.Footnote 9 A dense social fabric of artisans and shop-owners was still very much present in cities such as Toulouse, while left-wing culture even enjoyed a particular vibrancy, most prominently in the Paris of working-class neighbourliness and communist demonstrations.Footnote 10
The post-war years were thus not just an exceptional moment in European urban history, but can also be seen in a longer view. The relationship to architectural heritage as well as the presence of industrial workers, a self-employed lower middle class and bourgeois elites hark back to nineteenth-century cities.Footnote 11 The spectre of black marketeering and crime, often depicted in anti-Semitic terms, as well as the emergence of what has been aptly labelled a ‘self-help society’, are familiar from the period after 1918.Footnote 12 Conversely, these features did not just disappear in the subsequent decades. To cite but one example, shantytowns on the fringes of French cities existed into the 1970s. Civil society constitutes another long-term continuity, including the neighbourhood associations that played such an important role in the transition from the Franco and Salazar dictatorships to democracy or the active civic engagement in suburban England.Footnote 13
To point out often overlooked continuities does not mean minimising the far-reaching transformation which Western European cities underwent in the 1950s and 1960s – far beyond cities such as Coventry or Rotterdam, where reconstruction was anyway closely linked to modernisation. In a period of relative affluence, public and private investment was possible to an extent unprecedented for half a century, while construction became cheaper due to new materials and technologies. The pressing problems of the interwar years that had been impossible to address during the 1940s did not disappear, but their solution came increasingly within reach. Social housing was built on a massive scale, offering millions of urban dwellers access to central heating and indoor bathrooms. In poorer countries with rudimentary welfare states, such as Spain, the outlook of many cities was still drastically changed by commercial developers. Road systems were expanded to accommodate the rapidly growing number of cars. This transformation of entire cityscapes enjoyed widespread support, and – in more affluent countries such as West Germany, the Netherlands, France or Britain – was driven by government planners alongside architects and developers.
The attitudes and actions of this crucial group need to be placed in broader social and cultural contexts. From such a vantage point, the planners’ relationship to Western Europe's urban past was more ambivalent than is often acknowledged. On the one hand, they were bent on clearing away a nineteenth-century architectural heritage that was now deemed a burden to the development of cities. They strove to overcome the traces of wartime destruction and saw themselves as working towards a classless society. On the other hand, this modernist mindset can be seen as a continuation of the nineteenth-century tension between ease of circulation (with regard to road-building for car drivers) and civilising ambition (for instance with respect to the stability promised by new housing developments).Footnote 14 Moreover, as Tim Verlaan demonstrates in the present issue for the Netherlands, planners harboured severe doubts about change, out of both an attachment to the urban past and what the author identifies as an early form of ‘reflexive modernisation’. They felt as if they were faced with a juggernaut that they could at best hope to slow down and control – a thesis that challenges received wisdom about unqualified modernist optimism, but chimes with recent studies of planners in the United Kingdom.Footnote 15
However we assess the mindset of architects, planners and officials in the 1960s, it is crucial to note that they reacted to wider currents and pressures. The notion of authoritarian ‘technocrats’ imposing their one-sided views on the urban fabric is much repeated by scholars who are, perhaps for good reason, critical towards the planners’ agendas. But it obscures the extent to which democratically elected governments responded to a broad demand for domesticity, automobility and consumption, as historians of English or French cities have already been pointing out for some time and as Verlaan argues in this issue.Footnote 16 In turn, this responsiveness partly explains why the transformation of Western European urbanity did not go further than it did. After all, plans for a second motorway in Paris on the left bank of the Seine were eventually scrapped; in the Federal Republic of Germany urban centres retained far more public transport, leisure and shopping facilities than in the United States; in Belgium, the absence of planning led to a dispersal of newly built single-family homes that corresponded to their owners’ preferences – even if it caused a renowned modernist architect to speak of ‘the ugliest country in the world’.Footnote 17
Furthermore, one should not underestimate the substantial criticism of the collaboration between municipal governments and commercial developers. This criticism stemmed from intellectual traditions as well as from a strong attachment to the urban past, to established social identities and familiar ways of life. This was a real staple of 1960s culture, for instance in the song ‘The Boy of Gluck Street’ (Il ragazzo della Via Gluck, 1966), in which Adriano Celentano waxes nostalgic about a ramshackle street on the outskirts of Milan that had been home to poor southern Italian immigrants but was now entirely built up. Such criticism could be politically harmless, but was taken up by communists where capitalism could be blamed, for instance in Toulouse or Le Havre.Footnote 18 By the end of the 1960s it fuelled often massive discontent, which discouraged commercial developers and municipal authorities from some of their demolition projects in Franco's Madrid and the Gaullist government from the construction of yet more large-scale housing developments on the fringes of major French cities.Footnote 19
The rapid paradigm change from urban modernisation to urban preservation around 1970 remains puzzling, but it is, again, somewhat easier to account for when placed in a broader social and cultural context. Several contributions to the present issue offer elements of an explanation. Like Verlaan, Moritz Föllmer contends that what appears to be a strong consensus was rather fragile in the first place. He demonstrates how New Left activists after 1968 politicised pre-existing doubts about the whole notion of personal choice that had previously underpinned the development of road networks, apartment buildings and suburban homes. Christiane Reinecke points to the increasing attention that sociologists and journalists paid to stubborn zones of urban poverty. At international conferences and in media reports, they questioned not only the actual success of modernisation policies but increasingly also the prospect of creating a classless society. Already by the late 1960s social democracy as a pan-Western European and predominantly urban force began to show signs of wear and tear, as Natasha Vall demonstrates for Newcastle. In the north-east of England, the project of creating an ‘integrated industrial modernity’ drew strongly on Swedish models, which, however, proved unsuitable in a different social context and soon met with the new problem of mass unemployment.
The even less explored urban history of the 1970s and 1980s stands out by the co-existence of a number of seemingly paradoxical trends. While the shift towards the suburbs was still continuing, many middle-class residents rediscovered central areas as residential spaces. Modernisation projects in the 1960s vein were surreptitiously pursued, pushed through against mounting protests or neglected almost upon completion. Urban activism became far more important, ranging from the ultimately pragmatic quest for basic housing and infrastructural provision in Lisbon to the minoritarian but influential search for ‘alternative’ spaces and subjectivities in West Berlin, Amsterdam or Zurich, here analysed by Föllmer.Footnote 20 In the 1950s and 1960s women had been consigned to the domestic sphere by both Christian and Social Democrats (which corresponded, Leif Jerram insists, to the desires and interests of most of them). But now they became more visible, as feminist groups publicised concerns about sexual violence and generally pushed for a more gender-equal city. Ethnic minorities, previously kept out of central areas and ignored by urban planners,Footnote 21 did not just grow in number but began to change the face of cities such as Birmingham, Rotterdam or Frankfurt. Working-class urbanites were increasingly pushed to the margins of deindustrialising economies and societies, reinforcing the divide between Glasgow, Dortmund or Bilbao on the one hand and Bordeaux, Munich or Amsterdam on the other, while also transforming cities with more mixed economies such as London, Cologne or Stockholm.Footnote 22 Faced with these multiple challenges, municipal governments began to edge towards ‘softer’ priorities. They attempted simultaneously to appeal to more diverse constituencies and foster civic unity through an emphasis on green spaces, historic buildings, cultural institutions and public events, all the while striving to attract investors, tourists and national or European funding.Footnote 23 By the end of the Cold War, urban ‘Western Europe’ had acquired far greater complexity than could have been imagined in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 24
II
The complexity and diversity of the Western European experience was matched by that of Europe as a whole. Important parts of Europe's history in this period transcended the Iron Curtain: differences in ideology or development did not generate entirely contrasting urban experiences in East and West. For sure, ‘Western Europe’ and ‘Eastern Europe’ were real places. They were geographical artefacts that actually existed (notwithstanding Finnish, Greek and Czechoslovak outliers). They had their own political and economic characteristics. After all, for most of our period, the countries of Western Europe were usually capitalist democracies and those of the East were communist dictatorships. And while transnational links between East and West were of crucial significance in both blocs,Footnote 25 some urban environments, especially in cities that were closed to foreigners for military or strategic reasons, were shaped much more by curiosity about the West than by actual knowledge.Footnote 26 Yet research has repeatedly shown that a straightforward division between East and West seems to be an unsustainable framework for conceptualising the urban history of Europe since 1945.
At no point was this more apparent than during the post-war emergency. In some senses, it would be invidious to generalise too much about the comparative extent of urban poverty, malnutrition and disease, or the relative impact of physical destruction on either side of the Iron Curtain. Rotterdam, for instance, was wrecked by famine and bombing; the British Labour Party was elected in summer 1945 precisely in order to remedy a moral crisis of poverty and social injustice that was given voice during the war, and was most obvious in the cities. But urban devastation was plainly more common in those areas affected by Nazi-Soviet conflict. This extended to cities beyond the reach of the fighting, which were subject to overcrowding, the chronic neglect of infrastructure and severe economic dislocation. Here epidemics spread and filth was endemic.Footnote 27 Both in the Soviet Union and in the new or emerging communist dictatorships of its western hinterland, urban societies had been disordered, wrecked and only partly remade. Urban populations in the East found themselves with little choice but to pursue some of the same survival strategies as their comparators in the West: no government – in East or West – was capable of designing and implementing wholesale urban reconstruction in the immediate wake of 1945. Instead, individual urban dwellers, acting alone, or at varying levels of spontaneous organisation, played a very major role in the slow recovery of urban conditions. In the East, in recognition of state incapacity, party and government initiatives were sometimes designed to maximise the usefulness of individuals’ autonomous participation. It was understood that people were thereby contributing not only to the survival of themselves and their families, but also to the emerging recovery of their society. All this was true not just in places that were devastated by fighting or occupation, but also in zones well to the rear, as Robert Dale argues in this issue.
What this suggests is that there were limits to the capacity not only of state-directed resources but also of dominant political ideologies to determine the course of urban life in Cold War Europe. Policymakers and planners in East and West alike had to find practical solutions that were consistent with ideological prescriptions, but which stretched the boundaries of ideological purity. The resulting bureaucratic tensions, richly documented in archives, have been one of the most fruitful areas of recent historical inquiry.Footnote 28 Property law was a good example of how official policy incorporated the demands of practical reality. It facilitated individual self-reliance, notwithstanding the ideological preference for collectivism. In order to cope with the urban emergency, a Soviet decree of 1944 made it easier for ordinary urbanites to borrow funds, obtain building materials and access building plans, in order to construct a small, separate house that they would then own themselves according to the tenure of personal property (a kind of medium-term leasehold). In the late 1950s, as much as one third of urban housing construction was ascribed to this genuine form of individual ownership. By the early 1960s, in an atmosphere of Khrushchev-era Leninist idealism, personal property was being marginalised in Soviet cities in favour of cooperative apartments, but these also rested on a combination of individual savings and state credit.Footnote 29 Analogous tenurial arrangements could be found throughout the Eastern Bloc. In Yugoslavia, individual housing, seen by many urban dwellers as a cheaper option than apartments, was a source of anxious controversy among planners.Footnote 30 The situation was particularly striking in Hungary. In the so-called Family House Debate of 1960–61, architects and ordinary people explored the advantages of individual housing as opposed to the mass construction of apartment blocks.Footnote 31 Even in the late 1970s, 60 per cent of housing construction there fell within the individual sector.Footnote 32
Such houses were only one of the urban locations in which citizens of the Eastern Bloc created their own forms of privacy and private life. Almost immediately following the Bloc's collapse, social scientists and cultural studies experts started to imagine the socialist city as a complex web of public and private space,Footnote 33 and historians soon borrowed the approach.Footnote 34 If staking out personal space was no less important than in the capitalist cities of the West it required more effort and imagination. For sure, privacy was challenged by the collective rituals that were one of the functions of communist urban space, and by the acute shortage of housing. But people found privacy in overcrowded apartments and even in workers’ barracks. For much of the post-Stalin period, in most places, the law did not seek actively to reduce urbanites’ access to private space. In a wide-ranging survey of private life in the German Democratic Republic, Paul Betts draws attention, for example, to the ways that the arbitration of neighbourhood disputes in East Berlin facilitated the protection of individual space, admittedly in a socialist idiom.Footnote 35
By the 1970s and 1980s dissidents would decry their fellow-citizens’ retreat to private life. During this period, Eastern Bloc cities (outside Poland) were not arenas for much political dissent, but they were places that accommodated ‘deviant’ and marginal interests and lifestyles, ranging across sexuality, underground cultures and even hippy groups.Footnote 36 Yet private and public, marginal and mainstream, were not antagonistic concepts in the Eastern Bloc city. Urbanites constantly reconciled them in ways that were locally and temporally specific, but which were also typical of the ways that people live and think in modern cities. Thus Alexei Yurchak argues that an urbane 1980s Komsomol official could believe in important parts of the Soviet project while spending much of his free time acquiring and listening to bootlegged cassettes of Western rock groups.Footnote 37
If urban societies in the Eastern Bloc were notable, therefore, for the fluid ways in which official rules and unofficial realities blended together, they were still the metropolitan zones of communist dictatorships. Romania, for all its independent, pro-Western diplomacy in the 1970s, was the most statist in its planning, the most defiantly Eastern-Bloc in its architectural aesthetics. The infamous House of the People in central Bucharest, the third largest building in the world when it was constructed in the 1980s, is merely the most prominent example. It was in Romania that the actions of planners were most aggressive, demolishing huge numbers of traditional communities and replacing them with a limited number of urban forms.Footnote 38 In a widely read British novel of 2011 about the Romanian revolution of 1989, a character explores communist Bucharest with old guidebooks from the past: ‘We would cross the dark, cold, kitsch-marbled squares of Ceaușescu's Bucharest using a map that told us we were in a bustling side street full of cafés and cabarets.’Footnote 39
So there was a contrast between those urban phenomena that could most obviously be ascribed to universal developments – for the sake of simplicity, to modernisation – and those which were the particular consequences of either capitalist or communist ideology.Footnote 40 For a start, the purpose of post-war urban recovery was plainly different in the cities of the East and those of the West. In the East, the aim was to build socialism, which for the first decade of the period (more in some places) meant constructing a Stalinist way of life. Stalinism transformed cities. It used violence to subordinate the interests of the countryside to those of the towns, often imposing agricultural collectivisation on an uncomprehending and hostile peasantry and thereby extracting capital from villages in order to pay for fast-paced and mass-scale urbanisation and industrialisation. Most striking were those cities that were built out of nothing and which existed to serve the interests of a single, massive industrial plant. A prototype was Nowa Huta, near Krakow, which became the Polish steel city. Roads, housing, hospitals, schools and shops were built in the immediate vicinity of the steelworks. The enterprise was responsible for industry, labour, infrastructure and social services of all types, including entertainment and leisure. And yet, even during the most intensely Stalinist period of its construction, it remained an urban environment to which in-migrants (many of them peasants) quickly adapted, in which they forged their own particular urban selves and which, for all the apparent oppressiveness of its domineering mission to rewrite the landscape, ultimately represented a compromise between ideology and reality.Footnote 41
Meanwhile, such classically urban phenomena as consumerism and welfare were not only functions of Western cities. Historians of the Eastern Bloc have gone to great lengths to demonstrate that consumption shaped people's lives as much as production, and that the advertisement, acquisition and use of consumer goods were among the most crucial dynamics of urban societies.Footnote 42 Objects of desire, from the difficult-to-obtain car to the ubiquitous cigarette, created private arenas in public spaces and forced urban planners to imagine the socialist city in ways that did not always seem socialist.Footnote 43 But these ways did begin to seem normal, and ‘normalisation’ was precisely the label given to the socialist relaunch in Czechoslovakia after 1968. Here, images of consumer goods in television series helped to construct people's sense of the normality of their urban societies.Footnote 44 But compared with ‘consumerism’, welfare was built into the physical structures of the Eastern Bloc city much more deeply than it was in the West: Eastern European cities became welfare arenas in a far more thorough and extensive way than any of their Western counterparts. As Mark B. Smith shows with reference to the Soviet Union, this was partly, though far from only, thanks to company towns (Nowa Huta was a Polish analogue): the giant industrial plants that were also, effectively, a whole city or city district, and which had responsibility for a formidable infrastructure of welfare. In terms of physical urban space, welfare included housing, a considerable proportion of which was owned by enterprises, as well as hospitals, polyclinics, schools, kindergartens and pensions offices. It extended into exurbia, where industrial enterprises and their associated trade unions owned pioneer camps, rest houses and sanatoria. The complexity and deliberate design of this urban and immediately exurban network of welfare was a distinctive feature of the communist dictatorships and did not have an immediate analogue in the West.
Social welfare, therefore, arguably gave the socialist city its most socialist characteristics. But just as in the West, urban space was always contested territory. Its regulation and organisation brought individuals and social groups into dispute, while holding in awkward check the interests of the varied branches of central government, as well as municipality, party and population. Tension could take different forms. In Milan Kundera's The Joke (1967), for example, it is true belief, working-class brutality and folk tradition that collide in a variety of urban and exurban settings in 1950s Czechoslovakia. Kundera's message is that the oppressive state, the agent of totalitarianism, clumsily reorders the shape of urban space and the lives of urban dwellers, and ultimately they can do little about it, and if they express the wrong opinion, they will be destroyed. But urban space sculpted rights in particular if limited ways. These countries were dictatorships, and so most rights were absent or incoherent, but in the post-Stalin period these cities were nothing if not welfare arenas, partly modulated by socio-economic rights. The socio-economic, civil and property rights which constitutions promised to guarantee were experienced in particular urban spaces (far more so than in the countryside, which was rights-deprived even by the standards of the Eastern Bloc dictatorships).
A very ambiguous kind of civil society lurked in the shadow of existing rights. With its mass membership and its capacity to shape national debate, Solidarity in Poland was the gold-starred example of civil society in the communist East. There were other examples of groups which could legally exist, and, by the 1970s and 1980s, press their interests in debates with government. They were often formally semi-detached from the state but somehow autonomous from it, notably the Soviet veterans’ movement, the various national women's organisations, the spontaneous and entirely non-statist environmentalist groups and (with particularly focused interests on urban form) the Soviet All-Union Society for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture (VOOPIiK).Footnote 45 However, such groups scarcely influenced the course of city life in the way that millions of independent organisations did in Western Europe. They were enmeshed into the system, but their independence was uncertain – and they could not reproduce themselves. Stephen Kotkin and Jan Gross argue in a trenchant account of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc that it was precisely the absence of civil society (with the exception of Poland) that facilitated the collapse of Communism: the system expired when ruling elites saw the chance to turn political power into vast fortunes, and there were no organisations of civil society to stop them.Footnote 46 Ultimately, the urban societies of communist Eastern Europe were more fragile than their counterparts in the West. Since 1989, cities in the former Eastern Bloc have come to terms with that fragility in diverse ways, from rampant privatisation and radical rezoning of formerly public space, to the survival of much of the old housing stock and the struggles of contested nostalgia.Footnote 47
III
To bring different empirical studies together under the umbrella of ‘urban societies’ raises some important conceptual and methodological questions, although this theme issue can only address them to a limited extent. In the first instance, contemporary historians of urban Europe are faced with a body of relevant social thought, particularly with regard to the sociology of the city and of related themes such as migration or poverty. One tendency in recent years has been to historicise past sociological studies as primary sources. According to such a view, sociologists have contributed crucially to the construction of society and have (as interviewers or participant observers) even taken part in social interactions.Footnote 48 Therefore, they cannot provide us with an independent methodological vantage point; nor should their findings be taken as mere depictions of a ‘real’ society. Indeed, one could argue that some much-cited studies of the 1950s should be read against the backdrop of wider contemporary concerns about the cohesion of working-class families and neighbourhoods in the modernising city,Footnote 49 while many subsequent ones were written by authors close to the urban protest movements of the 1970s.Footnote 50 One might also point out that some more recent sociologists in Germany, for instance, have echoed rather than qualified worries about the putative disintegration of ‘the European city’. And other sociologists' emphasis on the identity and agency of specific cities arguably owes much to the language and imagery of urban marketing.Footnote 51 Whether either view can usefully inform urban historians is debatable.
The issue of how to deal with the rich body of urban sociology and urban studies when historicising urban societies is approached in different ways in the present theme issue. Christiane Reinecke treats sociologists, here of urban poverty, as objects of historical enquiry in their own right, while Moritz Föllmer places prominent interpreters of city life such as Henri Lefebvre or Michel de Certeau in the context of an emerging left-wing critique of 1960s-style modernity. At the same time Föllmer draws on a sociologist, namely Anthony Giddens, with his concept of modernity as an interplay between the ‘disembedding’ and the ‘re-embedding’ of social relations, to grasp contrasting notions of personal choice and their urban effects. Tim Verlaan similarly contextualises the ambiguous attitudes of urban planners towards the times they lived in by using Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash's notion of ‘reflexive modernisation’. The assumption underlying both articles is that those sociologies that place complexity and ambivalence centre stage have much to offer conceptually, even to historians who are otherwise inclined to treat sociological studies as one particular type of social construction.
In any case, urban sociology and urban studies offer a wide range of approaches and, rather than aiming for any single coherent theory, have rendered the scholarly view of the city in Europe and the World much more diverse in recent years.Footnote 52 In tune with this methodological pluralism, the contributors to the present theme issue pursue different lines of enquiry. Reinecke historicises sociological and journalistic reports and exchanges, while Verlaan does something similar with the interventions and projects of urban planners and Vall studies adaptations of housing schemes and architectural designs across national borders. These authors concur in holding that urban society has been a matter of construction rather than an independent ‘reality’, but that these constructions have had tangible social and spatial effects beyond their written or pictorial manifestations. Föllmer similarly focuses on discourses around personal choice and on the influence of these discourses on city politics and the order of space. Along the way, he takes the reader into 1950s ‘modern’ family flats as well as squatted houses in the 1970s and early 1980s – an attention to the micro-level of urban societies that also lies at the heart of Dale's study of housing shortages and reconstruction efforts in the post-war decade and of Smith's exploration of company towns, kindergartens and pensions offices. Both the constructionist and the microhistorical turn of social history, its focus on the agency of subjects as well as on that of ‘the state’ are thus represented.
Having said this, the present theme issue also leaves some important lacunae, of which class, gender and ethnicity are especially glaring. These have to some extent been addressed by other historians of European societies since 1945. Local studies and oral histories of the working class have questioned the predominant discourses of the period, which tended either to foreground classless consumers and citizens or, in the Eastern Bloc, to expand the scope of ‘proletarians’ far beyond the industrial labour force.Footnote 53 Explorations of gender and sexuality have fostered a more differentiated understanding of how post-war urban life created new lifestyles for many women, perhaps most dramatically (and notwithstanding the double burden of domestic and workplace duties) in the heavily industrialising East.Footnote 54 They have brought out how queer minorities established their own networks in public lavatories, bars and private flats,Footnote 55 or how pre-existing areas of sexual entertainment such as Soho in London or St. Pauli in Hamburg became more commercialised and sanitised in the course of the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 56 In all these cases, gender images were intertwined with spatial practices and thus had tangible social effects.
As for ethnicity, relevant studies have elucidated the interplay between ethnic and social stereotypes and spatial marginalisation, for instance in the shantytowns of southern Italians in Turin, or in Kracow, where urbane citizens perceived the rural migrants in nearby Nowa Huta as hicks.Footnote 57 Some historians even point to a racial, sometimes violent, underside of urban modernity until well into the 1980s.Footnote 58 Others stress how migrants, albeit slowly and tacitly, became part of a new urban normality, through the integrative efforts of some municipal authorities as well as their own activities as owners of shops or restaurants.Footnote 59 Studies of Jewry have shown how the surviving members of a minority that had once been such an integral and very visible part of many European cities found themselves in a peripheral position during the post-war decades, before Jewish culture began to become more visible again towards the end of the twentieth century.Footnote 60 In that sense, to conceptualise urban societies in Europe since 1945 requires us to be aware of absences as well as manifold presences, of social imaginations as well as social practices and effects.
All these aspects and examples suggest, to quote a prominent scholar of American history, that contemporary urban historians insist on ‘complex, conflicting, multi-scaled and dense processes, relations, and interconnections’ rather than aim to satisfy the frequent ‘quest for urban coherence in the study of the city’.Footnote 61 This said, the quest for urban coherence was a crucial and powerful feature of the period and thus needs to be taken seriously as a historical phenomenon, even if it was often disappointed in practice. After the severe conflicts of the interwar period and the material and societal destruction experienced during the war and its aftermath, city dwellers and municipal governments alike strove for pacification and consensus. This was ultimately behind many of the continuities and transformations that have been stressed in this introduction, ranging from the importance of the nineteenth-century urban past to the expansion of social housing. The quest for coherence also explains why the stark ideological differences of the Cold War did not always translate into differences of urban design and experience, why planners during the 1960s acted more in accordance with popular preferences than tends to be acknowledged in retrospect, why ethnic minorities were first marginalised and later, if often reluctantly, ‘integrated’ and why the New Left shook up the prevailing urban consensus but its initially radical impulses were soon accommodated and even commodified. Such a quest for coherence was if anything more apparent in the cities to the east of the Iron Curtain, though the conflict between ideological purity and economic reality made it even more vulnerable. It is this interplay between complexity, diversity and resilience on the one hand and the quest for coherence on the other that any history of urban societies in Europe since 1945 should aim to explore and understand.
