*

In Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1949–56, Katherine Lebow examines the tumultuous founding years of the largest new industrial city in socialist Eastern Europe. Poland's own version of Magnitogorsk and one of a number of new centres of heavy industry initiated in the 1950s across the Soviet bloc, Nowa Huta – or ‘New Furnace’ in Polish – centred on a massive steelworks complex named after Lenin. Unlike its Soviet precedent, however, Nowa Huta was not built in the distant uninhabited mountains but on the outskirts of Kraków. Polish Communists intended it to be a demographic intervention that would neutralise the reactionary influence of the old elites still entrenched in the country's historical capital. Indeed, the city's first inhabitants came from the countryside to be remade into new socialist men and women. Even though Nowa Huta was administratively integrated with old Kraków a few years after its founding, the two settlements maintained social and symbolic opposition for a long time. Projected to have a population of 100,000, Nowa Huta eventually reached over 250,000 inhabitants, but, in an ironic twist, it became one of the hotbeds of Solidarity, the movement that would pose the strongest challenge to the Polish socialist regime in the 1980s. It was, however, precisely because they took seriously the promise of the new socialist society, Lebow argues, that the Nowohucians came to rebel against the declining regime, thus affirming rather than defying the utopian horizon established by the project.

One of the strengths of Unfinished Utopia is its focus on the people who were to build socialism in Nowa Huta: rural migrants who came to inhabit the new city. Focusing on their engagement with Stalinist ideology, Lebow skilfully paints a very detailed image of the social trajectories and experiences of the resocialisation they underwent in their new environment. Each of the book's four central chapters focuses on one aspect of Nowa Huta's society in the making: the demographic transformations, the culture of labour competitions, gender and ethnic emancipation of women and the Roma respectively through their incorporation into the labour force and the moral panic caused by the perceived decline of cultural and sexual mores, including through seemingly rampant prostitution and ‘hooliganism’. Ideology and the ‘new men’ (and women) it produced, argues Lebow, emerge as mutually constitutive in this view: if Nowohucians built socialism, socialism built them in return by establishing a ‘moral community of labour’ and setting up a horizon of emancipatory expectations, which in the subsequent decades the regime would find increasingly difficult to fulfil.

The book's material draws from numerous personal narratives sourced from oral histories, interviews and memoirs, in addition to the archives of official organisations and governing bodies. Lebow's luminous writing allows Nowa Huta to come alive through its inhabitants, some of whom take on the role of the book's recurring characters. Illustrative – and especially touching – is the story of Edmund Chmieliński, one of the young poor rural migrants who comprised the majority of the city's early inhabitants. Chmieliński's biography encapsulates the broader history of post-war Poland: he was a wartime child slave labourer on a German farm and his life barely improved after the war's end, when he and his impoverished family continued suffering exploitation, now at the hands of the more well-off peasants from their village. For him, Nowa Huta provided an escape from such misery, offering the promise of a new, more dignified life and freedom. Chmieliński and many others in a similar situation embraced the opportunity for upward mobility, braving the hardships that the city's early builders had to face: overcrowding, petty crime, occasional epidemics and the ubiquitous mud. The road to normalcy led him through devoted hard work, but it also exposed him to disappointments, for example, when his poverty prevented him from completing his education. As a real-life version of the main character of Andrzej Wajda's celebrated film Man of Marble, Lebow aptly notices, Chmieliński eventually became disillusioned by repeated betrayals and ended up labelled a bitter ‘troublemaker’, even though he honestly embraced the ideals of socialism.

Lebow is much more interested in the inhabitants of Nowa Huta than in its physical environment and designers. Thus, even though she devotes the first chapter to the process of planning, the reader does not learn much about spatial relationships or about the development of plans and designs beyond the well-established tropes of socialist realism. Even if the accent is on people rather than buildings, it would be intriguing to know more about the experts in charge of translating political visions into physical reality – who they were and how they related to those who built and inhabited their creations. The chapter, however, is enlightening for identifying the strains of historical continuity where common perception sees unequivocal break. In order to explain why the members of the ‘hereditary intelligentsia’ – planners, architects and engineers, who were typically hostile to the new regime – embraced the construction of Nowa Huta with some enthusiasm, Lebow contextualises the project into the longer historical lineage of nationalist efforts at overcoming Poland's economic backwardness, which dated back to the nineteenth century and especially to the Second Republic. From this perspective, Nowa Huta emerges not only as an heir to Soviet precedents, such as Magnitogorsk, but also to local state-led initiatives, such as the port city of Gdynia, built on the Baltic Sea between 1920 and 1939, and the development of the Central Industrial Region (COP) during the Four-Year Plan (1936–1940). What was undeniably an imperial incursion by Moscow – even the site of Nowa Huta was determined by Soviet ‘advisors’ – at the same time also closely matched lasting Polish aspirations and narratives. The case illustrates not only how long-reaching foreign initiatives become localised but also how ideologically opposed regimes such as the interwar Polish republic and the post-war Stalinist state resorted to essentially similar strategies in reacting to the country's position on the economic (semi-) periphery.

*

Like Katherine Lebow, Brigitte Le Normand focuses on a single city as the unit of analysis. However, Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade is a very different book from Unifinished Utopia, not only because it places planners and designers front and centre, but also because Belgrade was a very different place from Nowa Huta and greater Kraków. That is not a trivial statement because Kraków and Belgrade shared several important features. As historic or current capitals, both cities occupied places of special significance on their respective national maps, resulting in their inflated propagandistic role, they both underwent drastic demographic expansion after the Second World War and they both saw the construction of vast new areas symbolic of the promise of socialism, which were at first conceived as separate cities before merging with the historical core. In contrast to Nowa Huta, however, Tito's socialist government did not expand Belgrade for industrial reasons but to build an administrative centre for the newly federated state; in addition, from its inception in 1947, New Belgrade – as the extension across the Sava river is known – was planned according to modernist principles, with hardly any manifestations of Socialist Realism. Even more than the physical layout and architectural appearance, however, it was the differences in Belgrade and Kraków's economic and political organisation that highlight the breadth of the concept of a ‘socialist city’. The root cause for these differences lay in Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Soviet orbit in 1948, which provoked the early demise of Stalinism and the reinvention of the state's founding ideology and geopolitical alliances. The resulting formulation of self-managing market socialism transformed the political and economic management of the city, whereas Yugoslavia's non-aligned foreign policy opened the doors to the intense international exchanges of architectural and planning expertise with the West.

Drawing from the archives of planning institutions and municipal political bodies, as well as interviews with several planners, Le Normand traces these transformations from the moment of New Belgrade's inception in 1947 to the adoption of a new master plan for the city in 1972. The book opens with a global overview of modernist planning and then continues with a chronological account of the different phases of the city's urban development: the first post-war plans devised during the alliance with the Soviet Union, the ‘lost decade’ of austerity and crisis in the wake of the 1948 split with the Socialist Bloc and the evolution of planning in the system of self-management, with a focus on New Belgrade, which Le Normand aptly terms the ‘capital of Yugoslav modernity’. The remaining three chapters trace the gradual erosion of modernist concepts and their replacement with other ideas. One reason for the shift were the effects of market reforms and the explosion of what Le Normand calls rogue construction – the illegal, self-built neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city necessitated by the continuing housing shortage. Another reason was the growing critique of modernist planning by the public, sociologists and planners themselves and rising concern for its psychological and aesthetic effects. As a result, by the early 1970s modernist ‘blueprint planning’ was replaced by new planning techniques, including computer modelling, which was imported from the United States. Le Normand presents a rich account of these changes, taking great care to contextualise the planning of Belgrade within the wider urban processes characteristic of the post-war period in both East and West. Such insistence on providing a comparative perspective is one of the book's strongest points, because it guides the reader in distinguishing between the widespread urban phenomena common to other parts of Europe and the specificities of the case, helping in turn to more clearly pinpoint the elusive ‘Yugoslav exceptionalism’.

Other reviewers of the book – all architectural historians – have critiqued Le Normand for equating modernist planning with the Athens Charter, an influential document formulated by the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne) in the early 1930s, which summed up some of the dominant modernist principles, such as the strict functional zoning and the primacy of free-standing high-rise buildings surrounded by greenery. To a certain degree these critics are right: Le Normand does treat the Athens Charter as somewhat akin to a religious canon, even though the Charter was far from the only influential source of planning models and it was questioned much earlier than the book presents it, both internationally and in Yugoslavia. Fixating on such shortcomings, however, means missing the book's important conclusions about the social position of architects and planners in socialist Yugoslavia. Most notably, the book challenges James C. Scott's influential formulation of ‘high modernism’ as the preferred logic of post-war states across the world, with their overt trust in rationalism and top-down planning. As the case of Belgrade amply demonstrates, not only did the supposedly monolithic state dissolve into an increasingly complex system of actors, but it was often precisely the representatives of the state who showed far greater flexibility and willingness to compromise than did the professionals.

For example, in one of the most illuminating episodes we learn about the turf wars between the planners and elected officials over the allocation of urban space for single-family houses. Like in many booming European cities of both the East and West, rural migrants in Belgrade often built their homes illegally in unregulated settlements because they were unable to acquire legal housing. By the 1960s the federation started encouraging individual construction as a way to ameliorate the escalating housing shortages, at the same time hoping to bring the builders into the fold of official planning. Resistance to this solution, however, came from planning institutions, which stubbornly refused to amend the plans and allow single-family homes within the city limits, pushing them instead to the semi-rural areas on the periphery. The official justification for such resistance was the higher cost of infrastructural equipment that the state would have to expend on such construction. In addition, Le Normand is probably right to suggest that the solution went against the grain of the reigning planning ideology. However, she also identifies another, more problematic, reason: an anxiety about the ‘ruralisation’ of Belgrade among the leading planners, which motivated them to try to keep the recent migrants outside of the city, even though they comprised much of the labour force engaged in the construction of the city. The stereotype of progressive experts thwarted by the repressive state is thus completely reversed, indicating not only the considerable level of autonomy that professionals enjoyed in Yugoslavia but also the limits to the emancipatory practices of socialism and one of its central problems, the right to housing.

*

If there was ever anything specifically architectural to socialism, it was indeed the ‘housing question’. Fully articulated by Friedrich Engels by 1872, between the wars the housing question was a key concern of avant-garde architects, as well as of European governments across the political spectrum (however, it was the left-leaning municipal governments that produced the most famous examples, such as New Frankfurt and Red Vienna).Footnote ¹¹ Soviet architects in the 1920s were deeply engaged in reinventing housing for a new socialist society, and they explored radical strategies like minimising residential space and collectivising services. However, such experiments were labelled unsocialist under Stalin, which ensured the survival of the conventional apartment unit as the dominant model for new construction until after Stalin's death. In Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin, Steven E. Harris traces the mass housing campaign in the Soviet Union during Nikita Khrushchev's reign by presenting a social history of the so-called khrushchevka, the diminutive standardised apartment in a multistorey building. Usually situated in the kind of monotonous prefabricated neighbourhoods associated with the stereotype of the ‘Eastern Bloc city’, the khrushchevka nevertheless marked a profound shift in Soviet civilisation. For millions of families, it offered the first opportunity to inhabit their own separate apartment equipped with modern amenities, such as heating, toilets and running water, and thus to escape the appalling living conditions characteristic of the earlier decades, when many had had to survive in as little as two square meters of living space per person. Indeed, in the years between 1957 and 1970, more than two million new apartments were constructed in the Soviet Union annually, thus transforming everyday life for large segments of the population. According to Harris, Khrushchev's housing programme in effect determined the mass experience of the Thaw Era, which historians previously interpreted only through the lens of high politics or ‘cultural intelligentsia’.

The book is divided into three parts that deal with the production, allocation and occupation of new housing. It opens with a useful overview of the international genesis of the minimum dwelling standards and the evolution of housing design in the Soviet Union through the Stalinist period, followed by an exploration of the origins and genesis of the architectural model of the khrushchevka. The next two chapters focus on the micro politics of distribution: the ubiquitous waiting lists for the allocation of apartments and the various investment models and their class implications. The final three chapters discuss the different dimensions of the everyday: the problems and opportunities of communal life in the often incomplete new neighbourhoods, the production and acquisition of new furniture and the ‘politics of complaints’ filed by the inhabitants about the design and construction of their apartments. The book draws from an impressive variety of sources: numerous state archives, especially those pertaining to the material about Moscow and Leningrad, the two sites that are the focus of the research; a variety of literary sources and mass media and the books and leading journals in architecture and the applied arts. The resulting text is thorough and dense, at moments perhaps even overwhelming in its exhaustiveness, but it is also remarkable in the way that it spans social and architectural history. Harris demonstrates the relevance of architecture for social history and also provides explicit hands-on examples of the socially constructed nature of the built environment.

A case in point is the second chapter, which traces the long road to the conceptualisation of the khrushchevka, determined in the complex interplay between political dictate, expert knowledge and bureaucratic norms and practices. Throughout the Stalinist period architects struggled with the problem of communal occupation. On the one hand, larger apartments were more cost-effective because they yielded more living space in relation to infrastructural investment, i.e., they required less kitchen and bathroom installations relative to the overall size of the apartment. On the other hand, the state-prescribed minimum norms of inhabitable space were applied in practice as the maximum norms of allocation, which meant that the relatively large apartments that were built for economic reasons greatly exceeded the size that would be normally assigned to a single family, thus leading to the phenomenon of the collective apartment – the infamous kommunalka – shared by two or more families. As Harris argues, the architects’ only tool in fighting communal occupation was design: extreme reduction in size, especially of hallways, bathrooms and kitchens, the elimination of corridors and the introduction of pass-through rooms, so that they could not be sectioned off from the rest of the apartment. Such solutions were developed early on, but they were rarely applied in practice during the Stalinist period. However, when Khrushchev proclaimed in 1955 that in ten years every Soviet family would be housed in a separate apartment, the same solutions were ready for application because the state never changed the long-established norms. Despite being an icon of the Thaw Era the khrushchevka thus appears to have Stalinist origins, and its minimalist layout, which is sometimes seen as a nod to avant-garde practices, emerges instead entirely as a product of bureaucratic rules.

The acquisition of the separate apartment depended on the social position of its inhabitants and, conversely, it determined their further socialisation. For a few years industrial workers could volunteer some of their spare time to labouring on the construction site of their future buildings through the short-lived programme of ‘people's construction’. Members of the intelligentsia could invest their private funds in housing cooperatives, which often afforded them larger apartments than available to the general population. The notoriously long waiting lists for the distribution of apartments further stratified their recipients according to social hierarchy, based as they were on merit, need, geographical origin and various other parameters. In turn, even though class differences persisted, the khrushchevka also functioned as a social equaliser, raising the standard and culture of living of the urban working class closer than ever before to that of the intelligentsia. In addition, regardless of class, everyone had to put up with similar systemic problems: design flaws and shoddy construction of buildings, inadequate quality and output of furniture available on the market or the lack of pavement, public transportation and access to stores and social services in the new neighbourhoods. Such shortcomings produced a widespread culture of citizen complaints to the regime; however, tackling these problems also generated new forms of socialisation through self-organisation in the grey area between state and society. As Harris concludes, the khrushchevka thus produced new post-Stalinist subjectivities that reshaped the relationship between society and the self, thus supporting Anna Krylova's argument in favour of an uneven and evolving socialist modernity in the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹²

*

The popular Czech term for a typical apartment building from the socialist period is panelák. Unlike the khrushchevka it does not derive from the name of its political originator but from the building's structural system: the prefabricated large concrete panel typically used for the construction of mass housing in much of Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia, however, is an especially apt case for the study of prefabricated mass housing because the dominance of that model was especially high there: in today's Czech Republic alone more than three million people – about one third of the population – still live in panelák buildings. In Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960, Kimberly Elman Zarecor chronicles the architectural evolution of the panelák from its origins in the interwar housing programme of the Bat'a Shoe Company in Zlín until its application in the late 1950s. Numerous political twists and turns complicated that evolution, which thus encompassed several distinct stages: the architectural experiments in mass housing during the National Front government of the early post-war years, the push to standardisation and typification paralleling the centralisation of the architectural profession in the wake of the 1948 Communist coup, the imposition of Socialist Realism – or Sorela, as it was known in Czechoslovakia – in the early 1950s and the campaign to purge the decorative excesses of Sorela in favour of a more utilitarian approach after Stalin's death. Despite these various detours, the drive to standardise mass housing exhibited remarkable continuity in Czechoslovakia, paralleled by similarly continuous efforts at industrialising construction. If Nowa Huta revealed continuity in Poland's national imaginary of modernisation between pre-war and post-war regimes, and if the khrushchevka had its roots in the Stalinist period, the panelák originated in the avant-garde architecture that flourished in Czechoslovakia between the wars. Zarecor's book is an explicit intervention in the architectural historiography aimed at piecing together the fractured history of modernism in Czechoslovakia, thus complicating the conventional view that the socialist period presented an absolute, insurmountable break and total erasure of preceding architectural culture.

In terms of genre Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the most conventionally architectural history of the studies reviewed here and that is visible at first sight: the book is richly illustrated with architectural drawings and the photographs of buildings and construction sites. Much of the text is similarly devoted to illuminating analyses and interpretations of projects. But beneath the surface it is also a book about people or, in other words, about architects as creative professionals and political beings, as well as about their involvement in architecture's institutional transformations under the political dictate. Even though she aims to paint a broad picture of the architectural profession, like Lebow, Zarecor singles out certain leading characters to exemplify the broader story. Some of the most recurrent names are Karel Janů, Jiři Štursa and Jiři Voženílek, who all began their careers in the early 1930s as Marxist followers of Karel Teige, the influential theorist of ‘scientific functionalism’ and the promoter of the concept of the ‘minimum dwelling’. Significantly the trio first met while working at the design offices of the Bat'a Shoe Company in Zlín, the great success story of Czechoslovakia's interwar entrepreneurship. Zlín was largely built by Bat'a for Bat'a, an experiment not only in paternalist capitalism, but also in architectural technology, which produced numerous innovations in prefabricated construction that informed post-war developments. As Zarecor demonstrates, Bat'a provided not only the technological point of departure for socialist housing but also for the organisation of Stavoprojekt, the centralised system of state-run design offices established shortly after the 1948 communist takeover. Voženílek was appointed Stavoprojekt's first director, similarly to Janů, who came to direct the short-lived Czechoslovak Building Works, a massive national construction corporation. As Stalinisation took hold in the early 1950s both men were removed from their leading positions, but both also resurfaced soon after the onset of de-Stalinisation. We thus find Janů in the mid-1950s active at the Institute for Prefabricated Buildings, making important contributions to the formulation of the panelák.

As Zarecor demonstrates, the Czechoslovak socialist housing was a complex phenomenon: at the same time home-grown and deeply informed by international developments. Foreign influences often came from unexpected directions, such as Scandinavia or the Soviet avant-garde experiments of the 1920s, which in the post-war Soviet Union had been long proscribed as ‘bourgeois formalism’. The career of one of the pioneers of prefabricated housing, the architect Vladimír Karfík, is illustrative of the breadth of international sources: it spanned his formative experiences in the offices of Le Corbusier, the Chicago architects Holabird and Root and Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1920s, his prominent position in Bat'a’s design office in the 1930s and his post-war plans for Zlín and the paneláks he designed in the mid-1950s. Of course the impact of Soviet Stalinism through the imposition of Sorela is also impossible to ignore, but its effect was predominantly at the scale of urban planning, favouring traditional perimeter blocks and monumental layout, as well as at the level of architectural aesthetics, favouring historical styles over modernism. The actual organisation of apartments and buildings appears to have been largely untouched by Sorela: standardised types were carried over smoothly from the preceding period and experiments with prefabrication were continued. Sorela’s greatest impact appears to have been on architects themselves, whose careers were thwarted or boosted depending on their ability to comply with political demands. The book thus makes a lengthy detour from the main story to discuss the career of Jiří Kroha, one of the prominent pre-war modernists who embraced Sorela to ascend to the very top of the profession, only to face a rapid demise after Khrushchev's denouncement of Stalinism. The detour, however, is necessary because it illustrates the adaptability of the architectural production to new aesthetic demands: the projects of Kroha's office for the new town of Nová Dubnica and for the Model Housing Development in Ostrava are paradigmatic in that respect, demonstrating the paradoxical hybridisation of the modernist ideals of standardisation and industrialisation with the craft-based historicism of Sorela. With a keen eye for nuance, Zarecor weaves such paradoxes and contradictions into a complex narrative, providing a much more detailed image of the architectural culture of state socialism than we have had before.

*

Bringing a sociological perspective to these questions, Virág Molnár's Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Post-War Central Europe explores the changing meanings of the built environment and its roles in the formulation of the socialist state in two former socialist countries, the German Democratic Republic and Hungary. Molnár addresses this topic through the lens of architecture as an organised profession, analysing how socialist architects positioned themselves vis-à-vis the state and society, and how they forged their professional alliances. This methodological angle is a logical choice for Molnár, whose training is grounded in the sociology of culture. As a primer in the theoretical modelling of the relationship between the state, the profession and society, her introductory chapter could be useful reading for anyone starting a project about the built environment in state socialism. Molnár, however, also makes a significant historiographical contribution. Her comprehensive research includes analysis of major post-war architectural periodicals in Hungary and East Germany, as well as forty-two interviews with architects, planners, architectural critics and officials in both countries. Such thoroughness was especially important in the case of Hungary, which still suffers from a dearth of current research about the architecture of the socialist period.

What makes it meaningful to study Hungary and East Germany side by side, Molnár argues, is their common ‘interstitial position’ as small states suspended between much more powerful forces. Here one could also draw a parallel with Le Normand's insistence on Yugoslavia's ‘in-between’ position, which raises the larger question of whether any other pair of Central European countries would be as appropriate for studying the interstitial condition. Another similarity that enables the comparison of Hungary and East Germany, according to Molnár, is in the shared historical dynamic of the professional organisation of architecture: from the chamber system before the Second World War, to Sovietisation after the war and back to the chamber model after 1989. However, despite these commonalities, the book does not quite function as a comparative study because each of its four, chronologically ordered chapters discusses a specific phenomenon in just one country: socialist realism and post-war urban reconstruction in East Germany (predominantly in Berlin), mass housing in 1960s Hungary, the nationalist challenges to Hungary's institutional modernism in the following decade and the reconstruction of Berlin after the collapse of the Wall. There is thus no direct synchronic comparison between similar phenomena in different places; instead, each chapter serves to exemplify one stage in Molnár's diachronic scheme linking architecture to its predominant use by the state: as a medium of political representation through socialist realism, as an instrument of modernisation manifested in stylistic terms as modernism, as a vehicle for national identity through a shift to postmodernism and as a channel of post-socialist transition through so-called ‘global architecture’. As an ideal model for the relationship between architecture and the state, this scheme is illuminating and, to some degree, it is likely applicable in many other parts of the socialist world. However, it will certainly require further testing in other contexts (including Hungary and East Germany) to establish local specificities, divergences and chronologies.

The German story, which focuses on architecture in the moments of systemic transition towards and away from socialism, is the more familiar one because Berlin has received considerable scholarly attention as a hotbed of the Cold War. Molnár's chief contribution in that case comes from her expertise as a sociologist: with a scientist's eye for classification, she is able to chart the architectural field in ways that other scholars typically do not attempt. One of the more illuminating classifications that Molnár provides concerns the diverse survival strategies that architects used to counter the political imposition of socialist realism: the émigrés returning from the Soviet Union, few in number, but politically powerful; the conformists ready to give up their professional convictions and follow the dictate; the numerous ‘waverers’, torn between belief, coercion and opportunism and the uncompromising dissenters, either on the political or aesthetic grounds. Again, this scheme would likely be applicable in other contexts as well and could help tease out their specificities. For example, the uniqueness of the East German case stems from that country's porous borders before 1962. As Molnár argues, it was paradoxically the dissenters who contributed to the entrenchment of socialist realism by emigrating for the West, thus leaving the practice to the more opportunistic groups. Dissenters existed in other countries under Soviet control as well, but they had fewer opportunities for emigration. One cannot but wonder if the greater numbers of remaining died-in-the-wool modernists in countries like Poland may have contributed to the especially swift revival of the avant-garde ethos in the wake of Stalinism, which indeed was not the case in East Germany.Footnote ¹³

In contrast to East Germany, post-war Hungary is practically an architectural terra incognita. Molnár's book thus opens a window into a completely new field, which so far has only been known sporadically through the names of a few prominent architects, such as Károly Polónyi and Imre Makovecz. Like in many other countries – not only in Eastern Europe but across the continent – Hungary underwent a boom in the construction of mass housing in the 1960s, initiated by a state-sponsored programme to construct one million dwellings by 1975. The specificity of the programme however, lay in its strong inclusion of private single-family homes which were intended to comprise 40 per cent of new housing construction. Molnár traces the sometimes fierce debates and struggles over the housing question, the general contours of which recall the one that Le Normand describes in the case of Belgrade: like in Yugoslavia, the Hungarian state hoped to tap into the population's initiative by subsidising self-built homes, but the leading architects objected to it. It appears that their complaints were largely aesthetic, exhibiting a great deal of elitist aloofness and in turn sparking a debate about the true nature of the socialist lifestyle. The state nevertheless increasingly relied on individual construction to alleviate the housing crisis and by the late 1980s it all but relinquished the construction of new housing to the private initiative, resulting in the paradox that the majority of new housing produced in socialist Hungary was private and individual.

Another challenge to architectural expertise came from the push to industrialise collective housing: on the one hand, the architects protested the decision to import prefabrication technology from the Soviet Union, rather than to develop it locally, and on the other, they criticised the increasing routinisation of design, leading to notoriously monotonous environments. The result was the so-called ‘Tulip Debate’ of the 1970s, which revolved around the controversial attempt to inject a sense of identity into new housing neighbourhoods by hybridising prefabrication with vernacular ornament. Molnár situates the Tulip debate in a longue-durée discursive scheme that had been present in Hungary since the nineteenth century, which recurrently pitched ‘urbanists’ against ‘populists’ in the attempt to define the terms of modernisation between universalism and local identity. This is yet another instance of persistent long-term continuities at work in the construction of socialism across Eastern Europe, which require much greater nuance in historical periodisation than has been the case so far.

*

The five books reviewed in this essay confirm the conclusion that Stephen Kotkin made in the case of Magnitogorsk: that the city was the prime site to negotiate the very definition of socialism, opening a space of agency for the many social groups involved in carrying out the construction of a new society. However, these books also show that such a space greatly expanded as socialism spread around Eastern Europe after the Second World War. A grey area between compliance and transgression was often left deliberately open in order to let the population take care of itself in the face of the state's inability to fulfil the promise of social justice: ‘unauthorised builders’ in the Soviet Union, ‘rogue construction’ in Belgrade and the predominance of ‘self-help building’ in Hungary are all examples of such possibilities. In addition, in many instances it was the state that demonstrated much greater flexibility in tolerating transgressive urban practices than experts, who often clung to professional orthodoxy in order to preserve an idealised vision of the city (as well as their own class interests) against the intrusion of incoming rural population.

Another common insight concerns the porosity of geo-temporal boundaries. On the one hand, all five authors demonstrate significant historical continuities spanning the conventional breaks, such as the Second World War or the period of de-Stalinisation, while instituting other major turning points, for example, the onset of mass housing programmes around 1960. On the other hand, the circulation of architectural and planning expertise across the geopolitical boundaries was not insignificant either and it appears to have greatly fluctuated between different periods and countries. In fact, both the diachronic dynamism and the regional differences in urban development pose the question of whether such a thing as the ‘Eastern Bloc city’ existed at all as a single ideal model. Between Stalinist historicism of new industrial cities and high modernist representation of New Belgrade, between the explosion of standardised mass housing and the equally intense informal construction, between avant-garde experiments of Czechoslovakia's Two Year Plan and the utopian proposals of the Hungarian architect Elemer Zalotay a quarter century later, the mirage of a monolithic ‘Eastern Bloc city’ dissolves into a multitude of specific phenomena that, at closer scrutiny, were not entirely unique to the socialist world. The urbanisation of Eastern Europe after the Second World War thus appears as a subset of the broader international phenomenon of post-war reconstruction under the rising welfare state – whether capitalist or socialist – in which some basic assumptions and principles were shared much more widely than either Cold War rival would have cared to acknowledge.

Such similarities appear at their most striking precisely where one typically expects to find the most obvious differences. For example, the two sides of the divided Berlin appear almost indistinguishable when judged by the designs of their architects and planners shown in the recent exhibition Radically Modern: Urban Planning and Architecture in 1960s Berlin (Berlinische Galerie, 2015).Footnote ¹⁴ And even if the actual experiences of the citizens of East and West Berlin differed indisputably and greatly at times, there are instances in which comparison proves otherwise, for example, in the American and Soviet ‘plutopia's, the secret ‘atomic cities’ constructed for the production of nuclear weapons, explored in Kate Brown's recent groundbreaking book.Footnote ¹⁵ Such instances, as well as many others, call for broad comparative – and hopefully cross-disciplinary – efforts to chart a global map of recent urban history. If the competing dream worlds of socialism and capitalism were imagined from the same Enlightenment ideals, as Susan Buck-Morss has argued, should it be surprising that there were similarities in the ways in which they materialised in urban space?Footnote ¹⁶

The books reviewed in this article also exemplify another kind of convergence: between the various historical disciplines involved in the study of the urban environment, ranging from social, urban and architectural history, to historical sociology. The natural outcome of such convergence is the arrival of new platforms for cross-disciplinary exchange and collaboration. One example is Second World Urbanity, which operates through periodical meetings and an actively edited website with a large number of contributors.Footnote ¹⁷ Second World Urbanity was co-founded by one of the authors reviewed here, Stephen Harris, and in addition to him, three of the remaining four reviewed authors have all been involved in its activities (for disclosure, so has the author of this review). During its three years of existence, the platform emerged as a fruitful research hub, indicating a very real need for an interdisciplinary setting that is topical, but narrower in focus than the usual scope of the area studies. It may be too early to speculate what kind of new knowledge may result from such a framework, but there is little doubt that it will at least lead to a far more comprehensive understanding of the built environments of the former socialist world.