Histories of architectural mobility in the second half of the twentieth century convoke the achievements of great western figures – Le Corbusier in Chandigarh or Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad – in diffusing architectural modernism from a capitalist centre to a developing periphery. Following Łukasz Stanek's excellent contribution to this field, they should now also be associated with eastern European socialist architects, planners and contractors whose work in West Africa and the Middle East proved important in bringing about urbanization and development in these regions. Through the cases of Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Kuwait City and Abu Dhabi – all capitals of member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement – Stanek complicates the view of both eastern Europe as a homogeneous Soviet bloc and of West African and Middle Eastern countries as Soviet proxies. Rather, he shows how construction professionals on the ground both competed and collaborated with a variety of geopolitical actors, including western institutions, from the 1950s until the 1980s.

Of course, ideology was always involved in the quest to enrol developing nations into the world socialist system: the many buildings gifted to West African states, or the low interest rates compared to those western institutions offered for construction projects, were supposed to illustrate the disinterestedness of Soviet assistance compared to predatory intervention by ex-colonizers. Eastern Europeans established parallels between their development path and that of developing countries in the Global South: they also had been colonized before – by the Ottoman Empire, for example – and were once part of the capitalist periphery. Those who had participated in the prior mass industrialization of Central Asia also argued that they understood Islam as well as tropical climates. Beyond ideology, other concerns explained the socialist involvement in West Africa and the Middle East. One of the smart moves Stanek makes in this book is to situate transnational construction exchanges within the political economy of socialist states. Since hard currency was in short supply in socialist and developing states, their leaders prioritized the exchange of goods for goods without direct monetary intervention. In Iraq, design services and construction materials were exchanged with crude oil, some of which was then re-exported to western Europe by countries like Bulgaria and Hungary in exchange for convertible currency.

Another strong focus of this book is labour. Stanek follows architects, engineers, technicians, managers, scholars, and workers from state design institutes to construction conglomerates in order to show how they adapted processes from abroad – such as the Soviet prefabrication system or East German type designs – to fit with local conditions. These professionals from eastern Europe were lured by the possibility of travelling abroad and leaving behind economic hardship, moving from communal apartments to beachside villas, even though parts of their salaries were taken by their state's watchful foreign trade organization. They saw themselves as being part of an international architectural culture, that of modernism, which morphed into a worldwide mobile workforce as chronicled by the final chapter on Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City. They were also used as a buffer between former colonizers and locals. In 1960s Nigeria, for instance, eastern European architects such as the Polish Zbigniew Dmochowski, who documented and valued Nigerian vernacular architecture, served as an expertise bridge in universities between departing British educators and the incoming foreign-educated Nigerian architects.

The focus on labour is in part made possible by an impressive number of interviews conducted with actors who took part in this exchange process. Keener to recognize their achievements and beneficial transnational collaborations on the ground than conflicts, their oral histories can partly account for the slight impression that the book stresses teamwork more than tension. Still, taken together with the impressive archival work conducted in four different continents over a decade as well as the interesting data visualization illustrating the transnationality of eastern European architects in the period considered, the empirical story told in this lavishly illustrated volume is particularly convincing and fills a clear historiographical gap. That socialist workers influenced urbanization processes in West Africa and in the Middle East under the constraints of the political economy of the world socialist system is made clear by the multiple case-studies of projects presented, such as the 1973 Baghdad master plan conceived by the Polish planning office Miastroprojekt. Stanek sees this phenomenon as an example of ‘worldmaking’, although the difference between this concept and globalization is not made entirely clear in the first chapter. The author also seems to subscribe to Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's planetary urbanization theory, which is mostly concerned with how the capitalist business cycle constantly transforms differential urbanization processes. A more explicit expression of the ways in which this theory can accommodate for a socialist political economy would have been welcome. Still, these theoretical considerations are minor compared with the convincing and enriching history Stanek skilfully brings into light in this book.