Red Cities: Urban Planning in Eastern Europe, 1960-1990

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Urban and regional planning were key spatial disciplines through which East European socialist regimes advanced their economies, and identities and everyday lives of citizens; they were thus perhaps most transparent to state ideology. Nations adjoining the Iron Curtain—East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia—perhaps more porous to western influences, by no means pursued identical processes of urban and regional change. From the 1960s to 1980s significant modernist settlements were built, based on broader economic models—from Yugoslavia’s hybrid public/private structure to the more centralized East German system. University-based urban planning education formed the first phase of transforming planning professionals into creators of urban representations of the state.

This panel focuses on urban and regional planning, citizen perceptions of place, and planning pedagogy and ideology from the 1960s to the 1980s in East Central Europe—more specifically in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Brigitte LeNormand examines the urban plan for Rijeka in the context of regional plans for the Kvarner region, with localities fulfilling different economic and cultural purposes including its port economy, tourism, and leisure. Akshatha Ravi Kumar presents a paper, co-authored with Irena Fialová, about urban imaging by inhabitants of the mining city of Most influenced by US urban theorist Kevin Lynch, and conducted by Czechoslovak art historian Jiří Ševčík and architects Jan and Ivana Benda. In their comparative analysis, Igor Marjanović and Katerina Ruedi Ray review co-optation by, and resistance to state ideology in urban planning education in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and especially in East Germany, Hungary, and Slovakia.

Sub Unit

• Geography, Urban Studies, Built Environments

Chair

• Ksenia Litvinenko, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (Germany)

Papers

• Multi-scalar Planning in Socialist Yugoslavia: Rijeka and the Kvarner Region in the 1960s - Brigitte Le Normand, Maastricht U (Netherlands)

• Obraz města Mostu: The Image of the City of Most - Akshatha Ravi Kumar, Czech Technical U in Prague (Czech Republic)

• Red Urban Planning Education Bordering the Iron Curtain, 1960-1990 - Igor Marjanovic, Rice U; Katerina Ruedi Ray, Bowling Green State U

Discussant

• Dragan Damjanovic, U of Zagreb (Croatia)

Session Manager

• Aliide Naylor, Independent Scholar