Legacies in Leaf: A Century of Making and Mapping Greenery in Soviet and Post-Soviet Contexts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Green spaces have long played a critical role in the socialist imagination and performance of emancipation—of freedom from environments deemed “of the past,” such as dirty, treeless lanes or unhealthy dwelling. Green was meant to foster productivity, adorn socialism, and foster desirable subjectivities and forms of human interaction. Urban green plantings were supposed to “liberate” society from the consequences of unplanned development, while becoming sites for forging ideal citizens and microclimates. Afforestation of rural and riparian areas has been similarly wrapped in ambitions for productive and disciplined ecologies. These papers unpack the complex interplay of human and more-than-human interests in the production of greenery with an eye to prompting new understanding of our relationship to these spaces.

Sub Unit

• Geography, Urban Studies, Built Environments

Chair

• Ketevan Gurchiani, Ilia State U (Georgia)

Papers

• A Society of Green Friends?: Civic Engineering, or the Urban Roots of Soviet Environmentality - Maria C Taylor, Cornell U

• Mapping Green and Public Spaces in Post-Soviet Tbilisi - Ia Kupatadze, Ilia State U (Georgia)

• 'There Are No Alternative Routes': Performing Afforestation in the Aral Seabed in Uzbekistan - Kate F Shields, Rhodes College

Discussant

• Heather D. DeHaan, SUNY Binghamton