The Soviet city as a landscape in the making: planning, building and appropriating Samarkand, c.1960s–80s

Jonas van der Straeten; Mariya Petrova

doi:10.1080/02634937.2022.2060937

The Soviet city as a landscape in the making: planning, building and appropriating Samarkand, c.1960s–80s

Jonas van der Straeten (Corresponding author), Mariya Petrova

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper traces the changes and continuities in the cityscape of Soviet Samarkand following the launch of the mass housing campaign under Nikita Khrushchev. It examines the planning, building, appropriation, and renovation of public and private housing on the level of practices rather than policies and discourses. The paper relates these practices to the specific temporalities of Samarkand’s landscape, such as the life cycles of inhabitants, the change of seasons, or the timelines of material decay, among others. It shows that self-help building often proved to be more effective than state projects in addressing these temporalities. Drawing on site-specific cultural, material, and technical repertoires, self-help building was more than a pragmatic reaction to the housing shortage. It sustained the traditional Central Asian neighbourhood that Soviet planners hoped to banish from the urban landscape and was key to the expansion and diversification, rather than homogenization, of the ‘Soviet’ cityscape.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	297-321
Number of pages	25
Journal	Central Asian Survey
Volume	41
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2022.2060937
Publication status	Published - 2022
Externally published	Yes

Funding

This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [grant number ERC AdG 742631]. We thank our interview partners for their thoughts and stories. We also thank the staff of the State Archive of Samarkand Province and the Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan for helping us navigate our way through the Soviet archival system. We are indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and detailed comments. Lastly, we thank our colleagues for sharing their comments, ideas (and personal memories as residents of a mahalla) at the virtual author workshop for this special issue on 6–8 April 2020.

Funders	Funder number
European Union's Horizon 2020 - Research and Innovation Framework Programme	742631
H2020 European Research Council	ERC AdG 742631

Keywords

Uzbekistan
building
history
housing
technology
urban planning

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1080/02634937.2022.2060937Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

Cite this

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The Soviet city as a landscape in the making: planning, building and appropriating Samarkand, c.1960s–80s

Abstract

Funding

Keywords

UN SDGs

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