2 Facing Post-War Urban Heritage in Central and Eastern Europe (original) (raw)
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This paper analyzes how global processes that promote the homogenizing of urban cultural space influence the perception and representation of the past in Central and Eastern European (CEE) cities. Cultural urbanism perceives all urban heritage merely as a scene for creative experiments and new cultural industries. In CEE cities, characterized by a complex and contested history, a special attitude toward the past appears to be one of a typical feature. This situation poses a serious challenge to how global cultural urban processes play out in various regional contexts. It is evident that the dominant view on creative urbanism held within established neoliberal theoretical frameworks is too narrow to explain all its effects for the cities of CEE. How do new cultural projects focusing on the revitalization of urban heritage represent the complex pasts of CEE cities? Are they transforming their experience and emotional resonance? Do they even leave any kind of space for this past? Or, maybe, is this past disappearing in new discourses and symbolic meanings? In this paper, these questions are explored based on case studies showcasing the use of the 1920s and 1960s modernist architectural heritage in CEE cities.
SL - 38 East European Cities After the Political Change: Reappropriation, Security, Preservation
Anais ENANPUR, 2013
Main issues The session is aiming at a comparative analysis of the East European cities, mainly Budapest, Moscow and Prague, after the end of totalitarian regimes in 1990. The problems of urban development of East European capital cities can be analyzed from several angles. The papergivers of this session are proposing to demonstrate to interrelated phenomena through three themes: • reappropriation of the urban territories: new political regimes have chosen different paths to deal with the symbolic heritage of the previous political regimes and to refurbish urban territories by their monuments; similarly, the built environment of the communist period are judged in various ways, but certainly meant a counterpoint to post-communist architecture and urban design; • urban security: the shift towards open societies caused a certain unease at more open and, accordingly, more disputed urban space and lead to the rise of crime, which ended up in various techniques of property protection. The recent division of urban space into protected and unprotected areas modified the circulation possibilities in these cities and had a deep impact on social segregation; • preservation: the three cities possess a considerable built heritage, which attracts large scale tourism. They all belong to the UNESCO World Heritage List. National and international preservation legislation has a deep impact on the urban development of city centers in the last two decades. Critiques of this process most often refer to lack of architectural creativity in the era of preservation and to tourist-dominated city centers. These phenomena lead to serious social and cultural problems as well as to different solutions. Context It is hard to define what an Eastern European city is from the point of view of urban studies. The three cities in question represent three different modes of urban development, which were united by the ideological regime of communism for four decades. Their individual histories, however, diverge before and after this period, and it is an interesting task to spot the similarities and differences in the urban planning of these capital cities under the influence of a totalitarian regime. This analysis also serves to test and to verify the notion of Eastern European city, which is quite widespread in secondary literature. The intervention of the central power in the urban planning of the three cities is a common phenomenon. Prague, one of the largest cities in late medieval Europe, was an important imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire and a showroom of the imperial power. From the mid-19th century till the 1910's was a privileged place to express Hungarian national pride to the world and especially to the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. After the World War One, both cities were eager to demonstrate their national pride and/or their cosmopolitan character by installing art nouveau and modernist buildings. From its very founding, Moscow was destined to express the grandeur of the Muscovite/Russian Empire. Accordingly, all the three cities had a tradition in expressing the central power ideological and political message through their urban tissue. The communist regimes followed their predecessors practice in re-planning their capital cities. With the fall of communism, however, it is not just the traces of the communist regime are supposed to be removed or neutralized in these cities, but new guiding principles are expected to replace the old ones. These guiding principles do not seem to impose themselves so easily as they used to do in
Changing Societies & Personalities, 2019
Dealing with the socialist urban legacy proved to become one of main challenges for the cities of Eastern Europe in the last decades. The fall of socialism found most of the socialist urban areas either as "rejected" heritage or as a sort of "devastated" spaces which had lost their functional meaning, symbolic significance, and any clear narratives. In such conditions, it is particularly important to watch out for those processes, which enable socialist urban legacy to acquire new languages and symbols in order to be included into the current social dynamics. This article explores the potential of the world modernist heritage discourse in giving a new approach to interpreting urban legacy of socialist era. Over the past decade, the sharp increase in the activities around rethinking and revitalization of modernist heritage turned into a global trend. For Eastern Europe modernist legacy appeared to become a certain lens, through which it is possible to explore various visions of the Eastern European urban past within different contexts. The article seeks to reveal how the global discourse of modernist heritage influences current perceptions and attitudes towards the socialist urban legacy in the Eastern European countries, and aims to find out to what extent it facilitates integration of this legacy into changing symbolic contexts.
Introduction to Urban History in East Central Europe
East central Europe. L'Europe du centre-est
What is commonly known today as urban biography a systematic study of a city’s various facets in a historical perspective is one of the oldest approaches to historical writing and remains one of the most popular ones among both histori- ans and the wider reading audience today. Who of us has not been excited by, and thankful to, the invaluable amount of information offered by the late nineteenth- century books on the history of particular cities, written by professional historians and amateurs alike?! The cities of East Central Europe have a history of their own and, in the nineteenth century, they even had their own “Hausmann” Alajos Hauszmann (1847–1926), a Hungarian of a Bavarian origin and a renowned professor of architecture, quoted in this journal volume with a symptomatic phrase concern- ing architectural style. It was nevertheless at the turn of the twentieth century that great debates about the origins of capitalism and the economic role of cities, epitomized in the works o...
Ephemeral architecture in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 21st centuries
This collection of essays focuses on the exhibition architecture in Central and Eastern European countries, a region of fluid geo-political conception, composed of multi-ethnic countries with constantly shifting borders. The authors analyse temporary constructions erected for national and international exhibitions in the 19th and 20th centuries presenting Polish, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian-Herzegovinian, Yugoslav, Romanian, Russian cases. In the papers the pavilions are considered hubs of architectural and artistic trends, political visions of this culturally heterogeneous territory. The papers demonstrate the complex political, cultural, social, economic and urban context in which the exhibition architecture was created. The complexity of the hitherto less known Central-Eastern European exhibition architecture is demonstrated not only by the variety of cases analyzed, but also by the diversity of scholarly approaches applied. In the 19th century pavilions and exhibition galleries were powerful means for nation building and mass entertainment, as well as they provided a "magic frame" for the latest technological and cultural achievements. In 20th century ephemeral constructions were often appropriated and utilized by the changing political regimes for power demonstration or for signifying their role as flagships of modernism.
Architecture in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union
2014
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are often associated with grey, anonymous, and poorly constructed post-war buildings. Despite this reputation, the regional architectural developments that produced these buildings are critical to understanding global paradigm shifts in architectural theory and practice in the last 50 years. The vast territory of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union covers about one-sixth of the world's landmass and currently contains all or part of 30 countries. 1 Since 1960 other national boundaries have existed in this space, including East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. Given the region's large size, numerous languages, and tumultuous recent history-communist and authoritarian regimes, democratic revolutions, civil war and ethnic strife, political corruption, prosperity, EU accession, and economic instability-a comprehensive summary of 50 years of architectural developments cannot be achieved in one chapter. Rather than survey individual architects or projects in depth, this chapter instead explores the shared transformation in architectural discourse and practice that resulted from the region's political and economic shift to communism
'Approaches to Urban Conservation in Central and Eastern Europe', 2003 07.pdf
War socialist period. Compared to the ideological and economic pressures for re-planning and re-development that were the driving force for much unnecessary destruction in Western Europe, in the socialist block the value of the historic environment as a usable resource served generally as a major agent for its retention.