Second World Urbanity: Infrastructures of Utopia and Really Existing Socialism

Abstract

The disappearance of most state socialist regimes in 1989/1991 afforded scholars from a range of disciplines new opportunities to examine the history of socialist cities and their post-socialist transformations. Recent scholarship has focused particularly on such cities in their corresponding national contexts and with the passing of the Cold War, broader commonalities with the urban history of Western cities have come into sharper focus. Absent in most recent work on socialist cities, however, is attention to the broader ideological, political, and cultural world—the socialist Second World—that bound these cities and their countries together. Similarly lacking is a deeper appreciation of the specificities of the socialist city in contrast to its counterparts in the capitalist West and the global South. Read together, the essays in this special collection underscore the value of re-examining how socialist cities were once part of the myriad relations that gave the Second World its ideological and material coherence in pursuit of socialist urbanity.