 The Soviet city as a landscape in the making: planning, building and appropriating Samarkand, c.1960s–80sJonas van der Straeten and Mariya Petrova Central Asian Survey, 2022, vol. 41, issue 2, 297-321 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. Date: 2022 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ccasxx:v:41:y:2022:i:2:p:297-321 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2022.2060937 Access Statistics for this article Central Asian Survey is currently edited by Raphael Jacquet More articles in Central Asian Survey from Taylor & Francis Journals |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.