Building the Socialist Balkans

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue of Southeastern Europe dedicated to architecture in the Balkans produced in the networks of socialist internationalism. The built heritage of socialism has suffered several waves of erasure, most spectacularly exemplified by the current remake of Skopje, but it is also undergoing a surge in popular and scholarly interest. Focusing on Bucharest, Skopje, Sofia, and the activities of the Belgrade company Energoprojekt in Nigeria, the issue contributes to the growing scholarship on socialist and postsocialist space by analyzing architecture’s global entanglements during the Cold War. “Architecture” is understood here not only as the built environment in its various scales, but also as a regulated, organized profession, a field of cultural production, an art, and a technical discipline. It thus opens up a broad range of phenomena that cut across the fabric of society: from the representations of specific global imaginaries, to the transnational exchanges of expertise, services, and material goods.