Controlling Land, Controlling People: Urban Greening and the Territorial Turn in Theories of Urban Planning in the Soviet Union, 1931-1932

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between urban planning and social order in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. From the mid-1930s, urban planners sought to shape the social order by reducing urban population density, limiting urban growth, and controlling mobility. The article explores how urban planners translated the ideal of less densely populated cities into designed built environments, through a study of how they theorized urban green space. This study ties the history of urban planning to the history of urban policing, mass operations, and the social repressions of the Stalinist 1930s through the lens of territoriality. It treats the rise of urban planning and urban policing as part of a single, state project to establish social order in cities, through establishing control over territory, implicating Soviet urban planners in the violent processes of social engineering of Stalinism.