Le Normand, Brigitte Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 372 fits squarely within the European tradition of property. Chapter five examines the implications of Soviet notions of ownership—in particular, the right of occupancy — on the housing policies of the late-Stalin and Khrushchev eras. At the core of Khrushchev’s urban housing programme, Smith argues, was a unique ‘nexus of property and welfare’. As Smith shows, individual forms of ownership did not disappear with the abolition of private property. In the 1920s, property was transformed by the new Soviet state from a ‘profit-generating commodity into a welfare good’ (p. 169). Personal property, a category of tenure that became more widespread during post-war reconstruction, made up one-third of the Soviet urban housing stock by the late 1950s (p. 144). The mass housing campaign built on this Stalinist foundation, shifting towards housing cooperatives rather than individual construction that had formed the basis of housing policy during late Stalinism. Smith frames his discussion of Soviet housing policy with three ideological motifs — sacrifice, beneficence and paradise — each of which came to the fore at different moments to inform policy-making. The dogma of sacrifice dominated in the 1930s, as Soviet citizens were asked to forego decent living standards for the sake of rapid industrialization. During the war, this sacrificial ideology gave way to beneficence, which underlay the state’s determination to raise living standards as a goal unto itself. During the Khrushchev era, as leaders sought to transition from socialism to Communism, paradise was reflected in the desire to use housing as a means to create a new Communist way of life. This sharp study of the urban housing program in the USSR after 1945 is of broad interest to those working in Russian and Soviet studies. Amidst a growing collection of new urban research in Slavic and East European studies, Property of Communists is an indispensable work. Department of History K. Zubovich University of California, Berkeley Le Normand, Brigitte. Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade. Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2014. xix + 300 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95 (paperback). After a long and unfortunate period of an interest predominantly in violence in Yugoslav history, we are finally seeing an increasing number of new books on topicsthatattempttonormalizeYugoslavia,despiteitsviolentend.Boththefirst and especially the second Yugoslavia displayed many extraordinary features which are worth studying in an international context and also presenting in REVIEWS 373 English to an international audience. One of these was the country’s post-war transformation which Brigitte Le Normand here explores through urbanism, a topic not immediately associated with (Cold War) politics. The book under review is the story of the making of New Belgrade, a city created in the aftermath of World War Two, according to Le Corbusier’s idea outlined in his famous Athens Charter. The city was built on the former flood plains that lay along the Sava and Danube rivers across from the old war-torn but functionally stagnant Yugoslav capital. New Belgrade’s initial success was complemented by the construction of New Zagreb, New Sarajevo and many other cities and towns across Tito’s Yugoslavia. However, by the late 1960s the Yugoslav authorities’ enthusiasm for the original functionalist grand plan was in decline, soon to be replaced with computer modelling and continuous planning as practised in the United States. Intertwining the global history of planning and modernist architecture with the history of socialist Yugoslavia, Brigitte Le Normand meticulously reveals the socio-economic forces and interests, as well as institutional and elite actions, that determined the rise of this most remarkable of Yugoslav socialist cities. Besides reports and minutes from political and planning bodies and interviews with planners, Le Normand draws on the grievances and demands of the city’s inhabitants and the rich resource of the Yugoslav press which pretty much freely deliberated all issues except Tito’s leadership, the Partisan myth and the Communist party’s monopoly on power. The book details how Socialist Yugoslavia’s adoption and appropriation of international modernism in urbanism unfolded in the extreme conditions of post-war austerity, reinforced by the Tito-Stalin split that...