Socialist Urbanization Research Articles

Socialist Palimpsests in Urban Vietnam

After the end of the war in Vietnam, socialist experts from around the world descended on the heavily bombed country to aid in the reconstruction of its demolished industry and infrastructure. Today, these material relics of socialist assistance reveal a dynamic landscape of urban design and building technology transfers. This essay examines the resulting global infrastructure-scape in Vinh City, central Vietnam, by focusing on two successive periods of urban destruction and renewal during the wars of independence against France and the United States. In the first period of socialist urbanization (1954–1964), the author examines international construction projects and efforts to transform the leveled township and its colonial ruins into a major industrial center. In the second period, after the end of the air war in 1973, the author analyzes the full-scale redesign and reconstruction of the city with the assistance of East Germany To better understand how these layered architectural histories continue to resonate in the lives of urban residents today, the author draws on the notion of the urban palimpsest to bring attention to the practices through which socialist constructions take on new use and meaning in a market economy, though often in unintended ways.

Socialist Urban Studies: Housing Policy and Architectural Experiment in Soviet Russia, 1917～1941

Socialist Urban Studies: Housing Policy and Architectural Experiment in Soviet Russia, 1917～1941

A Case of Socialist Urban Politics: The Experiment of Local Socialism of the Greater London Council

A Case of Socialist Urban Politics: The Experiment of Local Socialism of the Greater London Council

Urban poverty in the transitional economy: a case of Nanjing, China

In contrast to the traditional perception of the pervasive rural poverty in a developing country, poverty has become gradually urbanized in China, despite significant reduction of absolute poverty in rural areas since the late 1970s. This paper focuses on the changing context of urban poverty in China and emphasizes the difference between the “new urban poverty” and the traditional urban poverty, mainly experienced by the “three Nos” (people without stable income, working capacity, or family support) in the socialist era. A theoretical framework is proposed to address the impacts of three major transformations during the economic reform—economic restructuring, changing welfare provision, and sociospatial re-organization—on the poor segment of urban society. A case study of the city of Nanjing is conducted to examine the changing composition of urban poverty and its spatial characteristics. We conclude that new urban poverty in China is an inevitable outcome of economic restructuring, the state's retreat from workplace-based welfare provision and the urbanization process that re-organizes urban spaces. Due to the strong legacy of socialist urbanism and the limit of our data analysis, there is no strong evidence of poverty concentration at district level, though pockets of urban poverty are found at community level in the city of Nanjing.

Toward a Post-Socialist City? Economic Tertiarization and Urban Reformation in the Guangzhou Metropolis, China

This study examines economic tertiarization and urban reformation in Guangzhou, one of the most rapidly changing Chinese metropolises, as a path-dependent process blending the city's distinct mercantile tradition with the operation of new market forces and globalization. More specifically, it investigates how interaction of the socialist legacy of industrialization with the new forces of marketization and globalization has given rise to a peculiar pattern of simultaneous industrialization and tertiarization differing from the Western norm of linear progression. The author argues that the emergence of the tertiary sector as a main source of employment and a powerful engine for reorganizing urban land use and transforming the urban economic landscape raises new theoretical questions requiring a conceptual departure from the previous industrial-deterministic paradigm of socialist urbanization. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: L80, O18, R11. 5 figures, 8 tables, 88 references.

Making the Socialist City of Zanzibar

The urban-planning strategy of the revolutionary government for the Ng'ambo neighborhoods of Zanzibar City was dominated by a grand vision. Ng'ambo, which literally means Other Side, was slated to become the physical embodiment of the revolution's social experiment. However, the socialist grand vision fared no better in Zanzibar than did its weaker version on the Tanzanian mainland in creating an egalitarian urbanism. Specifically, I examine the attempted reconstruction of Ng'ambo as a vast public-housing project, which was the principal urban program and most enduring legacy of the revolutionary era (1964 to 1977). I contend that this program was not so much a means of bettering Ng'ambo for its residents as it was a way for revolutionary elites to define the area in their new ideological framework of understanding. Denied participation in official planning channels, Ng'ambo residents utilized their own customs and practices to remake the area as best they could, albeit under a set of authoritarian constraints. This study of the Zanzibari socialist experiment in its urban-geographical dimension contributes to the expanding literature on the political and ideological content of cultural landscapes (Western 1985; Constantin 1987; Roweis 1988; Duncan 1990). My interpretation of the Zanzibar cityscape differs from that in several previous studies (Martin 1978; Clayton 1981; Sheriff and Ferguson 1991). The premise is that it is necessary both to understand how the state has utilized space in tactics and strategies deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organization of domains (Foucault 1980, 77) and to examine how the residents of Ng'ambo used urban space in political and cultural expression. SOCIALIST URBAN PLANNING IN ZANZIBAR A practical question is whether the program of urban development for Zanzibar between 1964 and 1977 was really socialist. A socialist development program should have five characteristics: state ownership of means of production, absence of a free market for land and real estate, a centrally planned economy, effective one-party rule, and socialist goals prominent in public and state documents (Forbes and Thrift 1987, 2). The stress on common socialist goals in urban policy should involve both a redistribution of goods and services to create egalitarian cities and a decentralization of urbanization to prevent primate-city dominance of the urban hierarchy and to promote regional, rather than specific urban, growth. Socialist goals in the city have obviously varied somewhat according to regime, but the five listed above have broad application. According to these characteristics Tanzania was a marginal example of third-world socialism, because of the steep rise in overall urbanization and the tremendous growth of Dar es Salaam, the primate city of the country. This categorization of Tanzanian socialist experimentation dovetails with other, more detailed critiques (Hill 1975; Shivji 1976; Samoff 1979, 1982; Saul 1979; Coulson 1982). Under ujamaa, the collective term for Tanzanian socialist policies, urban policy called for the establishment of eight regional-growth centers to redistribute and balance development between urban and rural areas (Freund 1989). At best ujamaa was wishful thinking, and at worst a co-optation of socialism as a strategy through which the bureaucratic party elite controlled the economy for their own benefit (Shivji 1976; Mueller 1980). However, these critiques may not be relevant to Zanzibar. The mixture of autonomously derived policies that Abeid Amani Karume, the first president of Zanzibar, adopted seemingly hewed much more closely to the mainstream of socialist planning than was the case on the mainland. Centralized planning and proclamation of socialist goals were accomplished within a year of his taking power. The first postcolonial master plan for Zanzibar City was written by a planning team from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1968; the second was produced by a team from the People's Republic of China. …

Specific urbanization in East-Central Europe

Socialist urbanization is not a new model of modem urbanization. East-Central European socialist countries replicate to the global process. The specific features of their urbanization result partly from their historical development—especially their belated urbanization—and partly from their political system. Behind the facade of East-West differences lies a common underlying pattern of causality: the modern process of urbanization. Capitalist and socialist political systems have different mechanisms by which to express the process but these result in similarities in long-term urban development.

The Human Factor in Socialist Urbanization: The Emergence of New Guidelines

strategic task of accelerating socioeconomic and scientific and technical progress proposed by our Party requires not only the search for unused resources, but also a reexamination of existing notions of the guidelines of social development. The CPSU has enormous experience in carrying out tremendous scientific and technical and socioeconomic transformations, it is observed in the Political Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Twenty-seventh Party Congress. But however considerable they may be, our work in the past compares neither in scale nor complexity with what must be done in the coming period… [2].

An Assessment of Chinese Socialist Urbanism

An Assessment of Chinese Socialist Urbanism

More on Capitalist and Socialist Urbanization

Belated thanks for your printing of my remarks on "Urban Planning in the Soviet Union and China" in MR of June 1978, and for your thoughtful reply in the same issue. I will deal with the points raised by you together with those made in Charles Hoffmann's critique in MR of December 1978.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.