This workshop brings together urban historians and scholars of cognate disciplines for a discussion of the variegated social experiences of the socialist city in Eastern Europe. The contributors to the workshop cover a thematically and geographically wide range of case-studies, from extractive urbanism in Western Siberia to the nightlife of socialist Zagreb. Notwithstanding this diversity, the workshop papers all put emphasis on the constitutive role of urban space in the social history of the region.
The workshop kicks off with a keynote by Heather D. DeHaan, Associate Professor of History and Director of Russian and East European Studies at Binghamton University. The lecture is open to the public.
!CANCELED! Keynote – Heather DeHaan (Binghamton University)
‘How Socialist Citizens Fabricated Cities: Making Neighbourhoods in Soviet Baku’
Sociologist Richard Sennett defines the city as “a place where strangers meet,” a framing important to his commentary on urban life and yet a concept somehow alien to research on cities of the socialist East. Surely, strangers met there, too, and even became friends, acquaintances, or – more salient to this talk – neighbours? This lecture explores the temporal, geographic, and material dimensions of social interaction – and memories of that interaction – in Soviet Baku, using this to ask how we might productively rethink our concept of “the social” and “the urban” in both the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.
Date: 30 January 2025 Time: 16:30-18:00 Place: !! Due to illness the keynote is canceled!