Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Dr...(展开全部)

In the course of the Cold War, architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist Eastern Europe engaged in a vibrant collaboration with those in West Africa and the Middle East in order to bring modernization to the developing world. Architecture in Global Socialism shows how their collaboration reshaped five cities in the Global South: Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu ...(展开全部)

The Turkestano-Siberian Railroad, or Turksib, was one of the great construction projects of the Soviet Union's First Five-Year Plan. As the major icon to ending the economic "backwardness" of the USSR's minority republics, it stood apart from similar efforts as one of the most potent metaphors for the creation of a unified socialist nation. Built between December 1926 and Janu...(展开全部)

Matthew J. Payne is assistant professor of history at Emory University.

All over the planet, urban growth is taking place in delta and coastal areas. In the Netherlands, there is an inextricable link between hydraulic engineering, urban design, and nation building. To what extent can the Dutch experience serve as a model for other urbanised delta areas? Han Meyer, professor of urbanism at TU Delft, examines how this relationship has emerged and suc...(展开全部)

"The Living House" was the first book of its kind to present a detailed picture of the house within the social and symbolic worlds of Southeast Asian peoples. A pioneering title that has become a classic, this exemplary text draws on many sources of information, from architects and anthropologists, to the author's own firsthand research. As it probes into the centrally signific...(展开全部)

At the foot of the Argentine Andes, bulldozers are destroying forests and homes to create soy fields in an area already strewn with rubble from previous waves of destruction and violence. Based on ethnographic research in this region where the mountains give way to the Gran Chaco lowlands, Gastón R. Gordillo shows how geographic space is inseparable from the material, historica...(展开全部)

In Urban Horror Erin Y. Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal post-socialist China. Drawing on Marxist phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics from Engels and Merleau-Ponty to Lefebvre and Rancière, Huang traces the emergence and mediation of what she calls urban horror—a sociopolitical public affect that exceeds comprehension and provi...(展开全部)