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Globalizing Urban Theory

Starting from anywhere, making connections: globalizing urban theory

Pages 643-657 | Received 15 Nov 2016, Accepted 09 Dec 2016, Published online: 28 Mar 2017

This paper offers a commentary on the papers in this special issue, drawing out the ways in which they bring forward tactics for comparative and global urbanism, contributing to urban theory on the basis of experiences in a range of post-socialist contexts. The paper begins with an analysis of a short story by the South African novelist, Ivan Vladislavič, which provocatively brings post-apartheid and post-socialist contexts into conversation. Inspired by this drawing of lines of connection, the potential for ex-centric and regional studies traditions of urban studies to inform global urban theorising is explored through a reading of the comparative tactics adopted by the papers in this collection – reading practices informed by area studies; thinking with the multiple processes shaping urban outcomes; contributing to the revision and invention of concepts; and extending theory. An invitation, inspired by the scholarship reflected in these papers, is extended for drawing new lines of comparison across a wider range of different urban contexts.

 

Eurasian Geography and Economics 

Volume 57, 2016 – Issue 4-5: Post-Socialist Cities and Urban Theory

 

Ferdowsi Market

Former Iranian Market Ferdowsi – To be Demolished

Ferdowsi Market is located on a small street that is named after the Persian poet, in the heart of Yerevan, near the central Republic Square. At tables placed on the street, beneath poor residential buildings, you can buy a variety of products – from household items to inexpensive clothing.

 

Clothing market is open from 9 untill 6.
The Ferdowsi market is one of the “on a budget” markets of Yerevan.
There are almost 600 outlets in the market.
The seller are afraid of becoming jobless after the demolishing of the market.

During the first years of Armenia’s independence, in the course of the Karabakh war, the country had to endure a heavy transport blockade. In those years, the southern border with Iran became a source of life for Armenia. Trucks with Iranian products were being unloaded directly on the central square, and, by coincidence, were being sold directly on a street with a “Persian” name, Ferdowsi.

In the beginning, traders were mostly Iranians. Then, over time, when they began to bring in goods from other countries, the demand for Iranian goods fell, and they left, and there gradually began to appear Armenian merchants, ” says Lilia, who has worked in the market for around 8 years.

Today, the market offers mostly goods from Turkey and China, and rarely from Iran. According to the traders, the market provides jobs of more than 600 people. Unlike other capital markets, traders are mainly buyers themselves and cannot afford to employ salespeople.

Former Iranian Market Ferdowsi – To Be Demolished

By Gayane Mirzoyan

Ferdowsi Market is located on a small street that is named after the Persian poet, in the heart of Yerevan, near the central Republic Square. At tables placed on the street, beneath poor residential buildings, you can buy a variety of products – from household items to inexpensive clothing.

Clothing market is open from 9 untill 6.

The Ferdowsi market is one of the “on a budget” markets of Yerevan.

There are almost 600 outlets in the market.

The seller are afraid of becoming jobless after the demolishing of the market.

During the first years of Armenia’s independence, in the course of the Karabakh war, the country had to endure a heavy transport blockade. In those years, the southern border with Iran became a source of life for Armenia. Trucks with Iranian products were being unloaded directly on the central square, and, by coincidence, were being sold directly on a street with a “Persian” name, Ferdowsi.

In the beginning, traders were mostly Iranians. Then, over time, when they began to bring in goods from other countries, the demand for Iranian goods fell, and they left, and there gradually began to appear Armenian merchants, ” says Lilia, who has worked in the market for around 8 years.

Today, the market offers mostly goods from Turkey and China, and rarely from Iran. According to the traders, the market provides jobs of more than 600 people. Unlike other capital markets, traders are mainly buyers themselves and cannot afford to employ salespeople.

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The Afterlife of Constructivism in Stalinist Gardens

An Uneasy Metamorphosis: The Afterlife of Constructivism in Stalinist Gardens

Pages 16-41 | Published online: 26 Jun 201

If a failed hope could still have an afterlife, then what happened to the people who believed in constructivism? For these architects, professional survival was a top priority. Many—like Moisei Ginzburg, Ivan Leonidov, and Mikhaïl Korjev—tried to find a specialized niche wherein they could work according to their artistic convictions and become specialists in designing gardens. The abstract geometry of the Le Nôtre gardening school was for them a source of inspiration between the use of history and the modernization of that legacy. Strangely enough, the absolute Sun King gardener became in the USSR a model, organizing nature like a suprematist abstraction. Imitating Versailles became a way to satisfy the Stalinist USSR’s need for magnificence. Through gardens, the constructivists were still given a chance to experiment, changing the meanings of places. Meanwhile, they invented a daring aesthetic afterlife for constructivism, enabling a singular conceptual and political creation.

Metaphorically speaking, the attitude of the USSR toward its citizens often seemed like Kronos devouring his children. Or, perhaps another mythological image might be even more apt: Daphne’s metamorphosis into the laurel tree illustrates well the transformation of former constructivist architects into designers of Stalinist landscapes. In the 1920s and 30s, a number of architects who had served Soviet modernity were either put aside by the regime or had to envisage a radical adaptation to its new cultural context. Indeed, if a failed hope could still have an afterlife, then what happened to all those people who believed in constructivism?

Metamorphosis is indeed a keyword. Creating Soviet gardens demanded a reordering of nature, both at the level of the landscape itself and at the level of public perception and taste. However, landscape architecture is almost absent from political texts. If a number of essays considered the role of the city in the new socialist world, neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Bukharin said anything specific about the use of nature in the city center. According to Trotsky, “The man will be incomparably stronger, more intelligent, more subtle. He will have a more harmonious body, more rhythmic movements, a more melodious voice; daily life will assume eminently theatrical forms” (Service 2011Service, R. 2011TrotskyParisPerrin. [Google Scholar]).11 All quotations in the essay were translated by the author.View all notes Yet to achieve such a goal presupposed building both sport and cultural facilities: stadiums, theaters, and gardens would be some of the architectural programs likely to enable this sovietization of habits. Using similar logic but with more practical words than the ostracized Trotsky, Anton Makarenko (2012Makarenko, A. 2012Kommunisticeskoe vospitanie i povedenie. In La fabrique du soviétique dans les arts et la culture: Construire/déconstruire l’homme nouveau, ed. L.Kastler and S.Krylosova, 21. ParisInstitut d’Etudes Slaves. [Google Scholar]), an educator in labor communes, insisted on outside activities being a key ingredient for the education of a “new Soviet man.” These requirements asked for new constructions and landscaping without giving any guidelines regarding the forms that these constructions and landscaping should take. Actually, except for the requirement for fresh air and some public gardens near workers’ homes, architects had a free hand to choose what a Soviet garden should look like. In fact, the frontline was located elsewhere.

For constructivist architects, organizing their professional and artistic survival was indeed top priority. Finding programs where they could still work, in a fragile balance between their convictions and what was expected from them, led them to reconsider more carefully the design of parks. Since landscape architecture was now part of the milieu of the new Soviet citizen, parks of leisure and rest took on new importance as essential places for experimenting with political education and mastering propaganda.

Revolution and Landscaping

“The Russian revolutionary enthusiasm, combined with American efficiency, this is the essence of Leninism”; thus spoke Stalin (1939Stalin, J. 1939Les questions du léninismeMoscowState Publications in Foreign Languages. [Google Scholar], 87). If such a sentence seems more like a slogan than a true guideline for artists in charge of creating Soviet facilities, the insistence on spirit, undergirded by U.S. efficiency, seemed likely to promote the creation of new forms supposed to embody the revolution. Consequently, the decree “On Reconstruction of the Way of Life,” signed by the Central Committee in May 1930, discussed the best blueprints to build a socialist way of life in conjunction with the Five-Year Plan. First of all, the party organization was supposed to help this movement and to direct it ideologically. Then, blaming hurried attempts to reconstruct a way of life in one leap, the decree urged for new rules guiding the construction of workers’ cities near great industrial centers, collective facilities, schools, and laundries.

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Tblisi’s Modernisms and Mobilities

Harsha Ram: “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, Regional, National, Local”

Harsha Ram (University of California, Berkeley) held this lecture on “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, Regional, National, Local” during the Annual Conference “Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetics”, 5 – 7 November 2015, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The Conference was organized by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung in cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and convened by Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices.

Harsha Ram: “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, Regional, National, Local” from ForumundMaxWeber on Vimeo.

 

Harsha Ram. Photo: Luise Illigen

Harsha Ram. Photo: Art Histories/Luise Illigen under CC BY SA 4.0

One of the principal challenges facing the study of global modernisms, as of any properly supranational cultural phenomenon, is the question of scale. Current theories of world modernism, generally neo-Marxist or Wallersteinian in inspiration, assume a vision of the world as “one and unequal” (Franco Moretti). In tracing the convergences of the global and the local, prevalent theories of world literature assume a model of hierarchical mediation, based on an initially posited spatial distance between core and periphery which is then mitigated through contiguous contact and infrastructural support. Alternatively, the dialectic of the global and the local is mapped onto the competing spatial logics of the marketplace and the nation-state. Both approaches have the genuine merit of acknowledging the operative inequalities of the modern world system, from the nineteenth-century imperial division of the globe to the resistances engendered by anti-colonial nationalism and socialist internationalism. Nevertheless, these theories can and have been faulted for their linear historicism (reducing modernity to modernization) and their spatial diffusionism, whereby the West is seen as the sole motor of cultural change. The explanatory power of theories of world literature, then, derives in large part from the perceived capacity of the Western metropole to impose the territorial logic of the nation and the deterritorializing logic of market exchange onto the rest of the world. Can other stories be told?

In this lecture Harsha Ram seeks to examine both core/periphery and circulatory models of world modernism, while insisting on the local (urban) and the transregional as alternative models by which to conceive modernist cultural practice. He focuses on the city of Tiflis (Tbilisi) in “Russian” Transcaucasia during the Russian revolution. With the collapse of the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires, the peoples of the South Caucasus were able briefly to overcome their peripheral status, insisting at once on political emancipation and cultural modernization while tapping into older regional legacies that predate the modern world system.

Harsha Ram is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary fields of specialization are Russian and European literature, comparative romanticisms and modernisms. His theoretical interests encompass historical poetics, world literature, crosscultural encounter, and the problem of situating cultural production between the local (urban), the national, the imperial, and the cosmopolitan. He is the author of The Imperial Sublime. A Russian Poetics of Empire (2003), and is currently completing a second book entitled City of Crossroads. Tiflis Modernism and the Russian-Georgian Encounter.