Description
Book SynopsisSpatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929.
Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making.
Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects,
Trade Review
Crawford brilliantly showcases the materiality of the planning process. Her skills as licensed architect are on full display as she walks readers through planners' maps, travel notes, cartograms and similar documents, using these to produce a lived and practised genealogy of socialist design.
* Contemporary European History *
The contribution of Spatial Revolution to the history of socialism and Soviet architecture is remarkable for the scope of covered topics and the method chosen by its author.
* Eurasian Geography and Economics *
One can discern the outlines of a framework for the study of socialism that is not caught up in the tired paradigm of an oscillation between brilliant utopias and their mundane failures, but rather one that sees in the evolution of plans and meta-plans a version of the flexibility and adaptation often thought to be absent from state socialism.
* Journal of Urban History *
Christina Crawford's richly illustrated Spatial Revolution provides a fascinating view into the distinctive, experimental, often ad hoc, yet globally connected development of Soviet planning and housing strategies in the 1920s and 1930s.
* Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians *
Spatial Revolution is an expertly written and beautifully crafted book that reshapes conversations about early Soviet architecture and planning. The book is of interest not just to urban and architectural historians, but to scholars of the Soviet period broadly.
* The Russian Review *
Crawford's skillful handling of technical detail ensures that Spatial Revolution remains accessible for nonspecialists, allowing it to provide a valuable entry point into this area for scholars and students of cognate disciplines. Perhaps most important, the work highlights the fact that the lessons from these revolutionary efforts to materialize environments based on principles of livability, social equity, and sustainability have significant currency for us today.
* Technology and Culture *
Spatial Revolution examines the first fifteen years of Soviet architecture and planning in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv—three economically central cities where early socialist architecture and planning first took shape in the built environment.
* The Russian Reviewer *
Christina E. Crawford's rich and engaging new monograph, and its deep examination of the internal dynamics of Soviet urbanism — in particular, the way plans were framed, cultivated and put into practice — makes the existence of uniquely Soviet spatial politics clear.
* SEER *
SPATIAL REVOLUTION IS A PARALLEL STORY OF THEORETICAL debates and the physical realisation of socialist space-making in the early Soviet Union
* Europe-Asia Studies *
Crawford has produced an eloquently written and subtly argued book that willnd a wide audience among architecture historians, planning historians, urban historians, historians of the Soviet Union, and many others.
* Journal of Planning History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part I. Oil City: Baku, 1920–1927
1. Socialism Means Housing
2. From Garden Cities to Urban Superblocks
3. A Plan for the Proletariat
Part II. Steel City: Magnitogorsk, 1929–1932
4. The Great Debate
5. Competition and Visions
6. Frankfurt on the Steppe
Part III. Machine City: Kharkiv, 1930–1932
7. From Tractors to Territory
8. Socialist Urbanization through Standardization
Conclusion
