The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and their Afterlives

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived?In pursuit of the question - what is left of the socialist city? - the aim of this book project is not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city would at times engender radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself. These are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country’s Persianate heritage, or the vision of a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR.In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, the book explores the material a