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?—this book aims not only
to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city, but
to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered
radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism
itself.
These
ideas 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 a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision 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 Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026)
explores the material and immaterial legacies of
socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To
this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban
sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing
visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using
varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the
book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity,
polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the
social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political
center
in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and
linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness
within the regional dynamics of the Global South.
David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin.
This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee,
PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of
postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and
environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia.
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