Socialist Constructions: Modern Urban Housing and Social Practice By
Socialist Constructions: Modern Urban Housing and Social Practice By Natallia Barykina A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Geography University of Toronto © Copyright by Natallia Barykina 2015 ii Socialist Constructions: Modern Urban Housing and Social Practice Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Natallia Barykina Department of Geography University of Toronto Abstract My dissertation, “Socialist Constructions: Modern Urban Housing and Social Practice,” investigates the modernist production of living space by focusing on housing reform in Weimar Germany’s Berlin and Frankfurt am Main as well as on the subsequent projects of German modernist architects working in the USSR in the early 1930s. Broadly, my work addresses questions of urban politics (primarily in Germany and Soviet Union), ownership, modernist urban visions, and everyday living practices. I take as a starting point the claim that home was central to the production of modern subjectivity, and, more specifically, that suburban public housing was instrumental in the production of Weimar modernity. By surveying a range of constitutive material and discursive elements for these new forms of settlement (including new technologies and construction methods, state and civic managerial bureaucracies, struggles over finance policies, discursive, aesthetic, and propagandistic legitimizing strategies, etc.), I look at how suburban, large scale, and publicly funded housing estates ( Großsiedlung ) were organized, constructed, and inhabited. Informed by a conceptual model of “coproduction,” I aim to articulate how domesticity and public housing figured in the production of modern subjects and sensibilities and to re- connect discussions of policies to understandings of the sphere of the home as a site of everyday iii life, paying close attention to spaces that shape and produce—and are produced by—complex networks of social practices in the modern city.
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