City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research Hunter College 2012 The Socialist Design: Urban Dilemmas in Postwar Europe and the Soviet Union Elidor Mehilli CUNY Hunter College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_pubs/70 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] Review Article The Socialist Design Urban Dilemmas in Postwar Europe and the Soviet Union ELIDOR MËHILLI We programmed a system and it programmed us.1 —György Konrád, !e City Builder “We managed to rearrange the city down to the last grain of sand,” declares György Konrád’s frantic, impassionate, obsessive, idealistic city builder.2 He has gone through all the trials of communist rule: a distinctly bourgeois background, enchantment, postwar professional success, ambitious building assignments, arrest, imprisonment, disenchantment, and, !nally, release from prison into a world without Stalin but still with total planning. His unnamed socialist city, like Konrád’s text, is dense, polluted, sprawling, and layered. "e scale of urban planning appears both awesome and terrifying, provoking in the builder disgust just as much as pride. One minute he is mighty, with his bird’s eye view and 600 convicts working under him; the next he is languishing in a Stalinist prison designed by his own father. His bold plans for remaking the fabric of society seem to radically depart from anything ever done before, yet they merely introduce “a modi!ed system of inequalities in place of older systems.”3 Both the provincial East European city and its builder seem inextricably tied to the same fate.