The other pins the blame for failure on built socialism's alleged fixation with aesthetic or discursive realms and its corresponding neglect of the economy. One argues that built socialism failed, because it was too obsessed with the economy and industry and neglected every other aspect of social life. This article provides a critical overview of recent literature on built socialism and identifies a tension between two parallel ethnographic and historical narratives. Scholars, however, continue to produce accounts emphasizing how socialist cities and buildings, as well as the audacious social goals built into them, failed. This has only increased as post-socialist urban landscapes undergo an ever-intensifying process of neoliberal “re-privatization,” de-planning, and spatial as well as economic stratification.

It constructs its theoretical edifice with reference to the remaking of post-1945 Warsaw as a socialist city through property expropriation and monumental architectural and planning works, and post-1989 attempts to unmake its socialist character through property reprivatization and unplanning.Ī quarter century following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies, many of the dwellings, utilities, and public spaces built by these regimes continue to be cherished by their inhabitants and users.

' As a corrective, it proposes reorienting our social morphologies with reference to a Marxist notion of infrastructure, founded on a dynamic understanding of the relationship between determining economic base and determined superstructure. It problematizes how scholarship informed by actor-network theory, assemblage theory and other varieties of (post)postmodernism uses morphological optics and metaphors to represent social life, the material world, and existence itself as necessarily ' flat, ' ' complex ' or ' fuzzy. Th is article critiques assumptions made by urban anthropologists and other scholars of cities, focusing on currently fashionable theories of infrastructure, materiality, and complexity.

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