Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century

This edited collection explores the problem of space under socialist regimes in the twentieth century. Bringing together contributions from international scholars with expertise in the architectural, urban, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century socialism, the book includes examples from China, Africa, Mongolia, Eastern Europe and the USSR. The volume reflects on how developments in the field over the past two decades have altered our understanding of how such spaces were constructed (both literally and discursively), how they could become sites of contested meanings, and how they were perceived outside the socialist world. Moreover, the volume is concerned with how scholarly approaches associated with post-colonialism, global history, gender history, and the ‘temporal’ and ‘sensory’ turns have reconfigured our knowledge of, and approach to, the history of socialist space. Marcus Colla is Associate Professor of Modern European Political History at the University of Bergen, Norway. Previously, he was the Mark Kaplanoff Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. His first book, Prussia in the Historical Culture of the German Democratic Republic: Communists and Kings, was published in 2022. Further publications have appeared in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, History and Theory, Journal of Contemporary History, Central European History, European Review of History, German History, and Contemporary European History. Paul Betts is Professor of Modern European History in St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, UK. He has published widely on modern European history, including most recently Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War II (2022), and a co-written volume entitled Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (2023). He has also co-edited seven volumes, among them Religion, Science and Communism in Cold War Europe (2016), with Stephen Smith.