The Gift: Spaces of Global Socialism and Their Afterlives examines the buildings that socialist countries donated to newly independent states in Africa and Asia during the Cold War, and what has become of them since.
About This Book
Factories, schools, hospitals and housing were among the gifts that Soviet, Eastern European, Chinese and Cuban institutions offered the decolonising world—a highly visible way of projecting a new model of international relations. Edited by architectural historian Łukasz Stanek, this collection looks at how the moral, temporal and racial dynamics of gift exchange shaped the design and construction of these buildings in Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Mongolia, Vietnam and elsewhere, and how they have been inhabited and adapted ever since. Treating the gift as both generous and coercive, the book offers a more differentiated account of global urbanisation and its architecture, written from beyond Western Europe and North America.
Key Features
- Essays by more than 20 historians, architects and anthropologists from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas
- Case studies across Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Mongolia, Vietnam and beyond
- A wealth of previously unpublished contemporary and archival images
- Grows out of Stanek's research, conference and exhibition work on architecture and global socialism
What You'll Discover
- How gifted buildings served Cold War diplomacy between socialist states and the decolonising world
- The generosity—and the violence—built into architectural gift exchange
- The long afterlives of these buildings in everyday use by their inhabitants
- A history of global urbanisation told through architectural mobilities outside the West
About the Editor
Łukasz Stanek is Professor of Architecture at Taubman College, University of Michigan. His book Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion, and he co-curated the exhibition The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Dimensions:
- Pages:
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783986122461
- Publisher: JOVIS
Perfect For: Architectural historians, urbanists and students of Cold War, postcolonial and Global South architecture.