Politics booksReviewFrom eastern Europe to west Africa to the Middle East … how cities in the developing world were built by the Soviet blocIf you rummage through boxes of postcards in Polish secondhand shops, they reveal an unexpected geography – places few Poles would now go. They’re not just from Soviet cities such as Tashkent or Novosibirsk, but Baghdad, Havana, Tripoli. The UK-based Polish architectural historian Łukasz Stanek’s book explains why this is so. A generation of eastern Europeans travelled across the “non-aligned” countries between the 1950s and the 80s – and they were there to build. In the process, the urbanisation of what was then called the “third world” was carried out by architects, planners, engineers and workers from the “second world” of eastern Europe. While they were there, they promised to do things differently. “I remember well these eastern European architects,” recalls a Ghanaian at the start of this book, “because it was the first and the last time that a white man had an African boss in Ghana.”
This is one of those books that turns a discipline upside down – the cold war, state socialism, eastern Europe and 20th-century architecture all look different in the light of its findings. Based on multilingual research, it concentrates on how the development of several postcolonial cities – mainly, but not exclusively, Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City – were in large part the product of architects and planners from the USSR, Yugoslavia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. It sketches in a strange geography, where an architect couldn’t legally go from one end of Berlin to the other, but could travel across the world and reconstruct it. Each state’s foreign trade organisation kept a close eye on travelling architects – and took as much as a third of salaries in hard cash – but the notion of state socialist insularity and autarchy is blown to pieces. So too is the idea of total Soviet control, both over its satellites and its postcolonial “proxies”. Each of the countries discussed here was in the Non-Aligned Movement set up in the 50s by India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia; they ranged from the statist developmentalism of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana and Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr’s Iraq to the rentier capitalism of 70s Nigeria, ending in the oil monarchies of the Gulf. Most of these governments harshly repressed their local communists, but welcomed foreign ones to plan and build their towns and industries – in the age of Sputnik, they gambled that the Soviet path to modernity would be faster and fairer.
We now rightly see that path as a failure, but Stanek takes what Soviet economists called the “world socialist system” seriously, as “neither an ideological smokescreen nor a utopian vision”, but “an existing reality of foreign trade”. Within that system, there was much contestation. The communist trading bloc Comecon was intended to create a national “division of labour”, but Balkan countries refused their Soviet-allotted place as breadbaskets and insisted on setting up their own hi-tech industries. The system rested on gifts – donations of schools and public buildings from the USSR to Ghana and Mali, for instance – and most often, barter, especially for crude oil after 1973. Under Khrushchev, it was a point of pride to make deals with such countries as Ghana on extremely favourable terms to the postcolonial countries, but by the ‘80s, trade had become much more hard-nosed.
By the 70s, as east European countries acquired huge debts, these foreign endeavours became more pragmatic. Harsh divisions of labour emerged in Libya, for instance, where technologically complex East German plans were translated into the realities on the ground by Romanian designers and built by a working-class Romanian workforce living in barracks. In the 80s, meanwhile, Bulgarian and Polish architects in the Gulf were already participating in global capitalism. Bulgarian firms in Abu Dhabi competed well with American and British rivals on quality and technology, whereas Polish designers in Kuwait used the experience of daily interactions with western architects and easy access to the western press to move into postmodern architecture, here expressed in peculiar shopping mall-like souks.
It’s hard to countenance this 80s work – building Babylonian monuments to Saddam or luxury hotels for Gulf millionaires – as a great socialist or anti-imperialist project. What it does do is undermine the idea that east European countries were technologically backward. After 1989 in Poland, well-travelled architects capitalised on what they had learned, with one group in Wrocław known locally as the Kuwaitis. In (former) Yugoslavia or Bulgaria, though, these achievements were wasted in a swift return to the capitalist periphery.
What of the architecture itself (with which the book is liberally illustrated)? Some of it is gorgeous – the limpid, Soviet-designed People’s Art Club in Accra; the fluid plastic forms of the Bulgarian-designed Abu Dhabi bus station, the delicacy of Polish university buildings in Baghdad – and much is both highly professional and extremely of its time. Stanek’s book is no “Amazing Brutalist Cold War Monuments of the Third World” picture book. But it is a pioneering work of revisionist history that ought to be read far beyond the those already interested in architecture. It is not without flaws – though Stanek stresses African and Arab direction of the east Europeans rather than vice versa, it is the Europeans who remain the focus. But what he achieves here is enormous: a book that rewrites not only the history of the cold war, but also the history of globalisation and global urbanisation, which turns out to have been driven from Sofia or Belgrade almost as often as from New York, London and Moscow. Whether that meant a better globalisation is beyond his remit. Yet we now know that global cities as they currently exist are not the only ones possible.
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