Journal of Urban History

In the Soviet era, a long-lasting idea of collective housing was implemented in various forms, most notably, constructivist “house-communes” (doma-kommuny) of the 1920s. This article considers less-known realization of collective housing in late-Soviet Russia, by focusing on the project of “Youth Residential Complex” (MZhK). Starting in 1968, this project was declared as an experiment, in which residents had to participate in the process of design, organization, and management of their housing complexes. Future residents also had to work on the construction site for several years, building housing with their labor and earning, in such a way, the right to live in it. Based on this case, this article re-emphasizes the agency of residents’ collectives and grassroot organization as an essential but neglected part of late-Soviet urban development. In contrast to the common narrative of the top-down provision of apartments by the state, it demonstrates that bottom-up collective practices were behind a major housing project, with ample consequences for both people concerned and urban development. While the history of self-help housing construction is firmly embedded within the context of crises and austerity, in the Soviet context, participation in self-help project was regarded as a privilege, leading to a single-family apartment ownership and exclusive urban services, otherwise unavailable in residential districts.

In Central Hollywood, during the 1930s, population became denser, housing values declined, and rooming houses increasingly defined much of the neighborhood. The lodging population was mostly white and native-born (but with significant Asian minorities), young, transient, and maritally unattached. They constituted a working class that was often precariously employed in the entertainment industry, the service sector, and other unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. The rooming houses and residential hotels provided the possibility of housing for the unemployed, the poorly paid, the temporary resident, and the elderly. Lodgers formed part of a socially diverse population in a neighborhood that offered opportunities for employment, services, and entertainment, usually within walking distance. During a decade when migration to Los Angeles was still considerable, rooming houses provided a flexibility in housing possibilities that would decline after the Second World War.

This article is based on the analysis of the referential relationship within three concepts for the development of the urban matrix: High-rise City by Ludwig Hilberseimer (1924), No-Stop City by studio Archizoom Associati (1969), and Stop City by architectural office DOGMA (2007). The three projects represent a critique of the growth and development of the city within the economic system and the sociocultural context of the time. This research argues that each project finds its formal expression through referencing the former, adopting the programmatic, formative, and linguistic structures, which enable the reading of the authors’ interpretations and positions in relation to the generic properties of the urban matrix. Furthermore, the research aims to reveal the referential relationship between the aforementioned projects by comparing the critical positions they represent and the elements that constitute them.

This paper conceptualizes trade fairs as complex socio-spatial phenomena, which are constantly transformed, following socio-economic change, and reflect aspects of social and urban life. Methodologically, we apply a longitudinal systematic comparative analysis of historical fair evolution between international practice and the case of the city of Thessaloniki, exploring convergence and divergence, throughout the historical evolution of the city. It is shown that Thessaloniki fair exhibits similarities and differences vis-à-vis the international practice, with these linking to the socio-economic conditions of the city. Fair activity in Thessaloniki exhibits a time lag in integration of international practices while incorporating economic, social, cultural, and political dimensions. Particularly within the conditions of the 2008 global economic crisis, Thessaloniki fair emerges as a hybrid model that combines fairs’ strategies and social and urban practices with aspects of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern fair forms, significantly influenced by the historical evolution of the urban context.

Urban reforms in modern China included the municipalization of human waste disposal, which played a crucial role. However, previous studies often equated municipalization with nationalization and monopolization. This study examines Hangzhou, a major city in the Yangtze Delta, where the human waste industry was well established, and analyzes the structural changes in human waste disposal from the 1900s to the 1940s. In the 1910s, the municipality attempted to nationalize and monopolize the human waste industry but was met with resistance and ultimately failed. Nevertheless, the reform successfully introduced a new model of human waste disposal, which involved government supervision and the participation of private collectors, and this model became popular after a compromise was reached. Beyond financial gains, the transition was also shaped by various underlying structural factors.

This article examines the nexus between the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt am Main (built in 1462) and a neighboring street, Wollgraben. Utilizing Jewish communal sources in Hebrew and Yiddish, German municipal records, and contemporary maps, it traces the development of the ghetto against the backdrop of urban expansion and population growth. Although the Jews were technically confined to the ghetto, these sources demonstrate that as the Jewish population increased, both Jewish residents and their buildings spilled over into the once-empty lot on Wollgraben. Building policies demonstrate, however, that limiting the visibility of the Jewish minority was essential to the city council. As such, they restricted the scope and zoning of buildings to obscure the Jewish presence, particularly as the majority population expanded into this once peripheral area.

The aim of this article is to explore the diffusion of the USSR housing, planning, and architecture related to Spain in the transnational networks through the development of two international congress. The French magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui organized a trip to the Stalinist Soviet Union in 1932. The aims were to stage the I Réunions Internationales d’Architectes (RIA) and to discover the progress of Soviet urban planning and housing after the First Five-Year Plan. At the time, Spain was a newly declared republic that was eyeing the situation in the international context as a reference for development. In 1948, the RIA was transformed into the International Union of Architects (IUA) and organized the second meeting in Moscow, the V IUA Congress, under the support of the Khrushchev regime in 1958. Spain was then a dictatorship attempting to overcome the international isolation of the Franco regime. The chronicles of these meetings show the contradictions and similarities of ideas at two very different points in time for both countries.

Endorsement of open spaces internalized within residential blocks was an iconic concept promoted by the British garden city movement in the early twentieth century. Advancing various social goals, they were associated within a gendered ideology of domesticity, child safety, local food production, and community-centeredness. This article examines American responses through theoretical reformulation, endorsement, opposition, and uneven practical experiments situated against the maturing science of planned suburban development. Raymond Unwin included these spaces in a seminal morphological exposition, developing the concept of the quadrangle with a variety of uses including agricultural allotments, tennis courts, and playgrounds. Views of leading American community planners are canvassed, split between those promoting agricultural commons, landscaped gardens and playgrounds, and opponents citing upkeep and security concerns. Evolution of the interior park arguably peaked with Radburn which established a new iconic form and narrative of interior parks at a larger scale.

Sidewalks have long been a contested urban space existing between the private and public, thereby embodying conflicting sonic worlds of personal soundscaping, cultural world-building, and authority. This article theorizes and historicizes the lineage of the sidewalk as a medium of both control and resistance, addressed through an analysis of various sound technologies and techniques. Extending literature on the complex history of sidewalks as urban infrastructure, this article furthers scholarship by exploring the sounds of evolving social and political relations, the sonic environments imbued in this medial zone, and the shifting sound marks that accompany evolving urban policies.

In 1923, at the onset of the British Mandate for Palestine, the British launched their largest infrastructural project in the Middle East, a modern harbor in Haifa, which turned the coastal city into their stronghold on the Eastern Mediterranean. This engineering feat was the product of an avaricious instrumental, technocratic appetite, which ignored the existing town. We argue, drawing on previously uncovered historical documents, that the architects and urban planners, which were commissioned to plan the Government Estate on reclaimed sea land abutting the harbor, recognized the detrimental effect of the harbor’s location on the town, potentially degrading it to “the level of a fifth rate Marseilles.” The Estate consequently became a battleground between conflicting developmental and urban interests, with its formative Kingsway Boulevard performing as a critical architectural act of remedy, which salvaged the existing city from a destiny as an industrial service town and restored its civic standing.