Urban Experts in the Building of Post-Stalinist Bratislava
Urban Experts in the Building of Post-Stalinist Bratislava

Summary/Abstract: The vast majority of research dedicated to Czechoslovak urban history focuses either on history of ideas (expert visions, debates and projects) or on the final outcomes of urban planning and construction (mostly the realized housing estates). In order to historicize building and governing socialist city in the late 1950s, 1960 and early 1970s, this paper is, on the example of Bratislava, focusing on the dynamics in the broad sphere between visions and realized buildings or infrastructure. That means, on the intersection between expert knowledge and the practice of urban politics. While analyzing strategies and influence of leading architects in Bratislava, it inter alia deconstructs the alleged dichotomy (emphasized by architects themselves and partly reproduced by contemporary scholarship) between urban experts and (allegedly hostile) political power.

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