Paisajes del comunismo

Throughout the 20th century, communism took power in Eastern Europe and remade cities in its own image. Destroying the urban planning of the imperial past, he set out to transform everyday life. The wide boulevards, the epic skyscrapers and the vast housing estates were an emphatic statement of a non-capitalist idea. Now the regimes that built them are gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, from Moscow to post-revolutionary kyiv, the buildings, their most obvious legacy, remain. Hatherley, a brilliant and ingenious urban critic, offers us a trip to the lost world of socialist architecture. He shows how power was exercised in these societies, tracing the sudden zigzags of official communist architectural style: the superstitious and despotic rococo of High Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces and secret police castles; East Germany's obsession with precast concrete panels; or the subways of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space that went beyond what any avant-garde dared to do. It is an intimate story of twentieth-century communist Europe told through its buildings, but also an important reflection on power and what it does in cities.