Maroš Krivý: From Mass Housing to Gentrification? Urban Imagination Around 1990
From housing for the masses to gentrification? A vision of urbanism around 1990
Social housing programs for the masses have been criticized in socialist states of the Eastern bloc since their very inception. By the late 1980s, most architects even stopped trying to improve housing for the masses. Instead, they began to adopt a critical stance towards it and directed all their energy towards efforts to bring it to ruin. The lecture attempts to illustrate through the case of Czechoslovakia the significance of visionary drawings, fantastic projects, and other forms of architectural studies during the era of transition to neoliberalism. It diverts from the idea of dissidence expressed through architectural means and examines the contemptuous visions of the city of the future, in which social housing buildings are abandoned, overgrown, or simply razed to the ground, contrasting with fantasies of polished urbanism manifesting in public space. In the lecture, I argue that architectural studies have inadvertently contributed to the normalization of postsocialist reality and led to the justification of gentrification as a natural process.
Maroš Krivý is an associate professor and head of the Department of Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts. Previously, he worked as a researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. As a publicist, urbanist, and architectural historian, he focuses on examining neoliberal and socialist political systems in architecture. His works have been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Histories, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory, and Avery Review, as well as in various anthologies including Second World Postmodernisms (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Neoliberalism on the Ground (University of Pittsburgh, 2020). www.maroskrivy.eu
The lecture is an introductory event for the workshop Speculative Scenarios of Affordable Housing on Rohanský Island and the accompanying program of the exhibition Pro/Měna Karlín.
Introductory photo: Aleš Lamr, Variations on Housing Estates, from the exhibition Urbanity 86, 1986.
Social housing programs for the masses have been criticized in socialist states of the Eastern bloc since their very inception. By the late 1980s, most architects even stopped trying to improve housing for the masses. Instead, they began to adopt a critical stance towards it and directed all their energy towards efforts to bring it to ruin. The lecture attempts to illustrate through the case of Czechoslovakia the significance of visionary drawings, fantastic projects, and other forms of architectural studies during the era of transition to neoliberalism. It diverts from the idea of dissidence expressed through architectural means and examines the contemptuous visions of the city of the future, in which social housing buildings are abandoned, overgrown, or simply razed to the ground, contrasting with fantasies of polished urbanism manifesting in public space. In the lecture, I argue that architectural studies have inadvertently contributed to the normalization of postsocialist reality and led to the justification of gentrification as a natural process.
Maroš Krivý is an associate professor and head of the Department of Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts. Previously, he worked as a researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. As a publicist, urbanist, and architectural historian, he focuses on examining neoliberal and socialist political systems in architecture. His works have been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Histories, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory, and Avery Review, as well as in various anthologies including Second World Postmodernisms (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Neoliberalism on the Ground (University of Pittsburgh, 2020). www.maroskrivy.eu
The lecture is an introductory event for the workshop Speculative Scenarios of Affordable Housing on Rohanský Island and the accompanying program of the exhibition Pro/Měna Karlín.
Introductory photo: Aleš Lamr, Variations on Housing Estates, from the exhibition Urbanity 86, 1986.
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