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Susan Reid (Loughborough)

"Palaces in Our Hearts’: Caring for Khrushchevki"

18.10.2018 14:00  – 15:30 

Am Donnerstag, dem 18. Oktober 2018, heißt die Graduiertenschule Professor Susan Reid, Ph.D. (Loughborough) im Kolloquium in Regensburg willkommen. Reid wird einen Vortrag mit dem Titel "Palaces in Our Hearts': Caring for Khrushchevki" halten.

Am Donnerstag, dem 18. Oktober 2018, heißt die Graduiertenschule Professor Susan Reid, Ph.D. (Loughborough) im Kolloquium in Regensburg willkommen. Reid wird einen Vortrag mit dem Titel "Palaces in Our Hearts': Caring for Khrushchevki" halten.

Susan Reid, Ph.D. ist seit 2015 Professor of Cultural History an der Loughborough University. Zuvor war sie Professor of Russian Visual Culture am Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies der University of Sheffield.
Abstract

In Putin’s neoliberal Russia today, plans to demolish the khrushchevki—the standard prefabricated housing blocks built across the USSR in the late 1950s and early 1960s—and to replace them with new luxury apartment blocks for those able to afford them, have elicited passionate opposition from residents along with highly emotional expressions of love and appreciation. The khrushchevki have not always been celebrated as exemplars of modern urbanism, however. Western observers viewed them through Cold War lenses as the epitome of everything they thought wrong both with state socialism and with modernist social housing; monotonous, ugly, mean and basic, these prefabs allegedly spoke of shortage, de-individualization, lack of choice or of room for agency and participation (in the material environment as in the social and political sphere) and a lack of care for the comfort of ordinary people. Should we then dismiss the outpourings of love for the khrushchevki today as mere nostalgia—a highly selective, idealized reconstruction of the past as paradise lost, produced by the tribulations of the present—with nothing useful to tell us about the past?

Combining analysis of authoritative contemporaneous representations in the Soviet media of the 1960s with archival records of local organizations and with oral history, this paper probes the historical origins of the emotional attachment to khrushchevki in relation both to material interventions in built space and to discourses of socialist democracy, happiness and care, which mediated them when they were first built and occupied. Focusing on “care”—a richly multivalent word that encompasses material and mental work, love and maintenance, affect and action—this paper will explore the exercise of care in relation to architecture and democracy, in the sense of participation. Care for the environment of public housing, I will argue, motivated participatory urbanism, underpinning a limited exercise of democracy at the most local level and fostering a sense of community and attachment to place.
Die Veranstaltungen der Reihe "Kolloquium" richten sich sowohl an die Mitglieder der Graduiertenschule als auch an die interessierte Hochschulöffentlichkeit.

Zeit: 18.10.2018, 14:00 - 15:30 Uhr s.t.

Ort: Regensburg, Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien, Landshuter Straße 4, Raum 017 (EG)

Responsible for content: GS OSES/Hesse