Talk by Christina Crawford, Emory University On ‘Socialism Means Housing: Architecture + Planning in Early Soviet Baku’

Cambridge Central Asia Forum in collaboration with the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge invites you to a talk by

Christina Crawford, Emory University

On

‘Socialism Means Housing: Architecture + Planning in Early Soviet Baku’

Date: 11 February 2022

Time: 11am-1pm (UK time)

Venue: In-person SG2, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge

Online: Zoom Registration  https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYvcO2qqj4pG9Typ7Ia4fD6vhc5LvGlzqkn 

Everyone is welcome.

 Abstract: The oil-rich city of Baku presented all of the standard characteristics and attendant challenges of an early 20th century capitalist city: a dense urban core, poor worker housing, underdeveloped transportation, and industry adjacent to residential areas. From 1924-1927, through the primary tool of worker housing, newly installed Soviet leaders, architects, planners transformed Baku from a capitalist oil boom town into a first-generation socialist city. This talk follows the various design experiments enacted to address Baku’s housing problem that include ad-hoc renovation of industrial buildings into housing, import of oil worker kit-houses from the United States, and finally standardized urban blocks that provided living quarters bundled with other social infrastructure.

Biography: Christina E. Crawford, PhD,  is an architectural and urban historian, a trained architect, and assistant professor of architectural history at Emory University (Atlanta, USA), whose research focuses on the transnational exchange of ideas about housing and urban form. Her research and publications have been supported the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the College Art Association, among other institutions. In 2022, she serves as Outgoing President of the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA). She has written Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (Cornell University Press, 2022), and is co-editing Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917–1945 (MIT Press, 2023).