Wissen, Bauen und urbaner Wandel im sowjetischen Usbekistan der 1960er Jahre

Abstract

The Sovietization of Central Asian cities has been mostly written as that of a state-induced urban modernization process that turned Islamic cities into planned, socialist cities. The impact of Soviet urban planning and redevelopment, however, was highly diverse across different cities. The mass housing campaign that began under Khrushchev in the 1960s catalyzed the transition of the capital Tashkent into a socialist model city. In Samarkand, however, its impact remained relatively modest. Plans to redevelop the Islamic old city never materialized and a surge in the regular and irregular self-help construction of private adobe brick houses shaped the city’s peri-urban landscape. Using the example of Tashkent and Samarkand and drawing on James Scott’s differen-tiation between metis and techne, our paper examines the different forms of knowledge that both state planners and private builders drew upon for planning and building activities. Our paper shows that this interplay in urban planning and architecture, and especially in everyday building practice, cannot only be understood not in terms of an opposition. It can also be conceived as an entanglement of both forms of knowledge, resulting from numerous negotiation processes between the Soviet bureaucracy, planners, and the inhabitants of the cities.