Future images of the past? - Life and Afterlife of the socialist "city of the future" in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus.

• Applicant: Dr. David Leupold
• Subject Area: Asian Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 462569707

The project explores the life and afterlife of the socialist "city of thefuture" (gorod budušego) through two "urban laboratories" located atthe southernmost margin of the former Soviet Union: the Kyrgyzcapital Bishkek in Central Asia and the Armenian capital Yerevan inthe Southern Caucasus. In contrast to cities like Moscow, Kiev,Samarkand or Tbilisi, where the new Soviet city was built "on the ruinsof the former world" (Bronotvitskaja, Pal'min et. Malinin: Alma-Ata:Architektura Sovetskogo Modernizma, 1955-1991: Spravočnik-Putevoditel' 2018), Bishkek and Yerevan were largely pre-urban in thepre-Soviet period. As a result, they offered Soviet urban planners,architects and engineers unique experimental spaces where theycould implement their ideas of the "city of the future": whether as agarden city, a place of harmonious interaction between architectureand nature, or a communist cosmopolis - urban space was seen asthe most important laboratory of societal change. In this way, Sovieturban planners wanted to inscribe their vision of the future directlyand irrevocably into the material fabric of the city and translate theabstract idea of socialism into a physical reality that could beexperienced on an everyday basis. Temporally anchored in the post-Soviet momentum of the present, the project approaches the "city ofthe future" from a critical memory studies perspective both as amaterialized reality and as an immaterial utopia. The post-Sovieturban space is understood here as a contested landscape of memory,in which the future landscapes of the socialist past and the pastlandscapes of pre-figured ethnonational futurities oppose each otheras antagonistic maps of meaning. Material relicts of the socialist cityare challenged, appropriated, semiotically reinterpreted or physicallydestroyed by the memory regimes of the new nation states. The focusof the work lies therefore not only in exploring in historical perspectivehow competing visions of the future city were inscribed into the urbanlandscapes of both cities, but also how these visions, as "futureimages of the past," can still mobilize alternative ideas for urbandevelopment today. In addition to reconstructing the late Sovietdiscourse using primary sources from Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and theRussian Federation, the project therefore plans to conductbiographical-narrative interviews methodically based on Fritz Schützeand Gabrielle Rosenthal. Based on the subjective structures ofmeaning construed by architects, urban planners, civil engineers andcivil society activists, the project seeks to draw a multi-layered pictureof "future images of the past" and their mobilizing potential in cross-generationalperspective.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Heike Liebau