How to Read Re-Centring the City: Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity (FRINGE) RTF
What is the role ofmonumentality, verticality and centrality in the twenty-first century? Arepalaces, skyscrapers and grand urban ensembles obsolete relics of twentieth-centurymodernity, inexorably giving way to a more humble and sustainable de-centredurban age? Or do the aesthetics and politics of pomp and grandiosity ratherlinger and even prosper in the cities of today and tomorrow?Re-Centring the City zooms in on thesequestions, taking as its point of departure the experience of Eurasiansocialist cities, where twentieth-century high modernity arguably saw its mostradical and furthest-reaching realization. It frames the experience of globalhigh modernity (and its unravelling) through the eyes of the socialist city,rather than the other way around: instead of explaining Warsaw or Moscowthrough the prism of Paris or New York, it refracts London, Mexico City andChennai through the lens of Kyiv, Simferopol and the former Polish shtetls. Thistransdisciplinary volume re-centres the experiences of the ‘Global East’, andthereby our understanding of world urbanism, by shedding light on some of thestill-extant (and often disavowed) forms of ‘zombie’ centrality, hierarchy andviolence that pervade and shape our contemporary urban experience.
