Maroš Krivý, “The Socialist Past is a Foreign Country:
Architecture, Heritage and Postsocialism in Eastern Europe,” in N. Bobic and F. Haghighi (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Architecture,
Urban Space and Politics, Volume I, pp. 285–300 (London: Routledge, 2023)
This chapter focuses on heritage professionals and pundits to surveys contemporary heritage discourses around the the architecture of state-built mass housing in Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (former Czechoslovakia). It is argued that the socialist past is othered through the interconnected strategies of, on the one hand, denying heritage value to socialist mass-housing architecture and, on the other, construing its heritage value as “dissonant”.
This chapter focuses on heritage professionals and pundits to surveys contemporary heritage discourses around the the architecture of state-built mass housing in Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (former Czechoslovakia). It is argued that the socialist past is othered through the interconnected strategies of, on the one hand, denying heritage value to socialist mass-housing architecture and, on the other, construing its heritage value as “dissonant”.
