The book takes issue with the capitalist triumphalism that, after 1989, retroactively projected its inevitability to the post-war period and led to an understanding of globalisation as Westernisation or Americanisation. This view continues to reverberate in architectural and planning history today. It has been perpetuated by conceptual frameworks and archival repositories in the Global North, but also by funding schemes in Western Europe that celebrate the presumably “shared” colonial architectural heritage. The privileging of the encounter with the West can be seen even in critical scholarship, which explains urbanisation in the Global South by referring to two overarching “events”: the colonial conquest and the globalisation of capital. Similar blind spots haunt the current historiography of cities in Africa and Asia. For example, Baghdad has received a lot of attention of architectural historians who studied the work of Western architects in the Iraqi capital in the 1950s and then in the 1980s. But the two decades in between, characterised by Iraq’s more antagonistic relationship with Western powers, have been largely absent in scholarship. 

By contrast, my book points at the multiplicity of international exchanges of architects, planners, design institutes, construction companies, and decision makers in the Global South during the Cold War, notably with their counterparts from socialist countries in Eastern Europe. In particular, I study the ways in which the collaboration between Eastern Europeans, West Africans, and Middle Easterners reshaped five cities: Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City. In this way, the book makes it clear that the world, as a reality and as a concept, is not owned by the West. At the same time, and in difference to the Western vision of one homogenous “Soviet bloc”, this view from the South shows evolving motivations and sometimes contradictory aims of architectural mobilities from socialist countries, from East Germany to the Soviet Union, from Poland and Hungary to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania. 

The idea of the World Socialist System was contested, both from within and from without the socialist countries. It continues to be a subject of debates by economic and political historians. In my book I introduced it in order to distinguish two approaches that can be seen in Soviet architectural exchanges with the Global South. The first was the claim to the global applicability of the socialist development path, associated with Khrushchev’s opening towards the newly independent countries in Africa and Asia and often supported by preferential trade policies. This was the case with the Soviet support for Ghana under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah (1957-66). At that time, the Ghanaian government pursued state-led industrialisation, collectivisation of agriculture, central planning, mobilisation of the population by means of mass organisations, and a broad distribution of welfare. The second approach became dominant during the Brezhnev period, when the socialist countries began to see the Global South largely as a source of raw materials and mobile labour. Rather than trying to promote socialist development, they collaborated with countries of differing socio-economic systems. This is what Soviet authors called the World Socialist System, accompanied by a rhetoric of a “new international division of labour” that would break with the patterns of global economy inherited from the colonial period. 

While this rhetoric has been challenged by historians, I found the concept of the World Socialist System useful when discussing the economic exchanges between the socialist countries and Iraq, including exchanges in architecture, planning, and construction. In the wake of the coup in 1958, which toppled the pro-Western monarchy, the new Iraqi government and those that followed often referred to socialism, but they understood it very differently to the Soviet model and, more often than not, persecuted the Iraqi Communist Party. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites stepped in and offered large-scale military, economic, and technical collaboration.

In this context, some features and instruments of state socialist foreign trade, first introduced in Eastern Europe, became vehicles for the mobility of design, planning, and construction from socialist countries to Iraq. Among them was the state monopoly on foreign trade, the inconvertibility of Eastern European currencies, and barter agreements. The principle of petrobarter – the exchange of crude oil for goods and services – was not restricted to socialist countries, but it was dominating their foreign trade with oil producing countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In the book I argue that this transaction defined the design procedure, program, materiality, and technology of the buildings designed and constructed by state-socialist companies. For example, I describe how Romanian contractors redrew plans by third actors, whether coming from the West or from the East, so that they could be constructed by means of Romanian materials, technology, and labour, and bartered for crude oil. For an architectural historian such transactions allow us to study how actors on the ground exploited opportunities and tried to avoid obstacles that resulted from operating on a threshold between the political economy of state socialism and an emerging, increasingly global and Western-dominated market of design and construction services.

By the early 1960s, when the Soviets were arriving to Ghana, they had lost the monopoly on socialism. In the wake of the Yugoslav-Soviet split in 1948 and later the Sino-Soviet split, Nkrumah and the Ghanaian leadership were presented with several possibilities of what socialism could mean and various ways in which world-wide solidarities outside the West could be imagined. This multiplicity was reinforcing Nkrumah’s belief that it was possible for Ghana to pursue an independent policy while drawing on technical assistance from within and from across Cold War divisions. 

But the Soviets had a lot to show for: rates of growth arguably higher than in the West, technological feats such as the space programme, and the development of Central Asia. The latter was showcased to boost Soviet anti-colonial credentials. The Soviets claimed to have “liberated” Central Asia from Tsarist oppression, followed by a fast-pace economic and social development, the raising of living standards, and access to housing, schooling, health facilities, and culture. This development included also the recognition of Islam as an important component of the “national traditions” of Central Asia. The renovated mosques and madrasas in Samarkand and Bukhara were often displayed in Soviet propaganda materials. The development of the region was also used by the Soviets to distinguish their approach from Chinese technical assistance. Soviet authors writing in the early 1970s contrasted the structural change promoted by the Soviet Union among the developing countries with an incremental change, which they associated with the Chinese approach. Notably, by the end of the decade, with centrifugal tensions in the Soviet Union, the increasingly evident ecological damage caused by the Soviet development policies and, in particular, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Central Asian republics were no longer an attractive example for the developing world. 

The master plan by the British planners Minoprio, Spencely & Macfarlane was delivered in 1956, two years before the coup. Eleven years later, it was followed by a plan by the Polish state design institute Miastoprojekt-Kraków, and its more detailed version was delivered in 1973. This relatively short interval meant that both plans belonged to a broadly understood culture of post-war, modern town planning. Accordingly, they shared such principles as land use zoning, hierarchisation of traffic, and a nested system of social facilities. Furthermore, the Polish planners decided to keep some specific planning decisions of the previous plan, such as the overall shape of the city and elements of its environmental engineering system.

But there were significant differences, too. The most consequential included the Poles’ opposition to large-scale demolition of the Ottoman-era urban fabric, as foreseen by the 1956 plan. While the British planners acknowledged the architectural value of Abbasid monuments and several public buildings from the Ottoman period, they insisted on the clearing of their surroundings. By contrast, the Polish planners pointed at the historical image of the city as part of the nation-building process in Iraq. In so doing, they referred to the experience of rebuilding Warsaw’s Old Town after its planned demolition by the German-Nazi occupants during World War II. 

But perhaps the most striking difference between these two plans was their sizes. When put next to each other, the 23 pages of the Minoprio plan contrast with the four volumes of the Miastoprojekt plan. This large amount of documentation was not a reflection of socialist bureaucracy, as one might suspect. Rather, I argue that it resulted from the complex positionality of the Eastern European planners vis-à-vis their Iraqi counterparts. These planners had enjoyed less prestige and confidence of professional Iraqis in 1960s and 1970s Baghdad, who were typically educated in the West, in the UK and in the US. Iraqi decision makers needed to be convinced and presented with evidence. As a consequence, the master plans documented the process of planning, including the gathering of data, often unreliable and fragmentary, their assessment, their translation into alternative planning variants, and their evaluation and recommendation. In this way, such a transparent and almost pedagogical mode of presentation can be seen as an additional training offered to the Iraqi planners who were supposed to take over.  

I am not sure if most of the protagonists of this book would agree with this claim. Some Polish and Hungarian architects and planners would have been aware of the research about “backwardness” in the region. It straddled studies carried out in imperial capitals since the late 19th century, in particular Vienna, and those produced in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and elsewhere during the interwar period. After World War II, economists such as Paul Rosenstein-Rodan or Michał Kalecki translated this research into plans of economic development promoted in the Global South by the United Nations. But architects coming from “Central Europe,” i.e. the post-Habsburg space, were proud of the contribution of the region to modern architecture during the interwar period, whether Czech functionalist architecture, Hungarian pedagogy at the Bauhaus, or Polish town planning. Most of them also identified with the post-war reconstruction of the region, to which they contributed. Some would have been sceptical about the staged contrast between the period before socialism and the post-war modernisation, which was a recurring tone of the state-socialist propaganda machinery.

I think that rather than arriving with a belief of a shared history of underdevelopment and colonisation, several protagonists of this book discovered such connections from within their daily work in sub-Saharan Africa. When working in Ghanaian and Nigerian cities, they discovered similarities between the concerns of their African counterparts and several topics of Central European architectural culture since the mid-19th century. They included, for instance, studies of vernacular buildings as an inspiration for national architecture, or the development of rural areas, villages and small towns as a specific obligation for socially engaged architects. These topics, in turn, inspired them to apply and appropriate professional techniques from Eastern European architectural culture in their work in Africa, including techniques of drawing, surveying, researching, and planning. 

At the same time, such an “African view” on Eastern Europe resulted sometimes in the defamiliarisation of Eastern European history. For example, when travelling in Africa, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński reflected about Polesie, a region in today’s Belarus and Ukraine, which was subjected to an “internal colonisation” by the Polish governments between the two world wars. Kapuściński grew up in Polesie as a son of a Polish governmental official, and his trips to Africa made him think of Polesie as a “colonised territory,” characterised by poverty, the presence of ghosts, and a local population which refused to identify with any of the nation states in the region. 

One of the core arguments of this book is not to separate the materiality of the buildings, including their forms and construction, and their political economy. Or, rather, to trace the materiality of a building back to the decisions made in response to the political economy of state socialism and its foreign trade. What I mentioned before about the impact of barter on the design, program, technology, and materiality of the buildings co-produced by Eastern Europeans, was true also about other types of transactions. They included, for example, buildings-gifts, that most visible form of technical assistance of the Khrushchev period. I believe that meaningful differences between architectures do not appear as isolated features but rather in the ways these architectures facilitate the redistribution of times and spaces of everyday life. In this sense, an example of an architecture that made a difference could have been a canteen in Ghana which prepared pre-cooked food so that women would spend less time on domestic chores. It could have been a shop in Accra which was open until late so that office workers did not need to leave their work during business hours to shop. It could have been an architectural office where the desk of the chief architect was given to a Ghanaian who headed a team of Eastern Europeans. All these examples are taken from 1960s Ghana. They were attempts, not always successful, at uniting spaces and times that had been divided during the colonial period, and at redistributing them according to a new societal vision. 

One of the most memorable interviews which I carried out was with a former technical director of a large Bulgarian contractor called Technoexportstroy. When I interviewed him about his work during the Cold War, he told me: “We were like a Western company.” He had a lot to show in substantiation of this claim: Technoexportstroy’s organisation which reflected the British legal system, the Bulgarian firm’s accounts located in West Germany, the Western machinery and technologies they worked with, and the culture of competition and cooperation with Western contractors on foreign markets. Even in Bulgaria Technoexportstroy operated by means of what was called “internal export”, an oxymoron which meant that goods and services were sold within the country in exchange for “hard” (convertible) currency.

It is well known by economic historians that by the end of the Cold War several socialist countries had two competing modes of exchange: a local, inconvertible currency and a hard currency. East Germany was most notorious in this respect. Accordingly, firms such as Technoexportstroy operated across these two modes of exchange and two political economies, both in the country and abroad. The most skilful among their managers were able to exploit these differences. The dependence on this intermediary position makes the claim that Technoexportstroy was “like a Western company” rather questionable. But what puzzled me about this statement was something else: I wondered whether it conveyed my interviewee’s attempt to make sense of his professional life in view of the devalorisation of the socialist period after 1989. It made me think about the limits of an interview as a means of history-writing of socialism, whether in Eastern Europe, Nkrumahist Ghana, or Baathist Iraq. 

Much of the architectures co-produced by Eastern Europeans, West Africans, and Middle Easterners during the Cold War continue to impact urbanisation processes in the five cities which I studied. Some buildings have been put to new uses and are well maintained. Among them is the State House complex in Accra: once built for a Pan-African congress, the ensemble is today the Parliament of Ghana. Another prominent example is the National Arts Theatre in Lagos, which was undergoing renovation when I visited it a few years ago. In turn, the International Trade Fair in Accra is an important venue for the city, but its maintenance suffered because of the conflicts around land ownership which stem from the expropriations of the Nkrumah period. Cold-War era planning regulations, urban norms, building codes, teaching curricula, and research methodologies, while often modified and amended, also continue to be in use in many places which I visited. The most evident example is the 1973 master plan of Baghdad, which expired in 2000 but still awaits its replacement.  

By contrast, most institutional connections discussed in this book did not survive the creative destruction of state-socialist institutions after the end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe, and war operations in Algeria, Libya, Syria, and Iraq. While some Eastern European companies working in the Global South tap into their contacts from the 1970s and 1980s, most of them operate as subcontractors of Western firms. A few days ago Russia announced technical assistance to Syria’s effort to reconstruct Palmyra, and it would be interesting to know whether there is any personal or institutional continuity with the Soviet engagements in Syria during the Cold War. Such continuity is evident in the case of China’s presence in Africa. These engagements go back to the 1960s, and it was in Accra in 1964 that Zhou Enlai, China’s prime minister, announced the “Eight Principles” that would define China’s aid to Africa in the decades to come. By pointing at these continuities, this book aims at a more differentiated and antagonistic view on urbanisation processes in the 20th century and their consequences today.