The Technopolitical Lineage of State Planning in Hungary, 1930–1956

Lampland, Martha

doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262515788.003.0007

Cited by 4 publications

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“…The transnational flows of ideas and knowledge, inter-war legacies, war destructions, ideological and socio-political tensions, state and administrative limitations all led to the emergence of novel planning concepts, in particular the formulation of Doxiadis' Ekistics, whose focus on settlements and housing developed in dialogue with the growing field of international planning expertise in the post-war era (Mehos and Moon 2011;Pyla 2013;Lagae and De Raedt 2014). By focusing on rural settlements and the Greek countryside, this article goes beyond the prevailing focus on town planning and the rebuilding of urban centers, thereby offering another perspective from which to revisit European reconstruction and its various policy-making legacies and planning trajectories (Lampland 2011;Clapson and Larkham 2013;Pendlebury, Erdem, and Larkham 2014;Diefendorf 2015;Moravánszky and Hopfengärtner 2016;Wampuszyc 2018;Kohlrausch 2019). Moreover, it highlights a crucial episode in the post-war architectural and planning histories, which became intricately tied to the geopolitics of the Cold War, the international and national agendas for the socio-economic development of rural-based societies that spread across the non-western world from the 1950s onward (see, for example, Muzaffar 2012;Phokaides 2018;Karim 2019a).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Claiming the Countryside: Ekistics, Socio-Political Conflicts, and Emerging Cold-War Geopolitics During Greek Reconstruction

Phokaides

Samarinis

Triantis

et al. 2021

Architectural Histories

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This article investigates the complex ties between planning, socio-political conflicts, and emerging Cold War geopolitics during the post-war reconstruction period in Greece, by focusing on the years between 1944 and 1947. In these crucial transitional years, transnational flows of expertise, interwar legacies, and political, scientific, and ideological contestations gave rise to novel planning ideas and antagonistic visions for the country's reconstruction and its future development path. The article sheds light on how the architect-planner Constantinos Doxiadis formulated Ekistics as a spatial vision, a mode of central planning, and a technical guide, examining how Ekistics affected the shaping of reconstruction policies, particularly in the countryside. This analysis further exposes the way the Greek countryside became the locus of competing visions of spatial development, as well as contradictory state responses: from long-term housing policies and self-help practices all the way to ideological repression and population resettlement strategies, British interventionism, and Civil War conflicts that paved the ground to Greece's subsequent US-led recovery programs under the Truman Doctrine (1947) and the Marshal Plan (1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952). By focusing on the paradigmatic case of Greece, this article advances an understanding of European reconstruction as an uneven, contested, and transitional process and highlights the implications of architecture and planning discourses and practices amid ideological, territorial, and geopolitical contestations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Claiming the Countryside: Ekistics, Socio-Political Conflicts, and Emerging Cold-War Geopolitics During Greek Reconstruction

Phokaides

Samarinis

Triantis

et al. 2021

Architectural Histories

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“…Although Fraser concentrates on the possibilities of a new political Left following a crisis of vision after 1989, the general question here is whether this condition designates: 1) an historical epoch with structural explanations of demarcation (for example, the "transition" to a market economy); 2) a state of culture, mind, memory, or behavior that lingers on and surfaces contradictorily through inherited structures; or 3) a critical epistemology employed not only to reflect upon "actually existing socialism," but also to explore the middle ground between often essentialized "capitalist" and "socialist" worlds, and "Western" and "Eastern" concepts (Frank 1991, Verdery 1996, Chari and Verdery 2009, Bockman 2011, Lampland 2011). The rather "closed" and sometimes provincialized concepts of both socialism and postsocialism-often as the Oriental "Other" of the West-should also be treated differentially and relationally (Hann et al 2002, Outhwaite and Ray 2005, Stenning and Hörschelmann 2008, Silova 2010, Cervinkova 2012) and should be contextualized along globally uneven relations and circulations (see Bockman and Eyal 2002, Tulbure 2009, Bockman 2011, Gille 2010, Éber et al 2014).…”

Section: The "Big Historical Gap" In Postsocialist Hungarian Geographymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Contested Post-Socialist Rehabilitation of the Past: Dual Narratives in the Republishing of Tibor Mendöl’s "Introduction to Geography"

Zoltán

2015

ahea

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This paper aims to unravel the contextual layers of the postsocialist republishing of a prominent Hungarian geographer's textbook originally written in the 1950s, which is considered here as a vehicle of the contested narrativity in the "big historical gap" of postsocialist Hungarian geography. Tibor Mendöl's Introduction to Geography [Bevezetés a földrajzba] was a hybrid text written in a dual narrative: first in a traditional "age of discoveries" narrative of the previous conservative-nationalist regime, and second in the obligatory Marxist-Leninist language of the later Sovietized regime. In 1999, the two rehabilitators of the text were driven by different motivations (such as the return to a formerly glorious geographical tradition, or the selective confining of a discredited socialist past), but in both cases through a symbolic contestation of the author. This ultimately led to the arbitrarily reediting of the text, first by deleting its most compromising parts, second by reframing it in a "completed" form by "finishing" its historical span, and third by selectively and incompletely "translating" some of its burdened phrases into a partly de-ideologized language. My aim is to provide a layer-bylayer historical analysis of the text's contexts, because without a dense hermeneutical and historical reinterpretation, we are entangled in the "hermeneutic trap" of Mendöl's interwoven dual narrative. In the last part I also offer a sketch for possible reinterpretations of the textbook in light of critical theories, drawing from anti-Eurocentric literature. Keywords: Tibor Mendöl, History of Geography, Postsocialism, Narrativity, Dual NarrativeBiography: Zoltán Gyimesi is a critical geographer and Ph.D. student of human geography at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Budapest), where he teaches courses on the approaches to human geography (in English and Hungarian), the history and philosophy of geography, the geographies of scientific knowledge, critical urban studies, and global inequalities with a focus on world-systems and post-colonial theory. He is a member of several

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“…For some analysis of emerging state planning in Hungary in the 1930s and the international influences that fostered the process, seeLampland (2011) andUngváry (2016). Lampland also reports on remarkable continuities of interwar and postwar (communist) state planning.6 Ideology, Spatial Planning, and Rural Schools: From Interwar to Communist Hungary…”

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confidence: 99%

Ideology, Spatial Planning, and Rural Schools: From Interwar to Communist Hungary

Gyuris

2019

Knowledge and Space

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The author of this paper investigates the impact of political ideologies on spatial planning and the school network, especially small schools in small settlements, in twentieth century Hungary. After WWI and the resulting vast territorial losses, the interwar nationalist-conservative regime considered the country’s cultural advantage over its neighbors as a crucial prerequisite for territorial revision and launched large-scale school development projects. In the 1930s, these initiatives became increasingly exposed to political centralization and ethnopolitical attempts. The first years after WWII witnessed the restoration of war destruction and some institutional reforms, before the post-1948 Stalinist dictatorship targeted a radical demolition of small settlements and their schools now considered as “uneconomic.” Although succeeding non-Stalinist leaderships took a more tolerant stance, their attempts of limited decentralization led to regional administrative organs exploiting their own periphery, resulting in a mass closure of rural schools in the 1970s under the motto of “rationalization.”

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The Technopolitical Lineage of State Planning in Hungary, 1930–1956

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Claiming the Countryside: Ekistics, Socio-Political Conflicts, and Emerging Cold-War Geopolitics During Greek Reconstruction

Claiming the Countryside: Ekistics, Socio-Political Conflicts, and Emerging Cold-War Geopolitics During Greek Reconstruction

The Contested Post-Socialist Rehabilitation of the Past: Dual Narratives in the Republishing of Tibor Mendöl’s "Introduction to Geography"

Ideology, Spatial Planning, and Rural Schools: From Interwar to Communist Hungary

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