Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T19:40:49.379Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Urban Societies in Europe since 1945: Toward a Historical Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2015

MORITZ FÖLLMER  and
MARK B. SMITH
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geographically from Britain to the Soviet Union and cover topics as diverse as post-war reconstruction and alternative communities in the 1970s. Their respective approaches are informed by an interest in the way societies have been imagined in discourses and reshaped in spatial settings. Moreover, the papers move beyond case studies, urban history's classic genre, and can therefore facilitate synthetic reflection. It is our hope that, in so doing, we can make urban history more relevant to contemporary European historians in general.

Type
Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 24 , Special Issue 4: Urban Societies in Europe , November 2015 , pp. 475 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 When used as purely geographic descriptors these terms are not capitalised. However, in the context of this special issue, ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ tend to refer to political and ideological distinctions (implicit or explicit) as well as to geographic ones, and will thus be capitalised.

2 We should like to thank our former academic home, the School of History at the University of Leeds, for hosting and funding the workshops, especially its chair at the time, Richard Whiting.

3 For predominantly political histories, see Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005)Google Scholar; Wasserstein, Bernard, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 403–749Google Scholar; for surveys of social trends, see Therborn, Göran, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies 1945–2000 (London: Sage, 2005)Google Scholar; Kaelble, Hartmut, A Social History of Europe, 1945–2000: Recovery and Transformation after Two World Wars (New York: Berghahn, 2013)Google Scholar.

4 Jerram, Leif, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 372–84Google Scholar.

5 Kaelble, Hartmut, ‘Die Besonderheiten der europäischen Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert’, in Lenger, Friedrich and Tenfelde, Klaus, eds., Die europäische Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert: Wahrnehmung – Entwicklung – Erosion (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 25–44Google Scholar, here 34–44.

6 Lenger, Friedrich, Metropolen der Moderne: Eine europäische Stadtgeschichte seit 1850 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2013), 420–552CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See, among others, Zierenberg, Malte, Black Market Berlin: Profiteers, Illegal Networks, and Urban Space in the German Capital, 1939–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)Google Scholar; Roodhouse, Mark, Black Market Britain: 1939–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For good treatments of the different approaches to, and outcomes of, post-war reconstruction, see Diefendorf, Jeffry, ed., Rebuilding Europe's Bombed Cities (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wagner-Kyora, Georg, ed., Wiederaufbau europäischer Städte: Rekonstruktionen, die Moderne und die lokale Identitätspolitik seit 1945/Rebuilding European Cities: Reconstructions, Modernity and the Local Politics of Identity Construction since 1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2014)Google Scholar.

9 See, as one of the few case studies, Ulrich, Bernd, ‘The Senator's Tale: The Development of Bremen's Bourgeoisie in the Post-1945 Era’, Social History, 28 (2003), 303–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the pertinent remarks on ‘the golden age of a mid-twentieth century middle class’ by Conway, Martin, ‘The Rise and Fall of Western Europe's Democratic Age 1945–73’, Contemporary European History, 13 (2004), 67–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 80.

10 See the excellent books by Wakeman, Rosemary, Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse 1945–1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). On the post-war urban working class the jury is still out. In contrast to Wakeman, Conway, ‘Western Europe's Democratic Age’, 73–4, stresses its political weakness.

11 A similar argument has been made by Mort, Frank, ‘Modernity and Gaslight: Victorian London in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Bridge, Gary and Watson, Sophie, eds., The New Blackwell Companion to the City (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 431–41Google Scholar.

12 The term has been coined by Martin H. Geyer with respect to inflation-era Germany, see his ‘Teuerungsprotest und Teuerungsunruhen 1914–1923: Selbsthilfegesellschaft und Geldentwertung’, in Manfred Gailus and Heinrich Volkmann, eds., Der Kampf um das tägliche Brot: Nahrungsmangel, Versorgungspolitik und Protest 1770–1990 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), 319–45. On the importance of self-built housing in the interwar period, see Fourcaut, Annie, La banlieue en morceaux: La crise des lotissements défectueux en France dans l'entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Créaphis, 2000)Google Scholar. For the post-war years, see Nasiali, Minayo, ‘Citizens, Squatters, and Asocials: The Right to Housing and the Politics of Difference in Post-Liberation France’, American Historical Review, 19 (2014), 434–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 See Radcliff, Pamela, Making Democratic Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Origins of the Transition, 1960–78 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 235–318 (also the remarks on nineteenth-century continuities on pp. 3–4, 329); Pinto, Pedro Ramos, ‘Urban Social Movements and the Transition to Democracy in Portugal, 1974–1976’, Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 1025–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Balderstone, Laura, ‘Semi-Detached Britain? Reviewing Suburban Engagement in Twentieth-Century Society’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 141–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 On circulation in the nineteenth-century city, see Joyce, Patrick, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the City in Britain (London: Verso, 2003)Google Scholar, ch. 2. Osterhammel, Jürgen, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)Google Scholar, ch. 6.

15 Gunn, Both Simon, ‘The Buchanan Report, Environment and the Problem of Traffic in 1960s Britain’, Twentieth-Century British History, 22 (2011), 521–42CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed and Ortolano, Guy, ‘Planning the Urban Future in 1960s Britain’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 477–507CrossRefGoogle Scholar stress significant ambiguity about automobility and urban growth among British planners. By contrast, Hanna, Erika, Modern Dublin: Urban Change and the Irish Past, 1957–1973 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar highlights a stark contrast between modernist planners and preservation campaigners.

16 See, among others, Mandler, Peter, ‘New Towns for Old: The Fate of the Town Centre’, in Conekin, Becky, Mort, Frank and Waters, Chris, eds., Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (New York: Rivers Oram, 1999), 208–27Google Scholar; Flonneau, Mathieu, ‘L'action du district de la région Parisienne et les “dix glorieuses de l'urbanisme automobile”, 1963–1973’, Vingtième Siècle, 79 (2003), 93–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Flonneau, Mathieu, Paris et l'automobile: Un siècle de passions (Paris: Hachette, 2005)Google Scholar, 182; Logemann, Jan, Trams or Tailfins? Public and Private Prosperity in West Germany and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Braem, Renaat, Het lelijkste land ter wereld (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1968)Google Scholar.

18 Wakeman, Modernizing, 96–100; Dhaille-Hervieu, Marie-Paule, Communistes au Havre: Histoire sociale, culturelle et politique (1930–1986) (Rouen: Publications de l'Université de Rouen et du Havre, 2010), 376–7Google Scholar.

19 Castells, Manuel, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 251Google Scholar–9; Newsome, W. Brian, ‘The Rise of the Grands Ensembles: Government, Business, and Housing in Postwar France’, The Historian, 66 (2004), 793–816CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 793–4, 815–6.

20 Pinto, Pedro Ramos, Lisbon Rising: Urban Social Movements in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974–1975 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Pinto, ‘Urban Social Movements’.

21 Even in a city already as multi-ethnic as Bradford, see Gunn, Simon, ‘The Rise and Fall of British Urban Modernism: Planning Bradford 1945–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2010), 849–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 859, 864–6; the most drastic attempt to clear a city centre from immigrant presence is the killing of at least 50 Algerian demonstrators by the Paris Police on 17 October 1961, see House, Jim and MacMaster, Neil, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

22 For a case study of the latter aspect, see Haumann, Sebastian, ‘Disputed Transformations: Deindustrialization and Redevelopment of Cologne's Stollwerck Factory, 1970–1980’, Urban History, 40 (2013), 156–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Wakeman, Modernizing the Provincial City, 217–64; von Saldern, Adelheid, ed., Stadt und Kommunikation in bundesrepublikanischen Umbruchszeiten (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006)Google Scholar; Niemi, Marjaana, ‘Politicians, Professionals and “Publics”: Conflicts Over Green Space in Helsinki, c. 1950–2000’, in Clark, Peter, ed., Green Space and the European City 1850–2000: London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 207–28Google Scholar.

24 For the ideological underpinnings of the changes of the 1970s and 1980s, with a focus on the rise of ‘neoliberalism’ and the shift away from anti-fascism, see Stone, Dan, Goodbye to all that? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

25 The impact on the East has received most attention from historians. See, for example, Péteri, Győrgy, ed., Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: many of these essays are urban-focused or have an urban dimension.

26 Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010).

27 Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

28 For an example of architects’ and town planners’ debates about how to realise this, see Zarecor, Kimberly Elman, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Smith, Mark B., Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press)Google Scholar, ch. 5.

30 Le Normand, Brigitte, Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Virág Eszter Molnar, ‘Modernity and Memory: The Politics of Architecture in Hungary and East Germany after the Second World War’, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2005, 82–3.

32 Locsmándi, Gábor and Sillince, John, ‘Housing Policy in Hungary’, in Sillince, John, ed., Housing Policies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (London and New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar, 440–74.

33 Pioneers of this approach (here with reference to the Soviet Union) include Boym, Svetlana, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, and Kharkhordin, Oleg, The Collective and Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

34 Notable collections of essays are Crowley, David and Reid, Susan E., eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford: Berg, 2002)Google Scholar and Siegelbaum, Lewis, ed., Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)Google Scholar.

35 Betts, Paul, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 5.

36 McLellan, Josie, ‘Glad to be gay behind the wall: gay and lesbian activism in 1970s East Germany’, History Workshop Journal, 74, 1 (2012): 105–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jay Risch, William,‘Soviet “flower children”: hippies and the youth counter-culture in 1970s L'viv’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40, 3 (2005): 565–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

38 Giuresco, Dinu C., The Razing of Romania's Past (New York: World Monuments Fund, 1989)Google Scholar.

39 McGuiness, Patrick, The Last Hundred Days (Bridgend: Seren, 2011), 49–50Google Scholar.

40 The most sustained attempt to write a comparative East-West urban history is Kate Brown's account of an American and a Soviet nuclear industry town: Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutopian Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The book emphasises common features between these particular urban societies in the Soviet Union and the United States.

41 Lebow, Katherine, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The writings of Lebow and others show that the reality of ‘totalitarian’ and would-be utopian urban societies, even in entirely new and purpose-built cities, was far more varied and multi-grained than is allowed in the very influential work of Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

42 See, for example, Bren, Paulina and Neuburger, Mary, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2010Google Scholar; Crowley, David and Reid, Susan E., eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. The argument is taken to its conclusion in Patterson, Patrick Hyder, Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

43 Siegelbaum, Lewis H., ed., The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Siegelbaum, Lewis H., Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Neuburger, Mary C., Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

44 Bren, Paulina, The Greengrocer and his TV: The Culture of Communism and the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

45 Edele, Mark, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ghodsee, Kristen, ‘Pressuring the Politburo: the Committee of the Bulgarian women's movement and state socialist feminism’, Slavic Review, 73, 3 (2014): 538–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for case studies of the work of VOOPIiK in Leningrad, see Kelly, Catriona, St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

46 Kotkin, Stephen with Gross, Jan T., Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009)Google Scholar.

47 One of the few case studies of this process that speaks directly to historians is an important work on Sofia: Hirt, Sonia, Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-Socialist City (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 See the recent studies by Ziemann, Benjamin, ‘Opinion Polls and the Dynamics of the Public Sphere: The Catholic Church in the Federal Republic’, German History, 24 (2006), 562–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lawrence, Jon, ‘Social-Science Encounters and the Negotiation of Difference in early 1960s England’, History Workshop Journal, 77 (2014), 215–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 de Lauwe, Paul-Henry Chombart, ed., Paris et l'agglomération parisienne: L'espace social d'une grande ville, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952)Google Scholar; see Wakeman, Heroic City, 170–6; Wilmott, Michael and Young, Peter, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Penguin, 1957)Google Scholar.

50 For instance Castells, The City and the Grassroots. Radcliff, Making Democratic Citizens, 264–5, points out that Castells was himself a participant in the citizen movement in Madrid. For a pertinent critique of contemporary intellectuals’ views of urban mass culture, see Foot, John, Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture and Identity (Oxford: Berg, 2001)Google Scholar.

51 Siebel, Walter, ed., Die europäische Stadt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004)Google Scholar; Löw, Martina, Soziologie der Städte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010)Google Scholar and the rather scathing critique in Kemper, Jan and Vogelpohl, Anne, eds., Lokalistische Stadtforschung, kulturalisierte Städte: Zur Kritik einer “Eigenlogik der Städte” (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2011). SGoogle Scholaree also the pertinent remarks on the proximity between urban sociology and current diagnoses of urban crisis, often based on outdated notions of public life, social cohesion and spatial centrality, in Schroer, Markus, Räume, Orte, Grenzen: Auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie des Raumes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 227–51Google Scholar.

52 Good overviews are offered by Bridge and Watson, Blackwell Companion to the City and Jan Lin and Christopher Mele, eds., The Urban Sociology Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), both volumes attesting to the global and ethnographic orientation of much recent research. For a differentiated account of the city as a site of social positions, mobilities, relations and encounters see Grafmeyer, Yves and Authier, Jean-Yves, Sociologie urbaine, 3rd edn (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012)Google Scholar. Farías, Ignacio and Bender, Thomas, eds., Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (Milton Park: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar, foregrounds relations between human and non-human actors, including buildings, vehicles, network infrastructures and urban animals.

53 Todd, Selina, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010 (London: John Murray, 2014)Google Scholar, 152–359; Pittaway, Mark, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Kenney, Padraic, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Filtzer, Donald, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System After World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also several chapters in Rodger, Richard and Herbert, Joanna, eds., Testimonies of the City: Identity, Community and Change in a Contemporary Urban World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)Google Scholar.

54 Fidelis, Malgorzata, Women, Communism and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Gundle, Stephen, Death and the Dolce Vita: The Dark Side of Rome in the 1950s (London: Canongate, 2012)Google Scholar.

55 Cook, Matt and Evans, Jennifer V., eds., Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)Google Scholar. Important monographs include Evans, Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Houlbrook, Matt, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar.

56 Mort, Frank, ‘Striptease: The Erotic Female Body and Live Sexual Entertainment in Mid-Twentieth-Century London’, Social History, 32 (2007), 27–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sneeringer, Julia, ‘“Assembly Line of Joys”: Touring Hamburg's Red Light District, 1949–1966’, Central European History, 42 (2009), 65–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Martin Baumeister, ‘Grenzen der Stadt: Masseneinwanderung und Öffentlichkeit in Barcelona und Turin 1950 bis 1975’, in Lenger and Tenfelde, Die europäische Stadt, 417–36, here 425–8; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia.

58 See, among others, House and MacMaster, Paris 1961 or, on a much less prominent case in Leeds, Aspden, Kester, Nationality: Wog. The Hounding of David Oluwale (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007)Google Scholar.

59 Spicka, Mark E., ‘City Policy and Guest Workers in Stuttgart, 1955–1973’, German History, 31 (2013), 345–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chabal, Emile, ‘Managing the Postcolony: Minority Politics in Montpellier, c. 1960–2010’, Contemporary European History, 23 (2014), 237–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buettner, Elizabeth, ‘Going for an Indian: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 80 (2008), pp. 865–901CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Möhring, Maren, Fremdes Essen: Die Geschichte der ausländischen Gastronomie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Auslander, Leora, ‘Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40 (2005), 237–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meng, Michael L., Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Thomas Bender, ‘History, Theory & the Metropolis’ (2006), available at www.geschundkunstgesch.tu-berlin.de/uploads/media/005-2006_03.pdf (last visited 28 Aug. 2014), quotations 3, 2.