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KI generiert: Das Bild zeigt eine Gruppe von Menschen, die gemeinsam auf einer Treppe draußen vor einem modernen Gebäude stehen. Es scheint eine Versammlung oder ein Gruppenfoto zu sein, möglicherweise im Rahmen einer Veranstaltung oder eines Seminars.

UrbanHIST | 20th Century European Urbanism

The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (Sweden), Universidad de Valladolid (Spain) and Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika v Košiciach (Slovakia) ran the European Joint Doctorate Programme UrbanHIST | 20th Century European Urbanism together with 13 European partner organisations, including the Stadtmuseum Dresden, from October 2016 to July 2021. The programme was funded as part of the Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodovska-Curie Action.

The Stadtmuseum Dresden hosted doctoral students for several months as part of the urbanHIST programme. They were supervised by Dr Claudia Quiring, curator for architectural history and urban development.

The history of Europe in the 20th century is, to a significant extent, the history of the deliberate development of cities through public urban planning. Urban planning contributed significantly to the development of the welfare state, strong economies and a comparatively balanced settlement structure. On no other continent has public spatial planning been used as a political instrument to such an extent. Democratic and emancipatory social projects have resorted to it just as much as dictatorial and reactionary ones. Sometimes the direct, material impact of planning programmes was only minor. 

For the first time, experts from different parts of the continent and different disciplines, who have been working on planning history for a long time and form a concentration of expertise that is unique in Europe, worked together to understand the basic lines, the astonishing changes and the history of European urban planning in the 20th century in a coherent way.urbanHIST divided this previously confusing overall subject into eight thematic areas, which were worked on between 2017 and 2021:

1. »Historiography of European urbanism«
2. »Urbanism, political and development strategies«
3. »Public Infrastructure, Social Housing and Evolution of Cities«
4. »Heritage and Urbanism in Europe«
5. »Central Europe since the fall of Austro-Hungarian Empire through dictatorships of the 20th century to European Union«
6. »Urbanism, architecture and building of national identity«
7. »The establishment of urbanism as profession and discipline«
8. »Planning for the growth society and the emergence of sustainability«

www.urbanhist.eu

PhD students | Researchers in Dresden


Azmah Arzmi

Secondment to Dresden Jan – March 2018

Contact: azmah.arzmi@uni-weimar.de
Education: Masters in Architecture (M.Sc.), University of Kent
Supervision: M. Welch Guerra (BUW), M. Spurný (UPJŠ) 

Research Project: Central planned economies and weak urban planning. Explaining a paradox in the European countries of state socialism.

Objective: This IRP aims to provide an analysis of the relationship between urbanism and dominant steering mechanisms in two state socialist nations with divergent political approaches. The Soviet Union and – in the second half of the 20th century – the countries in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe applied urbanism as an important instrument for the implementation of development strategies. Although there were regional differences (e. g. between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union), the centrally planned economies went generally along weak urban planning.

»With land nationalization and restriction of private land ownership, it may be tempting to assume that the countries of centrally-planned economy would be better in urban planning. However, in the former socialist states of Central and East Europe, urban planning has always been subjugated to heavy industrialization and other aspects of sectoral plannings. Thus, I intend to use this paradox as an initial idea to explore further and do a comparative study between the GDR and Czechoslovakia of its different historical phases, political processes and other factors that formed the cities of its time.«

Elvira Khairullina

Secondment to Dresden Jan – March 2018

Contact: elvira.khairullina@alumnos.uva.es
Education: M.A. in Urban Planning, University of Granada
Supervision: L. Santos y Ganges (UVa), J. Hofierka (UPJŠ)

Research Project: Contemporary History of Technical Infrastructures in European Cities and in Urban Planning

Objective: The research objective is to contribute to the knowledge about road infrastructure and transport planning and its role in urban transformation in Eastern European cities in socialist period. The topic will be approached from the perspective of history including 3 main focuses: history of socialism, history of urban planning and road infrastructure planning history in conjunction with the city. Through the analysis of urban theory and different contexts it is expected to determine the level of interrelation of theoretical ideas in road infrastructure planning, as well as applying comparative analysis of case studies to identify its specific contexts and urban characteristics.

»I plan to identify the interrelations of currents and patterns of ideas in planning transport infrastructure, as well as their urban characteristics in order to contribute to an overview on the planning of the cities of Eastern Europe during the socialist period.«

KI generiert: Das Bild zeigt einen Banner mit dem Titel "History of European Urbanism in the 20th Century". Der Hauptinhalt des Bildes ist die Ankündigung eines Themas oder Projekts über die Geschichte des europäischen Urbanismus im 20. Jahrhundert.
KI generiert: Das Bild zeigt die Flagge der Europäischen Union, welche aus einem blauen Hintergrund mit einem Kreis von zwölf goldenen Sternen besteht. Die Sterne symbolisieren Einheit, Solidarität und Harmonie unter den Völkern Europas.
KI generiert: Das Bild zeigt das Logo des Horizon 2020 Programms der Europäischen Union, einem Rahmenprogramm für Forschung und Innovation. Im Zentrum des Bildes steht die Weltkugel, umgeben von einem blauen Hintergrund und dem Schriftzug "Horizon 2020".