文章基本信息

标题：Traces of Utopia: Socialist Values and Soviet Urban Planning
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作者：J. C. Myers
期刊名称：Cultural Logic : an Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice
电子版ISSN：1097-3087
出版年度：2008
出版社：Department of English and Foreign Languages
摘要：Not long after the most recent turn of the century, but well past the point at which a wide variety of commentators had signed and date-stamped socialism’s death certificate, the publisher of a libertarian website made a disturbing discovery: the criticisms of suburban sprawl articulated by planners advocating “smart growth” matched almost exactly the vision put forward by Soviet urban planners in a book entitled The Ideal Communist City. Mixed-use development would facilitate access to public services. High-density housing would promote equality and community. Public transportation would ease congestion by reducing the need for private automobiles. The New Urbanism was nothing short of a communist plot and its outcome, the author of Vanishing Automobile Update #53 warned, would be just as grim and foreboding as the gray world once enclosed within the Iron Curtain.1 In one sense, of course, this was the sort of hysterical slippery slope paranoia that would have made Colonel Jack Ripper proud: If the communists tie their shoes with bows, we’d better use square knots! Fallacious reasoning along these lines was certainly not new in American society, but in2005 it was strangely anachronistic. Yet, despite its rather feverish overtones, the recognition of a connection between urban planning and the socialist tradition was not altogether inaccurate. Socialist politics and urban planning do have something to do with each other, and understanding their relationship to one another can help us to transcend the ways in which both friends and enemies of the socialist tradition have often misrepresented many of its most important elements.