IN-PERSON London. Section A

Abstract

The 1920s saw the proliferation of urban theories that advocated an equitable redistribution of resources in the Soviet Union. Dubbed disurbanism, this movement advocated a progressive erasure of cities through the scattering of small-scale settlements across the entirety of the country. The primary target of such projects was the Eastern part of the vast territory of the USSR, encompassing large parts of Siberia and the Far East, which were occupied by an array of indigenous peoples. A particular model of urbanization, the linear city, emerged as a domineering pattern in this context, exemplified by Ivan Leonidov’s plan for the new settlement of Magnitogorsk, Ural Mountains (1930), a twenty-five-kilometer-long strip of housing and service buildings lined by a highway which resembled a straightened, modernized version of the “Ciudad Lineal” of Spanish planner Arturo Soria y Mata (1882). The radical visions of the disurbanists were intimately tied to the rapid electrification of their country, a process which, far from liberating the traditional owners of the lands of Siberia, accelerated their demise. This paper investigates the interplay between the projects of the disurbanists, who saw Siberia as a testing ground for their theories, and the push for the Sovietization of the Far East as a new frontier for the fledgling USSR. More specifically, the paper considers the role played by the figure of the line in the colonization of Siberia and the Far East, putting into perspectives the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway and the radical projects of the disurbanists.