HTC Forum Maria Taylor: From Microclimates to Microraions: Unbundling the Ambitions of Soviet Urban Greening

ABSTRACT:

Urban greenspace was an infrastructure of Soviet modernity. This talk examines the confluence of politics, plants, and place in the USSR, analyzing Soviet urbanists’ management of industrial pollution, everyday environments, and urban forests from the 1930s era of rapid industrialization to the late 20th-century emergence of a mass environmental movement. It draws from Taylor’s current book project, Between Forest and Factory, identifying the urban roots of Soviet environmentality in relation to garden-factories, microdistricts, cities “melting into greenery” and other typologies of socialist urbanism. By bringing insights from ecocriticism and materiality studies into conversation with urban landscapes from Tbilisi to Tashkent, this work contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship about non-Western environmentality, the transnational history of urban climatology, and 20th-century attitudes toward nature and ecology. Urban greening efforts enrolled both professionals and populace in the shaping of distinctively socialist ambitions. Building cities that were “hygienic, cultured and green” meant adapting standardized planting schemes to an immense range of climates and conditions. Abundant greenery was expected to ameliorate industrial living conditions, provide a communal amenity and index differences vis-à-vis capitalist urbanism and consumption. Eventually, when the trees intended to mitigate industrial hazards perished, so did the state-socialist political project of civic engineering.

BIO:  

Maria C. Taylor is a historian and theorist of urban and landscape design, with regional expertise in Eastern Europe, Siberia, and Soviet Central Asia. Prior to joining Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture (College of Agriculture and Life Sciences), she was a Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanitites at Princeton University, and Emerging Educator in Design at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. Taylor earned a PhD at University of Michigan, where she received the Distinguished Dissertation in Architecture Award. Taylor holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Washington and a MA in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies from Stanford University. 

HTC Forum is made possible with the support of Thomas Beischer (Phd, 2004)