The Sovietcityasalandscapeinthemakingplanningbuildingandappropriating Samarkandc 1960 S 80 S

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The Soviet city as a landscape in the making: planning, building and

appropriating Samarkand, c. 1960s–80s
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DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2022.2060937
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The Soviet city as a landscape in the making:

planning, building and appropriating Samarkand,
c.1960s–80s
Jonas van der Straeten & Mariya Petrova
To cite this article: Jonas van der Straeten & Mariya Petrova (2022) The Soviet city as a
landscape in the making: planning, building and appropriating Samarkand, c.1960s–80s, Central
Asian Survey, 41:2, 297-321, DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2022.2060937
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CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY
2022, VOL. 41, NO. 2, 297–321
https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2022.2060937
The Soviet city as a landscape in the making: planning,

building and appropriating Samarkand, c.1960s–80s
a b
Jonas van der Straeten * and Mariya Petrova
a
Project ‘A Global History of Technology 1850–2000’, Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt,
Germany; bLeibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper traces the changes and continuities in the cityscape of Uzbekistan; history;
Soviet Samarkand following the launch of the mass housing technology; building; urban
campaign under Nikita Khrushchev. It examines the planning, planning; housing
building, appropriation, and renovation of public and private
housing on the level of practices rather than policies and
discourses. The paper relates these practices to the specific
temporalities of Samarkand’s landscape, such as the life cycles of
inhabitants, the change of seasons, or the timelines of material
decay, among others. It shows that self-help building often
proved to be more effective than state projects in addressing
these temporalities. Drawing on site-specific cultural, material,
and technical repertoires, self-help building was more than a
pragmatic reaction to the housing shortage. It sustained the
traditional Central Asian neighbourhood that Soviet planners
hoped to banish from the urban landscape and was key to the
expansion and diversification, rather than homogenization, of the
‘Soviet’ cityscape.
Introduction
In 1979, the German geographer Ernst Giese published a chapter in an edited volume
on ‘The Socialist City’ (Giese 1979). His pioneering study, as the title indicates, was dedi-
cated to identifying the general patterns of the ‘transformation of Islamic cities in
Soviet Middle Asia into Socialist cities’. Giese provided a typology differentiating
between three elements of cities such as Samarkand, Bukhara, Kokand and Tashkent:
the Islamic city, much of which in Samarkand dates back to the Timurid period
(1370–1449) and the subsequent Turkic and Persian rulers; the Russian colonial city
built next to the old core during Tsarist rule (1868–1917); and the Socialist city,
which Soviet administrations had been aspiring to build since the early 1920s. His
assessment of which of these areas signified the future of urban Central Asia echoed
that of Soviet urban planners at the time.
CONTACT Jonas van der Straeten vanderstraeten@pg.tu-darmstadt.de

*Present address: History Lab, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
298 J. VAN DER STRAETEN AND M. PETROVA
The living quarter of the Russian town, and later those of the extended Soviet town, devel-
oped into favoured housing areas,’ Giese wrote, ‘while the native town, with inferior facilities
(especially sanitation), declined to become the housing area of the poor. (Giese 1979, 155)
Except for a few historic monuments, he continued, the Islamic old towns had ‘either been
destroyed or to a great extend supplanted’ and the ‘traditional residential communities’
within them had ‘dissolved for good, being replaced by residential communities of the
socialist pattern’ (155, 156). The chapter also included a map of Samarkand, indicating
the three types of settlement in different colours (Figure 1).
An aerial view of present-day Samarkand, however, retrospectively reveals some inac-
curacies in both Giese’s analysis of urban transformation and his map.1 Except for a small
block opposite Registan Square, the residential parts of the Islamic city have neither been
demolished nor supplanted, despite plans by Soviet planners to do so in 1963. Practically
none of the areas marked in Giese’s map as ‘Soviet extension’ feature state-built housing.
Instead, they host a belt of regularly and irregularly built private houses that grew from
the 1960s onwards around the centre. Being built from adobe bricks and featuring the
layout of the traditional Central Asian courtyard house, the buildings in this ‘Soviet exten-
sion’ resemble those in the quarters of the Islamic city (called mahallas). They form a strik-
ing contrast to the prefabricated, multi-storey apartment buildings that were built by the
state on a relatively modest scale on the western fringes of Samarkand (outside the par-
ameters of Giese’s map). Contrary to Tashkent, where almost all the old Islamic quarters
made way for prefabricated apartment buildings (Stronski 2010), neither the sweeping
redevelopment plans for Samarkand’s centre, nor its Soviet extension transformed it
Figure 1. Ernst Giese, map of Samarkand in 1973 entitled ‘The socialist city’.Source: Giese (1979, 158).
Reused with permission.
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY 299
Figure 2. Aerial view of Samarkand in 2020 showing the old city (yellow), the colonial city (green), and
Soviet-era apartment blocks and micro-rayons (orange). The areas of the city that are not coloured
feature a mix of private dwellings, commercial and administrative buildings. The white box indicates
the boundaries of the map by Ernst Giese (see Figure 1). Numbers indicate the approximate location of
respondents’ houses. Source: Copernicus Sentinel data 2020, modified by the authors.
into what Giese defined as a socialist city (Figure 2). By and large, Samarkand remained a
city of adobe bricks and vernacular architecture until the end of Soviet rule and beyond.
In a recent essay, Debjani Bhattacharyya argues that a ‘map-mindedness governs the
visual framing of spaces’ and call us to ‘decolonize our visual literacy’ (Bhattacharyya
2020). She illustrates her point using the example of colonial Calcutta in India where much
of the economic and spiritual life was structured by the tides of the Hooghly River.
However, the maps drawn by British cartographers deliberately ignored the moving land
and waterscapes created by the tides, effectively erasing key elements of the city’s tempor-
ality and materiality from historic memory. In a similar vein, our paper explores those material
and temporal qualities of Central Asian cities that often remain hidden or misrepresented in
Soviet maps, archives, public and expert discourses – and concordantly, in historical studies
using them as their source. Thus, we intend to trace the changes and continuities in the build-
ing fabric of Samarkand’s urban landscape and its major infrastructures (heating and water)
during the last three decades of Soviet rule. Instead of official discourses, our study focuses on
the practices of both state and non-state actors that shaped the city’s material constitution.
The three empirical sections of this paper address, first, the planning and building of houses;
second, their appropriation and infrastructure provision; and third, their maintenance and
repair. We scrutinize the temporalities these practices are embedded in, including the life
cycles of inhabitants, the change of seasons, the timelines of building and decay, as well
as the administrative cycles. In so doing, we draw on ideas on the temporality of the
landscape proposed by Tim Ingold, who conceptualizes the landscape as being permanently
in the making and rejects the idea of it possessing any kind of definite form (Ingold 1993). Fur-
thermore, we explore the frameworks of agency both of individual and state actors when it
came to coping with or keeping in sync with these temporalities.
The starting point for our study is the mass housing campaign launched by the Nikita
Khrushchev administration in the late 1950s and which reached Samarkand in 1961. The
campaign was not only about the creation of new housing space. In architectural journals,
state planners described it as an opportunity to eliminate ‘primitive, unhygienic and ram-
shackle housing’ in Uzbek cities, which they considered ‘not appropriate to enter the era of
communism’.2 However, instead of replacing Samarkand’s mix of residential areas that
differed in age, building style and materials with a homogenous and unified socialist citys-
cape, the mass housing campaign ultimately contributed to its further diversification. As we
will argue, this diversification cannot be exclusively understood in terms of the deficiencies
of the Soviet command economy, or in terms of the uneven geographies of housing result-
ing from the ‘spatio-temporal projection of priorities onto the urban landscape’ (Gentile
2019, 55). Equally important are site-specific practices of self-help housing construction,
modification, and renovation, and the traditions embodied in the vernacular architecture.
To understand the impact of these practices and traditions on the urban landscape, we
believe there is a need to look beyond their residual nature. Samarkand’s adobe brick
houses did not merely persist as remnants of the ‘ancien régime’ that Soviet planners tried
to eradicate (Bocharnikova and Harris 2018, 4), but were crucial in sustaining and bolstering
the city’s vital functions. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union (especially in its periphery), self-
help construction in Samarkand was a pragmatic reaction to a range of issues that have
been extensively studied (for a review, see, e.g., Gentile and Sjöberg 2013), including the per-
sistent shortage of state housing, the ‘tyranny of the waiting list’ (Gentile and Sjöberg 2013,
178) in housing allocation, and, more generally, an ‘under-urbanization’ resulting from the
fact that industrialization constantly outpaced urbanization (Murray and Szelényi 1984).
Yet, almost all this literature dismisses the privately built neighbourhoods as ‘typically
poorly located and poorly serviced’ (Gentile and Sjöberg 2013, 179) settlements. Such state-
ments arguably underestimate the agency of residents to shape their material environments,
and the internal diversity of the Soviet Union regarding the cultural, material, and technical
repertoires that they employed for this purpose. At best, these repertoires can only partly be
uncovered in maps, official archives, and published sources.
Our study draws on in-depth oral history interviews – a source that has arguably
remained rather neglected in the historiography of Central Asian cities. Twelve interviews
(Table 1) were conducted in 2016 and 2018 with owners of houses and apartments in
different neighbourhoods of Samarkand (locations are indicated in Figure 2). They comp-
lement written sources from state archives in Samarkand and Tashkent, along with pub-
lished literature, most notably the journal Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana
(Construction and Architecture in Uzbekistan), founded in 1960.
Making socialist cities, making cities socialist: literature review and

interpretative framework
In the three decades since 1989, historical research on socialist cities has flourished. While
studies from the Cold War era had primarily focused on the general capacity of the
Table 1. Interviews conducted.

Name code (real Age
name withheld) Date Type of housing Occupation (years)
1 Wladimir 29 July 2018 Flat in a prefabricated Retired, former 68 Audio
apartment architect transcript
2 Rano and Dilya 17 September Private house in the ‘old Private-hotel 52, 56 Audio
2018 city’ owners transcript
3 Bakhrom 18 September Private house in a Soviet- Architect 63 Written
2018 period residential area notes
4 Natalya 20 September Flat in a prefabricated Taylor 63 Audio
2018 apartment transcript
5 Boris and 21 September Private house in the Retired, former 81, 79 Audio
Yevgeniya 2018 colonial part of the city engineer transcript
6 Mukhabbat 22 September Private house in the semi- Accountant 64 Audio
2018 rural suburbs of transcript
Samarkand
7 Anvar 25 September Private house in the ‘old Tourist-vintage About Audio
2018 city’ shopkeeper 55–60 transcript
8 Tatyana 26 September Private house in a Soviet- Construction 68 Written
2018 period residential area engineer notes
9 Said 27 September Private house in the ‘old Cook 65 Audio
2018 city’ transcript
10 Nelya 29 September Private house in the Historian, private About Audio
2018 university campus tourist guide 55–60 transcript
11 Nazar and Olga 15 September Private house in a Soviet- Accountant and 65, 62 Written
2016 period residential area teacher notes
12 Makhmud 20 September Private house in a Soviet- Retired, former taxi 78 Written
2016 period residential area driver notes
socialist system to generate housing for its citizens and transform its cities (e.g., DiMaio
1974; Andrusz 1984), more recent scholarship has produced comprehensive historical
analyses of individual cities. Yet, in their selection of case studies, most authors have con-
centrated on the ‘big’ stories of socialist urban transformation, including national capital
cities (e.g., Bohn 2008), industrial monocities (e.g., Kotkin 1997) or socialist showcase pro-
jects (e.g., Lebow 2013; Schwenkel 2020). Others have focused on the rise of the prefab-
ricated socialist housing block as the dominant form of urban housing (e.g., Zarecor 2011).
Central Asia is no exception. Stronski’s (2010) pioneering monograph on Tashkent (which
ends with the earthquake of 1966) stands out as the most comprehensive among the few
monographs on individual cities in the region (see also Buttino 2020; Petrova 2021). With
good reason, Stronski (2010) echoes the narrative of Soviet planners who turned Islamic
cities into socialist ones – albeit paying more attention to the often messy and disorga-
nized nature of urban planning and the reactions of their residents to these measures.
Our study contributes to this debate by revisiting the narrative of a ‘socialist transform-
ation’ through the lens of material practices and temporalities. We argue that this per-
spective brings to the fore some site-specific processes and practices that have played
a key role in making and unmaking the socialist urban landscape, but which have received
little attention in the historiography of the socialist city, comprising a gap in the literature
we aim to address. The focus on the privileged locations and technologies within the
Soviet ‘landscape of priorities’ has arguably led to excessive emphasis on the ability of
the state to shape urban futures. Most authors situate this power almost exclusively on
the side of the officials, planners, and architects who imagine, plan, and thereby create
the city, whereas the residents are left to resist or acquiesce to these plans. This interpret-
ation is reinforced by heavy reliance on correspondence, statistics, and maps from official
archives, as well as on published sources. However, evidence from municipal archives and
especially our oral interviews paints a different picture. The residents of Soviet Samarkand
were undoubtedly subject to the particular mix of welfare and coercion, including
instances of forced displacement, characteristic of Soviet urban planning. Yet, for better
or worse, a substantial part of them had ample autonomy (or were simply left alone)
when it came to housing. We believe, therefore, that the fact the respective practices
of self-help construction and their imprint on the urban landscape are not well under-
stood stems from a second gap in the literature.
In the last two decades, several studies on material culture in the Soviet Union have
proven especially productive for understanding the relationship between individual
households and state ideology. This debate concentrates almost exclusively on those
areas and domains of daily life in which the state held almost total hegemonic power,
such as urban planning, architecture, or industrial design. Prominent examples are
Victor Buchli’s historical ‘ethno-archaeology’ of the experimental Narkomfin complex in
Moscow (Buchli 1999), or the studies by Steven E. Harris (Harris 2013) and Susan Reid
(e.g., Reid 2019) on how living in state-built apartments shaped the vernacular experience
of the Khrushchev-era modernization wave. This debate arguably comes with a tendency
to generalize observations from case studies on the European part of the USSR (or other
Eastern European countries) into an experience of the Khrushchev-era mass housing
shared across the Eastern Bloc.
Recent studies have brought global differentiations and new directions to the debate
(e.g., Palmarola and Ignacio Alonso 2014; Schwenkel 2020). Among these works, Christina
Schwenkel’s (Schwenkel 2020) study stands out, a multisite, multivocal historical ethno-
graphy of a development project from the GDR for mass housing in Vietnam. She meti-
culously reconstructs how competing visions of socialist housing clashed in the
planning processes; how residents appropriated modernist forms and spaces in a way
that alarmed authorities; and how the premature decay of buildings turned the
promise of socialist housing for eternity into a ‘landscape of inhabited socialist ruins’
(4). Still, her ethnography seldom departs from the high-rise, mass-produced buildings
of the project site. Related scholarship on Central Asian cities includes Buchli’s (2007)
reflections on how the debate on modernity and social progress has shaped the urban
materialities of Astana (today Nur-Sultan), or Mateusz Laszczkowski’s account of how resi-
dents in an apartment block in the same city struggle to organize repair and maintenance
(Laszczkowski 2015). Both authors aim for ethnographies of present-day urban conditions
rather than historical analyses.
What happened to those people who did not move into state-built apartments? How
did their frameworks of individual action (Kotkin 1997, 2) compare with those of the
dwellers of state housing? How did their choices and practices impact on the cityscape
as a whole? To answer these questions, our paper extends the scope beyond processes
of material and spatial appropriation in state-built mass housing. It pays specific attention
to practices of self-help building, which have been acknowledged as an integral element
of the mass housing campaign in its early stages (Smith 2010, 36, 89; Bohn 2008, 197;
Andrusz 1984, 99–109), and as a general (informal) reaction to the shortage of state
housing (Gentile and Sjöberg 2013, 179). However, they have rarely been unpacked in
terms of the underlying site-specific conditions and repertoires that differed considerably
throughout the socialist world.
To situate these practices in the cultural landscape of Central Asia, our analysis profits
from growing interest in the material constitution of state, sociality, and daily life in the
region (for a review, see Van der Straeten 2019). Particularly instructive regarding verna-
cular housing and building traditions are: Wladimir Sgibnev’s study on the social pro-
duction of space in the Tajik city of Khujand (Sgibnev 2018); Christilla Marteau
D’Autry’s ethnographical account of communal work, called hashar, in a neighbourhood
of Samarkand (Marteau D’Autry 2011); or Enrico Fodde’s article on adobe brick architec-
ture in the Zarafshan area of Tajikistan (Fodde 2009). These studies are ethnographical
rather than historical in their approach, and seldomly reach further back than the dissol-
ution of the USSR. An exception is the recently translated monograph on Samarkand by
Buttino (2020), who meticulously traces the changes in its urban and social life since 1945
through biographies of people in four different ethnic mahallas. However, he addresses
the city’s spatio-material transformation only superficially.
How can we make these culturally sensitive accounts of urban life and material prac-
tices in Central Asia productive in understanding the transformation of entire cityscapes
under Soviet rule? To answer this question, we can borrow concepts from historical
anthropology that conceive the landscape as being permanently incorporated and
shaped by a complex set of human practices, natural cycles, and material transformations.
This ‘dwelling perspective’, as Ingold (1993, 152) called it, has recently witnessed a revival,
especially in infrastructure research, serving also as a heuristic device for our study of
urban change in Soviet Samarkand.3 Ingold calls for the need to understand the form
of the landscape through its intrinsic temporality, which is not defined by any regular
system of dated time intervals (e.g., clock time, calendars), but rather inheres in the pat-
terns of dwelling activities that shape it. Accordingly, to temporalize our maps of Central
Asian cities, it is not sufficient to craft chronologies of urban change that try to identify
significant events, periods or transitions, to then situate them on a linear, universal time-
line. In our analysis, we also aim to identify and describe some of the crucial place-specific
processes and dwelling activities, read the signatures they have left in the landscape, and
explore the relationship between preconceived ideas and plans of the city. By contrasting
official planning discourses with actual practices of making the city, we show that the
‘Soviet extension’ of Samarkand needs to be understood as a result of myriad practices
on the ‘micro’ level, such as (self-help) building, modification and renovation, as much
as of urban planning on the ‘macro’ level.
Grounding the urban revolution: building Samarkand’s future in the

1960s
Well into the 1950s, Uzbek cities were still firmly in the grip of a housing crisis that had
been aggravated by the evacuation and deportation of hundreds of thousands of
people to Central Asia during the Second World War. Under the Stalin administration,
with its obsession for heavy industry, attempts to achieve an effective and coherent
housing policy were incipient, at best (Smith 2010, 58). This oversight could be felt in
Samarkand, where the population had jumped from 136,000 to 202,000 in the two
decades after 1939, but the built surface had remained almost unchanged.4 In 1961,
the average living space per capita in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) was still
a mere 5.6 m2, well below the so-called ‘sanitary norm’ of 9 m2.5 Low-rise, adobe brick
houses continued to dominate Samarkand’s cityscape. An inventory report by the city

administration in 1951 revealed that 70% of dwellings were made of adobe bricks and
25% of timber-frame structures with adobe filling.6 This applied also to many residential
buildings in the colonial part of the city (Nil’sen 1988, 106). Their spacious courtyards had
been filled with rudimentary structures to accommodate war refugees and deportees.
These common yards (obšiy dvor) had turned from an emergency measure into a perma-
nent feature of the cityscape (Buttino 2015, 69).
The shift in dynamics of the way Samarkand’s urban landscape was transformed from
the late 1950s onwards was closely linked to the beginning of the mass housing cam-
paign, albeit not in the way Soviet urban planners had expected. Coming to power in
1953, Khrushchev brought housing to the forefront of the more benevolent brand of
socialism he promoted. In a decree passed in 1957, the administration committed to pro-
viding separate living space for every family in the Soviet Union within twelve years.
Beyond addressing the housing crisis, the decree formed part and parcel of Khrushchev’s
proclaimed rush towards ‘full communism’ (Hanson 1997, 176). The new housing ideals
were epitomized in the concept of the micro-district (mikrorayon), self-contained neigh-
bourhoods that would provide rent-free apartments for about five to twenty thousand
people, carefully calculated levels of public service, and connection to a wider network
of centralized services (Smith 2010, 116–17).
In Central Asia, this vision of proto-communist housing was popularized in movies such
as Mahallada duv duv gap (1960 – Тhe Whole Mahalla is Talking About It).7 The lively
comedy revolves around a young couple living in the last remnants of one of Tashkent’s
old mahallas and working on the construction site of new multi-storey apartment blocks
that have already enclosed their neighbourhood. In the end, the progressive prevails over
the backward. The couple finally manages to marry and thus avert a marriage arranged by
the parents. One of the last scenes shows families from the mahalla cheerfully carrying
modern furniture into newly built state apartments that they have received.
The movie’s humorous undertone sugar-coated an uncompromising attitude towards
Uzbekistan’s legacy of vernacular adobe brick architecture. It suggested that societal
change was inextricably linked to material change, and the nature of this change was
revolutionary rather than reformist. Urban planners, almost none of whom were ethnic
Uzbek at that time, were convinced that the mahalla was set to disappear. In 1962,
Mitkhat Bulatov, the head architect of Tashkent, declared nine of the 17 million m2 of
existing housing in the Uzbek SSR outright unworthy of preservation.8 In 1964, a group
of architects published plans for the demolition of the old city quarters of Samarkand
and their redevelopment into a unified city centre, featuring multi-storey apartment
buildings.9
In the early 1960s, Samarkand witnessed the rise of the first apartment blocks of this
novel type on Dehqon Street (today Gagarin Street), where the Uzbek State Committee
for Construction (Gosstroi) had ordered the construction of 15,000 m2 of housing space.
The first of these houses were still built from burned bricks, before a Kombinat dedicated
to prefabricating concrete panels, opened in 1961 on the western outskirts of the city, had
gained sufficient production capacity to supply the construction sites of several housing
projects in its vicinity. It would take until the end of the 1960s for Samarkand’s first two
micro-districts to be completed.10 As state planning and construction left its visible
imprints on the city’s periphery, its core remained almost entirely unaffected.
While state projects were concentrated solely on the city’s western outskirts, the
margins and free spaces elsewhere were filled with private housing. A programme for
‘individual construction’ had initially been an important component of Khrushchev’s
mass housing campaign.11 This widely overlooked policy provided the opportunity for
many families to acquire plots, specific credits and manuals for self-help construction.
In the late 1950s, the administration began imposing restrictions on the programme
out of concerns for increasing infrastructure costs, uncontrolled urban expansion, and
the aesthetic appearance of these houses (Smith 2010). In Samarkand, however, self-
help building, also termed semi-officially ‘chastnyi sektor’ (private sector), persisted and
accounted for the bulk of newly created housing space. Between 1957 and 1967, the
city’s executive council distributed more than 6000 plots measuring 350–600 m2 to
private builders. A comparable number of houses was reportedly built without official
permits. The high degree of private and partly unregulated construction did not only
reflect the silent recognition of the state’s limited capacity to meet the growing
demand for housing. It was also a result of recurring conflicts between the city adminis-
tration and the surrounding kolkhozes for scarce land, in which both sides attempted to
bring about done deeds by distributing building plots (Petrova 2021).
In theory, these single-family houses were as much subject to state regulation and
standardization as their prefabricated multi-storey counterparts. These standardized
designs reflected what architects assumed to be the actual and future demographics of
the Soviet Union, with little local variation. The core family, consisting of two adults
and not more than three children served as an almost universal planning unit. Private
builders were usually assigned one of the few standard designs for detached houses of
two to four rooms with a square-shaped (about 10 × 10 m) or rectangular (about 8 ×
10 m) layout (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Soviet-era standardized design for a single-family house. Source: Copyright: Mariya Petrova.
In practice, municipal authorities had limited resources to monitor private builders’

compliance with standard designs and land use plans, so many of the latter pursued
their own visions of housing, differing decisively from that of the state.12 People built
unauthorized extensions or obtained more plots than they were officially entitled to –
in one case, six adjoined plots for different members of the extended family.13 The com-
pletion of a detached house was the starting point, rather than the end for long-term
housing visions. When Bakhrom was a schoolboy, his father had already started building
an additional house on the opposite side of the courtyard for his son’s future family.14 The
tedious efforts of obtaining materials such as beams, boards or laths required long plan-
ning horizons and incremental building. Other families made provisions for building
activities that were even decades ahead by following a local rural tradition of planting
trees upon a child’s birth.15 A plantation of poplar trees, planted by one interviewee’s
family in the 1960s, provided wood for the reconstruction of their house in the 1980s,
and again in the 2010s.16
Most industrially manufactured materials were in constant shortage, prohibitively
expensive or reserved for government construction projects.17 For masonry, however,
Samarkand’s loess subsoils provided a remedy. Almost all private builders sourced
adobe locally from the ground, making them independent of the formal command
economy. However, construction had to be in sync with certain seasonal temporalities:
adobe bricks were usually produced in the early summer months and were ready for con-
struction in late summer. An usto, a master (or foreman) with expertise in the traditional
technology, would guide crews of two to three workers who had to form a total of 12,000–
16,000 bricks required for a single-family house.18
The absence of a formal open market to procure the labour and services required,
meant elaborate self-help and labour strategies were needed to accomplish this
arduous task. Along with some informal day labourers, house builders recruited man-
power from a wider circle of relatives or neighbours. In so doing, many builders relied
on hashar, a tradition of kinship or neighbourhood help. The emphasis that a house
was built or extended ‘by hashar’ was a recurring theme in our interviews and an apparent
source of pride.19 The term featured prominently in private and official narratives about
Central Asian cultural heritage and identity and came to be deliberately used in public
discourse as a translation of Soviet forms of collective work such as subbotnik (Van der
Straeten and Petrova 2021, 131–32; Marteau D’Autry 2011, 292). It seems therefore unsur-
prising that our respondents did not frame their accounts of hashar as being at odds with
the Soviet state ideology or embedded in a larger moral–political critique of a socialist
state that neglects its citizens, as Fehérváry described in the case of Hungary, for
example (Fehérváry 2009, 455).
The standpoint of urban planners was less conciliatory, however. In 1966, A. Kogan, the
director of Samarkand’s architectural planning bureau, complained that the major
obstacle to the state-led redevelopment of Samarkand was ‘the attraction of the local
population to the land, to individual housing with a plot of land’.20 After all, both
modes of building competed for scarce land. Still, every new state project sparked a
wave of self-help building since plots were preferably distributed to those who were
evicted from their homes for these projects (Petrova 2021, 58–59).
While self-help building was a widespread phenomenon in the post-war USSR, it
shaped Samarkand’s urban landscape in unique ways both regarding its extent and the
locally specific forms of vernacular architecture and neighbourhoods it created. Instead of

the notoriously monotonous cityscapes, the campaign led to the further diversification of
Samarkand’s building stock with a much higher share of privately built houses than antici-
pated by Soviet planners. Various factors were at play: while being promoted as manifes-
tations of socialist standardization and socio-spatial justice, the newly constructed
housing estates created new forms of social and, above all, socio-professional residential
segregation (e.g., French 1995). It seems plausible that this trend also translated into
ethnic segregation in housing in Central Asia, even though official archives generally
remained silent on the issue (cf. Gentile 2019).21
Besides the fact that living in state apartments remained an unrealistic prospect for
many families, our sources suggest that some people did not consider them particularly
desirable.22 The two- to three-room state apartments were too small to live in without
splitting up the typically large and multi-generational Uzbek and Tajik households.
They also lacked the possibilities that a privately owned plot offered for planting fruits
and vegetables or keeping small livestock.23
In comparison, self-help construction provided a solution for anyone with the necess-
ary skills and resources, who could build on a repertoire of local materials, know-how and
cultural practices that were also adopted by the different ethnic communities of post-war
Samarkand.24 State-led building, however, was entirely at the mercy of the command
economy which prioritized Tashkent as a showcase capital city regarding the supply of
materials, construction technology and labour, as official plans and statistics consistently
show. There, the earthquake of 1966 would also provide a unique opportunity for the
large-scale demolition and redevelopment of private housing districts.25
Regarding its temporal structure, self-help construction was characterized by opportu-
nism, incrementality and a higher willingness to accept provisional – and often quite pre-
carious – arrangements. Many building activities continued long after residents had
moved in and had accumulated sufficient financial and material resources, often in antici-
pation of future life-cycle events. In state projects, the ideological imperative of providing
fully serviced housing at mass scale within specified time intervals (annual goals, five-year
plans) presumed the synchronization of several interdependent processes (e.g., construc-
tion and infrastructure provision). The utopian nature of Khrushchev’s ‘campaignism’ pro-
vided an ideological justification to subordinate the process to the result, following an
economic rationale that Hanson has called a ‘sort of final-exam economy’ (Hanson
1997, viii). We will discuss the implications of this building rush in the following sections.
The landscape and the plan: making Socialism fit

The urban landscapes that the designers of the mass housing campaign intended to create
were ‘prefabricated’ beyond the narrow meaning of precast elements in construction.
Besides the goal of maximizing housing output, the standardized housing designs
reflected a preconception of the societal development path that all peoples of the Soviet
Union would follow. Accordingly, the two- to three-room state apartments were designed
to both address and expedite a general trend towards living in core families and can there-
fore be considered a form of social engineering. At the same time, they were also a practical
solution reconciling the idea of single-family occupancy with minimum living space norms
and a socialist system of housing distribution (Harris 2013, 71–108). This planning base
proved to be reasonably effective for addressing the communal housing problem in the
European part of the USSR. In the Uzbek SSR, however, both residents and professionals cri-
ticized the incommensurability of imported housing layouts with local demographic and
climate realities in a remarkably open discussion. Besides their unsuitability for large
families, the apartments in reinforced concrete buildings heated up unbearably in the
extreme summer heat and the small balcony they sometimes featured did not provide suit-
able outdoor living space (Stronski 2010, 227–28).
In this section, we turn to a range of practices that were – intentionally or unintention-
ally – aimed at reconciling the standard designs of a socialist urban landscape with the
needs and plans of dwellers in different types of housing. They included various strategies
for appropriating, adapting and repurposing spaces in state housing that have received
considerable scholarly attention (e.g., Reid 2019 for kitchens). As has been documented
for several socialist countries (e.g., Schwenkel 2020), many residents of prefabricated
apartment buildings in Samarkand closed their balconies to create additional living
space. The exterior of these buildings soon turned into a hodgepodge of self-made
window frames, in brick, plywood or other materials used to close the balconies –
making the author of a reader’s letter in Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana wonder
if a central supply of prefabricated window frames for this purpose could solve the
issue.26 No less importantly, in their search for recreational space for the summer, resi-
dents appropriated parts of the public courtyard in front of their houses, for example,
by turning them into fenced gardens. Both practices were ridiculed in a caricature in a
1962 issue of Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (Figure 4).
Some residents were even able to solve major design flaws. One respondent lived on
the ground floor of an apartment building with an entry door that faced the courtyard,
requiring its residents to walk several hundred metres to reach the road just next to it.
She would later breach the outer wall of a balcony and inset an exterior door to the
street.27 Nevertheless, the material constitution of apartment buildings raised clear
obstacles to adaptation and left some fundamental issues unresolved, most notably
their inadequacy regarding the requirements of an extended family.
Figure 4. Caricature ridiculing the widespread practice of closing balconies and appropriating outdoor
space. The caption translates as ‘behind the monastery wall’. Source: Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbe-
kistana (June 1962).
Figure 5. Sketch created by a respondent showing the transformation of a Soviet-era standardized

design for a single-family house (here referred to as ‘type project’) into a courtyard house. Source:
Copyright: Authors.
Note: Markings by the authors.
In the privately built areas, the availability of space and adobe as a building material
opened a much wider scope of action for adaptation. After completing the detached
houses according to the prescribed standard design, many private builders turned to
enclosing their plots with a wall and building extensions along its perimeters (Diener
and Gangler 2006, 154–67). Over time, their houses increasingly resembled the traditional
courtyard houses in the ‘old’ city (Figure 5), especially when house owners added charac-
teristic elements of Central Asian vernacular architecture, such as an aiwan (pergola).
Except for the colonial city, the courtyard house remained a widespread form of
private housing across different social strata and neighbourhoods, that considerably
differed regarding density and quality of life. While in some of the mahallas, the
cramped living conditions depicted in Soviet propaganda might have indeed existed,
the official housing statistics tended to provide a skewed picture of the situation. These
statistics only counted indoor living space, ignoring the outdoor space in the courtyards
where daily life took place most of the year (Rywkin 1980).
The reluctance of Old City dwellers to move into the ‘comfortable’ (blagoustroennye)
state apartments did not go unnoticed among architects and planners.28 In fact, most
authors acknowledged the suitability of low-rise housing (two to three stories) with
shaded courtyards or small gardens to the local climate and demography but subordi-
nated it to the primacy of cost and space efficiency, especially during the building rush
of the early 1960s.29 Initially, the discussion remained limited to the question of how to
identify ‘progressive’ elements of traditional architecture and incorporate them into the
designs for the prefabricated multi-storey apartment buildings.30 As more data on the
demographic structure, daily life and microclimate in the old city quarters became avail-
able, some architects asked on a more fundamental level what an Uzbek version of a
micro-district could look like. In 1965–66, the Tashkent Zonal Research Institute for Exper-
imental Planning (TASHZNIIEP) initiated an experimental project in Tashkent, fittingly
called mahalla-project, that aimed at combining the concept of a micro-district with
the ‘positive aspects of a traditional Uzbek town house’.31 In 1968, the researchers pre-
sented five versions of the mahalla-mikrorayon. Even though four of them included
only a small share of low-rise houses, they reflected a more reconciliatory approach
towards urban redevelopment. The project leader, Zlata Chebotareva, called for a
gradual redevelopment that would not destroy ‘neighbourhood and family ties that
have developed over the course of several generations’.32
Ultimately, however, the project was not pursued beyond a few experimental buildings
(Figure 6), most likely because the earthquake of April 1966 opened the possibility of an
all-out redevelopment of the city centre (Stronski 2010, 232).33 Probably for the same
reason, the Uzbek Gosstroi never followed up on a discussion of January 1966 on the con-
struction of ‘semi-detached/terraced’ houses for multi-generational families in Samar-
kand.34 In the end, architects and planners could not escape the straitjacket of an
ideological orthodoxy, stipulating that a communist future could not be built with
materials of the past. While emulating the layout of a courtyard house in their designs,
Figure 6. Aerial view of the experimental schemes for low-rise housing as part of the mahalla project.
Source: Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (August 1971).
even the researchers of the mahalla project made no mention of preserving the existing
housing stock but implied its replacement.35 After the 1966 earthquake, the low seismic
resistance of adobe provided an additional justification for the demolition of the old quar-
ters (Stronski 2010, 160, 271). At the same time, the implementation of experimental pro-
jects was constrained by questions of costs, the difficulties of adapting them to industrial-
scale production and to the guidelines of target population density.
Another argument for demolishing the old city quarters was the difficulty of connect-
ing them to networked infrastructures. If infrastructure provision was a yardstick for mod-
ernization, an on-site visit to a ‘traditional’ mahalla had created some cognitive
dissonance among some TASHZNIIEP researchers. In spite of what they considered inher-
ently backward housing conditions, they found that many houses were ‘electrified,
equipped with radios, and many families have TVs and so on’.36 While amenities such
as central heating and hot water remained restricted to state-built apartments, other net-
worked infrastructures such as electricity, water and gas found their way swiftly into the
new, privately built neighbourhoods and the old mahallas. Between 1950 and 1960, the
share of privately owned dwellings with connection to the electricity grid, for example,
increased from 29.1% to 83.4%.37 ‘Gasification’ took off in 1959.38
Accessing and appropriating state-built infrastructures required the typical repertoire
for manoeuvring one’s way through the Soviet bureaucracy, including the art of petition
writing. ‘In all houses there is electricity, television, waterpipes. Life and livelihood [byt …]
is improving day by day’, a petition by the committee of a neighbourhood located close to
the historical Gur-Emir mausoleum solemnly claimed.39 The mahalla committee (mahal-
linskij komitet), the equivalent of the housing committee (domovoj komitet) in the
micro-districts, acted as a broker between residents and the city’s executive council,
mediated conflicts and monitored building activities (Abashin 2011). The petition’s
language was carefully chosen to fit the ideological discourse to give weight to its
actual goal – convincing the city administration to asphalt a road and provide material
for cleaning the hauz (a basin for water storage).40
Oftentimes, residents of the mahalla seamlessly integrated new infrastructures into the
existing ensemble of technologies, as the example of heating shows. While public
housing increasingly relied on central heating, private houses continued to use stoves.
In 1971, 77% of buildings in the city were using a stove burning solid fuel.41 However,
when these houses were connected to the gas network, many of the stoves were refur-
bished to work with gas.42 When heating with gas was impossible or unaffordable,
people applied different coping strategies to save heating fuels, for example, by
heating only one room in the winter, or gathering around a traditional sandali, essentially
a low table under which live coals were placed in a hollow, covering their legs with a large
blanket.43 While it evoked nostalgic memories among several respondents, few would
have hesitated to replace their sandali with a (functioning) central heating system.
Soviet planners emphasized the unbridgeable chasm between the state-planned
socialist cityscape that catered to a modern and amenable life, on the one hand, and
the historically grown and intrinsically backward mahallas, on the other. When taking a
‘dwelling perspective’, however, we see that both forms of landscape converged con-
siderably through countless practices of adjustment, appropriation, and repurposing.
Many residents and especially dwellers of privately owned homes found themselves rela-
tively well equipped to access and appropriate some elements of the socialist cityscape.
Their appropriation activities were not mere reactions to the design flaws of Soviet plan-
ning and architecture but were inherently creative and future oriented. Furthermore, the
architects and planners – who naturally had their share in shaping the urban landscape –
faced both ideological and practical barriers in their attempt to adapt the standardized
housing designs to local needs and incorporate elements of traditional infrastructure.
Maintaining the new and renewing the old: managing decay in the
landscape
In a widely received essay, Steve Jackson asks what happens if we look at the world
through the lens of ‘erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and pro-
gress’ (Jackson 2014, 221). For Samarkand’s urban landscape, the answer seems to be
more complex than this dichotomy suggests. For centuries, erosion and decay had
shaped the cityscape as building and manufacture. Adobe walls and especially roofing
decay relatively fast when exposed to heavy rains, strong winds or extreme heat, and
are vulnerable to contingencies such as earthquakes and floods. It was this unpredictabil-
ity that Soviet planners (along with their Tsarist predecessors) despised about many
Central Asian cities, as it made them notoriously unsuited to a system of planning that
was based on the calculability of its various elements (cf. Zajicek 2022).
In this section, we examine those practices that were directed at managing decay in
the urban landscape and mirrored the material preconditions and temporalities of con-
struction that we have addressed previously. The upkeep of Samarkand’s specific architec-
tural legacy was a major concern not only for private builders, but also for municipal
authorities that had inherited many adobe brick buildings and, initially, also relied on
this construction material.44 After the severe winter of 196945 or heavy spring rains in
May 1974, for example, several dozens of residential buildings were heavily damaged
or even destroyed.46 The replacement of adobe brick buildings moved ahead sluggishly.
By 1975, only 279 of the 3328 municipal residential buildings were multi-storey houses
built of fired brick or concrete.47 This diversity of building materials required differentiated
skills, techniques and materials for their maintenance.
The mass housing campaign marked a high point in the state planners’ attempts to
make construction and maintenance calculable, for example, by introducing standar-
dized, durable, scientifically approved industrial building materials and earthquake-
proof building methods. It became quickly apparent, however, that the campaign
would generate its own set of problems regarding the upkeep of the newly built
housing. The breakneck speed of construction and the narrow focus on the square
metres of housing as a key benchmark did not leave much time and resources for
process improvement, quality management and local adaptation (Smith 2010, 107–11).
Internal reports criticized all kinds of violations of technical rules, material quality, and
the fact that laborious processes were still performed manually, thus creating long
delays.48 While these problems existed all over the Soviet Union, they seem to have
been particularly pronounced in Samarkand. ‘I have to say it outright – nowhere else
have I seen a lower quality of building works as in Samarkand’, the journalist Volynskij
wrote after a visit to the newly built Dehqon district. ‘Try not to approve it’, he cited
the city’s chief architect. ‘No further explanation needed: the plan [ …]’ (Volynskij 1961,
137).
Anticipating the huge liability of the city’s repair bureaus, the director of the main
department for communal services admitted as early as 1962 that, ‘even the required
depreciation rates do not allow for a proper upkeep of the majority of the housing
stock’.49 In subsequent years, the responsible state agencies turned to the question of
upkeep. In 1964, the Gosstroi of the Soviet Union issued a brochure with detailed instruc-
tions for planned and preventive maintenance, including a detailed list of the average life-
spans of different building materials and the respective maintenance periods. Buildings
made of adobe, for example, were estimated to last only 30 years on average, while con-
crete structures were expected to last 100–120 years.50
The structures themselves, however, did not raise the main challenges regarding repair
and maintenance. The concept of the micro-district was inextricably linked to a dogma of
centralized infrastructure provision. These infrastructures were prone to failure, especially
the complex heating systems. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the city’s maintenance
offices oversaw an ever-increasing number of heating systems, some of which supplied
a whole micro-district, including boiler houses and underground pipe systems.51
Between 1960 and 1975, the share of housing with central heating in the public
housing stock of Samarkand grew from 7.7% to 58%,52 as the housing stock itself
almost doubled from 348,579 m2 to 692,000 m2.53 Because of the low quality of materials
and installations, inadequate operating and maintenance, heating systems dilapidated
ahead of schedule, and regularly broke down. Shortly after their inauguration, Samar-
kand’s first micro-districts experienced accidents, culminating with a breakdown of the
entire district heating system in December 1969.54 Some blocks initially remained
without functioning heating altogether. In Mikrorayon ‘A’, the underground pipes
needed a complete overhaul after only seven years.55
In response to the deteriorating condition of its housing stock, the city council almost
doubled its annual budget for repairs between 1971 and 1977.56 It set up a permanent
commission for ‘communal services and the protection of the housing stock’ that
included representatives from various municipal departments.57 The minutes of the com-
mittee’s monthly meetings provide detailed insights into the challenges of introducing
and executing routine repair and maintenance cycles within the framework of the
Soviet command economy and vis-à-vis the seasonal changes in the city.
The annual preparations for the ‘heating season’ are a case in point. Making the city’s
heating systems fit for the winter required a broad spectrum of works, for example, repair-
ing or replacing radiators, fixing leaks in cellars, renewing underground pipes or overhaul-
ing the boiler houses of district systems. In spring, the responsible specialists were eager
to convey an impression of proactive and coordinated planning of repair and mainten-
ance, while putting forward their conditions to the party representatives. The usual
bargain was plan fulfilment in exchange for timely delivery of materials. At a meeting
in February 1976, a representative from one of the construction departments claimed
that ‘we could start the work now, but we lack material resources. There is no reinforced
concrete and no valves [ … ] if we get them on time, we will fulfil the plan’.58
The calculated optimism faded during the course of the year as repair works fell behind
schedule, workers were dispersed over multiple sites, and materials such as pipes, valves
or even oxygen for welding remained difficult to obtain, despite the unofficial barter
system between state companies. As end-of-year deadlines were approaching, other
state enterprises stepped up production, thus putting additional pressure on resources.
In autumn, frenzied activity broke out in multiple departments to patch the heating
system, knowing that weather conditions during the relatively humid and cold winter
in Samarkand (e.g., compared with Bukhara) would render many construction and
repair tasks impossible.59 The haste and need to improvise without adequate materials
often extended repair issues into the next year rather than solving them. The result of
these asynchronous yearly rhythms was a recurring strain on the department’s repair
and maintenance capacities.
For apartment dwellers in Samarkand, fixing minor damages and organizing the main-
tenance of infrastructure provision – with or without the help of the official authorities –
was part of everyday life, as almost everywhere else in the socialist world (Laszczkowski
2015).60 However, the embeddedness of these apartments in an ensemble of integrated
technical systems limited the repair capacities of their residents, as they experienced pain-
fully when the supply networks in the Samarkand micro-rayons fell into severe disrepair in
the mid-1980s.61 In 1987, the chairman of the communal services committee complained
that major repair works, routinely scheduled for every decade, had been skipped – in
1966, in 1976 and in 1986.62
Keeping privately owned houses in shape was no less of a challenge, as the need for
regular repair and maintenance pertained to their very fabric. In the harsh winter climate,
loam roofs wore off quickly and often started leaking. Sprinkling ashes on the leaks could
provide a quick fix, but for the next winter, more extensive repairs were necessary (Fodde
2009, 162).63 Research on the Zarafshan area in Tajikistan suggests that people added a
few centimetres of clay on top of their roofs every five years or so. Other measures to
prevent decay included the plastering or whitewashing of adobe brick walls, which
extended the intervals required for major overhauls (Fodde 2009, 158–62). In most
Tsarist-era residential houses, an outer layer of fired bricks made the adobe brick walls
very durable.64 Once industrially manufactured building materials became more widely
available in the 1970s and 1980s, private house owners had few reservations in making
use of them, for example, by replacing their heavy loam roofing with asbestos fibre
cement.65
A major renovation undertaking would serve as a common occasion to call for hashar
among family and neighbours. Such a renovation project, however, usually went far
beyond the simple mending of damages and restoring the ‘original’ condition of the
house (Van der Straeten and Petrova 2021). In most cases, it was aimed at getting the
house into shape for life-cycle events such as circumcisions, weddings, and funerals.
Especially those parts of the house that would be visible to visitors were expected to
be amenable and in an aesthetically appealing condition. People referred to this condition
as ‘remont’, a word with French roots that entered Central Asian languages from Russian.
As Sgibnev has shown, the word is tellingly used for both the act of repairing and reno-
vating and the condition that results from it, reflecting the idea of the Central Asian house
as always in-the-making, renewing itself and transforming according to the requirements
of its dwellers (Sgibnev 2018). As an architect noted in Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekis-
tana in 1972, Samarkand’s old city was ‘being constantly regenerated’.66
Our interviews suggest a high variation in the upkeep of private houses, depending on
the dwellers’ financial means, family situation, ability to mobilize help, and technical
skills.67 Yet, the various practices of repair and maintenance presented in this section
refute the narrative of urban modernization and industrial construction as a cure
against material decay and vulnerability as it was relentlessly promoted by Soviet plan-
ners. Almost no article on urban planning in Central Asia would go without reference
to the ramshackle condition and vulnerability of vernacular adobe brick architecture. It
was the low durability of adobe, however, that forced private house owners to engage
constantly with the upkeep of their house – a task that was intimately linked to future-
oriented practices of rebuilding, renovating and repurposing. For the municipal auth-
orities, in turn, routinizing the building rush of the early 1960s increasingly turned into
an uphill battle. As the new houses and infrastructures transformed from a future
promise into a liability, the municipal agencies struggled to perform the elaborate admin-
istrative routines necessary for their repair and maintenance, as well as to synchronize
them with the temporalities of the command economy and seasonal changes in the
city. Provocatively speaking, we argue that the history of Samarkand’s transformation
can be also told as one of new and constantly renewing ‘traditional’ adobe brick
houses and the ‘unplanned obsolescence’ (Schwenkel 2020, 21) of the ‘modern’ multi-
storey apartment buildings.
Conclusions
In this paper, we have explored the transformation of Samarkand’s urban landscape after
1960. This transformation was markedly different from what Soviet planners had envi-
sioned and Western geographers have established (or at least anticipated) in contempor-
ary studies. The mass housing campaign set off unexpected dynamics as it encouraged
private self-help construction earlier and on a larger scale than that of the multi-storey
state housing projects. The ‘Soviet extension’ of Samarkand proved to be as much a
work of thousands of private builders as of the industrial prefabrication of multi-storey
apartment houses. What was more, the traditional Central Asian neighbourhood that
Soviet planners had long hoped to banish from the urban landscape not only persisted
in the city centre, but its key characteristics also came to be reproduced in the new, pri-
vately built suburban neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods increasingly reflected
Samarkand’s ethnic diversity, rather than the standardized Soviet designs for low-rise,
single-family housing. In particular, those areas primarily inhabited by Tajiks and
Uzbeks came to resemble the traditional mahalla regarding their materiality (adobe
bricks), architecture (courtyard house), and social composition of households (extended
families).
Our examination of the causes for this high degree of material and cultural persistence
in the landscape focused on practices associated not only with planning and construction
of housing but also with its appropriation and upkeep. While living conditions in some
(but far from all) of the privately built houses remained precarious, they offered remark-
able adaptive capacities for their dwellers to address the specific temporal challenges
posed by Samarkand’s social and material landscape, including the fluctuating size and
constitution of households; the impacts of the change of seasons on housing; the vulner-
ability and high maintenance intensity of adobe; or the recurring failure of major infra-
structures. This ability of private housing to incorporate changing requirements and
constantly renew itself contrasted starkly with the state housing of standardized, static
layouts, industrially manufactured materials, and fixed (but rarely met) maintenance sche-
dules. These aspects added to the list of political, bureaucratic, and material obstacles that
limited the scope of action for state architects and engineers, as well as for dwellers of
state apartments, who also attempted to transform and to adjust structures to their
ideas and needs.
We argue that Samarkand seems particularly well suited to engage productively with
two sets of tensions between disciplinary perspectives on the socialist city. The first con-
cerns those tensions between the rich literature on the general characteristics of Soviet
urban planning and housing (e.g., in urban geography), on the one hand, and the field
of research dedicated to place-specific cultural, ethnic or religious identities and prac-
tices, and – more recently – their material foundations (e.g., in Central Asian studies),
on the other. We contend that framing self-help building solely as a pragmatic reaction
to the general shortage of state housing (especially in the Soviet periphery) falls short of
explaining the motivation and self-perception of builders and the specific local
preconditions.
While receiving a state apartment remained an unrealistic prospect for many families,
none of our respondents referred to self-help construction as a provisional option. As we
have shown, they profited from several favourable site-specific preconditions when taking
housing matters into their own hands. In contrast to cities such as Minsk, where a short-
age of materials was the main obstacle to the construction of private wood houses (Bohn
2008, 197), the natural abundance of adobe provided a cheap building material that was
accessible outside the state economy. Self-help building was characterized by ‘unofficial
materialities’ (Buchli 2007, 56) and profited from widespread skills in adobe brick con-
struction; local traditions of vernacular architecture that differed considerably even
within Uzbek SSR;68 or the tradition of hashar which was not only helpful in mobilizing
labour but could be seen as a practice that turned building and renovation into an act
of cultural self-affirmation (cf. Van der Straeten and Petrova 2021). These practices
mostly took place in spaces that were outside the reach of state architecture and
urban planning. They are often overlooked in the historiography of the ‘socialist city’
and material culture in the Soviet Union. While many historical works on the socialist
city concur with the notion that the ‘practices of inhabitants were often violently
molded and merged with new practices and urban forms’ (Bocharnikova and Harris
2018, 4), we have emphasized the ability of Samarkand’s residents to – quite literally –
mould the urban landscape themselves.
The second tension is of a historiographical nature and connects urban histories that
centre on the emergence, creation, or transition of spatial structures with ideas about the
temporality of the landscape. While the former are usually organized around linear chron-
ologies of change, we have endeavoured to provide a comprehensive view on the urban
landscape, its specific temporalities and the signatures they leave in it (one might speak of
a chronographic approach; Van der Straeten and Weber 2021). Our study of Samarkand is a
first exploration into the potential of such an approach which needs to be tapped more
systematically. We show the need to break up the tidy temporal sequencing of urban
change in which plans are being drawn up, then negotiated, and then implemented; or
in which structures are first built and then occupied by their dwellers. The houses (and
some apartments) of our interviewees assumed and changed their layout long after the
occupants had moved in. They were adapted and extended, subsequently connected
to different infrastructure networks, fell into disrepair, were repaired, and renovated.
Our study illustrates why Soviet and post-Soviet housing should be treated not only as
a question of power, (material) resources and space, but also of time, including many
recurring and non-linear temporalities such as the change of seasons, or the life cycles
of people, artefacts, materials and technologies.
Most notably, the agency of residents to address these temporalities was not
limited to reactive practices of appropriation or repair but included ‘future-oriented
practice[s] that coordinates specific actions and resources in a given temporal frame-
work in order to achieve a defined goal’ (Obertreis 2019, 215) – in short, planning. By
decentring planning from institutions that were officially in charge and their respect-
ive discourses, our study reveals many practices of active planning, for example, the
planting of poplar trees in anticipation of future building activities. In analogy to ver-
nacular architecture as ‘architecture without architects’ (alluding to the fact that no
officially recognized architect is involved), one might speak of planning without plan-
ners. Soviet Samarkand, we maintain, was a ‘planned’ city but in a different way than
commonly understood.
Notes
1. Most notably, Giese could have hardly foreseen this disparity with the source material avail-
able at the time.
2. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (April 1960), 1–3.
3. Ingold’s concept has been taken up by a group of scholars studying the temporality of infra-
structure in Central Asia and beyond (Joniak-Lüthi 2019).
4. For the 1939 census, cf. http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/rus_pop_39_3.php (accessed
on March 15, 2020); for 1959, see http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/ussr59_reg1.php
(accessed on March 15, 2020).
5. Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan/Tsentral’nyj Gosudarstvennyj Arkhiv
Respubliki Uzbekistan (TsGARUz), 1619/16/4/25.
6. State Archive of Samarkand Province/Samarkandskij Oblastnoj Gosudarstvennyj Arkhiv
(SamOGA), 26/1/1363/3.
7. For both Russian and Uzbek versions, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUxcI0ZguNM
(accessed on August 8, 2019).
8. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (February 1962), 12.
9. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (January 1964), 34. For one year in 1964, the journal was
renamed Stroitel’stvo I arkhitektura Srednej Azii.
10. SamOGA, 26/1/2465/23–25.
11. ‘Individual house construction’ (individual’noye stroitel’stvo) is an official Soviet term. ‘Individ-
ual property’ for personal use was legally separated from capitalist ‘private’ property and con-
ceived of as legitimate to a certain degree (Smith 2010, 143).
12. Interview with Mukhabbat, #00:39:12-5#.
13. SamOGA, 1658/2/109/95−97.
14. Interview with Bakhrom, 1.
15. Interview with Wladimir, #01:47:36-2#.
16. Interview with Mukhabbat, #00:28:24-6#.
17. Interview with Bakhrom, 1; SamOGA, 1617/1/233/3.
18. Interview with Bakhrom.
19. Interview with Mukhabbat #00:24:13-2#; interview with Anvar #00:04:39-4#.
20. SamOGA, 1658/2/146/6–8.
21. Nancy Lubin finds a strong connection between ethnic background and employment pat-
terns in the Central Asian Republics, along with regions such as the Baltics, Moldova and
the Caucasian Republics (Lubin 1984, 77).
22. Interview with Dilya and Rano #00:17:59-1#.
23. Interview with Mukhabbat #00:30:54-6#; interview with Nazar and Olga, 1. Until 1963, no four-
room apartments were built at all, and later only on very low scale; Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura
Usbekistana (March 1968), 30.
24. Samarkand’s multi-ethnic landscape included many more than the Tajik/Uzbek and Russian
communities under investigation here, such as Bukharan Jews and Ironi. Different waves of
migration, evacuations and deportations during the Soviet period added substantial commu-
nities of Armenians, Koreans, Krimean Tatars, Ukrainians and Jews – to name only the largest
ones (for more details, see Buttino 2020).
25. We have no evidence that the 1966 earthquake in Tashkent had a direct impact on construc-
tion in Samarkand. It seems plausible, however, that the massive reconstruction works
diverted resources and attention away from Samarkand. The earthquake also coincided
with an emerging debate on heritage preservation, for example in Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura
Usbekistana (November 1966), 27–30, which complicated the demolition of historical districts
and contributed to the preservation of Samarkand’s architectural ensembles of the old city,
including residential buildings.
26. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (September 1964), 17.
27. Interview with Natalya, #00:39:45-6#.
28. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (August 1971), 34.
29. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (April 1960), 5, 24–26.
30. For example, technical elements for sun protection, ventilation, improvement of microcli-
mates and provision of shaded outdoor space; Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana
(October 1961), 28–29; (June 1962), 32–33.
31. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (July 1968), 11–15.
32. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (July 1968), 11.
34. SamOGA, 1617/1/209/29–31.
35. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (July 1968), 11–15.
37. TsGARUz/1619/16/4/43.
38. SamOGA, 26/1/5416/131.
39. SamOGA, 26/1/3063/11–12.
40. In 1968, Samarkand had 133 mahallinskij/kvartalnyj and 220 domovye committees; SamOGA,
26/1/3063/35, 38; interview with Said, #00:14:01-5#.
41. SamOGA, 1658/1/220/33.
42. Interview with Boris and Yevgeniya, #01:11:12-3#; interview with Said, #00:48:19-3#.
43. Interview with Rano and Dilya, #00:06:23-7#.
44. SamOGA, 26/1/5106/151.
45. SamOGA, 26/1/3262/64.
46. SamOGA, 26/1/3788/76.
47. SamOGA, 26/1/3788/76.
48. SamOGA, 1617/1/254/77–78.
49. TsGARUz/88/11/682/84.
50. See http://www.libussr.ru/doc_ussr/usr_6133.htm (accessed on March 15, 2020).
51. SamOGA, 1658/1/220/33.
52. TsGARUz/1619/16/4/29.
53. TsGARUz/1619/16/5/62; SamOGA, 26/1/3999/100.
54. SamOGA, 26/1/3086/13–14.
55. SamOGA, 26/1/4270/8.
56. SamOGA, 26/1/4270/41.
57. The municipality followed a union-wide policy of centralizing communal repair and mainten-
ance; cf. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (May 1981), 2–6.
58. SamOGA, 26/1/4135/44–45.
59. Interview with Rano and Dilya, #00:11:17-9#; SamOGA, 26/1/4135/3.

62. SamOGA, 26/1/5416/32.
63. Interview with Said, #00:35:14-4#.
64. Interview with Boris and Yevgeniya, #01:10:09-1#.
65. Interview with Said, #00:10:39-7#.
66. Stroitel’stvo I Arkhitektura Usbekistana (July 1972), 9.
67. It is important to reflect on the different types of sources here: while state authorities left
detailed records of the technical condition of its housing stock, such as damage and
defects, such records do not exist for privately owned houses.
68. Courtyard houses are uncommon in regions such as Karakalpakstan, for example.
Acknowledgements
We thank our interview partners for their thoughts and stories. We also thank the staff of the State
Archive of Samarkand Province and the Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan for
helping us navigate our way through the Soviet archival system. We are indebted to the two anon-
ymous reviewers for their constructive and detailed comments. Lastly, we thank our colleagues for
sharing their comments, ideas (and personal memories as residents of a mahalla) at the virtual
author workshop for this special issue on 6–8 April 2020.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [grant number ERC AdG 742631].
ORCID
Jonas van der Straeten http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6072-9376
Mariya Petrova http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8276-3495
Archives
State Archive of Samarkand Province/Samarkandskij Oblastnoj Gosudarstvennyj Arkhiv
(SamOGA).
Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan/Tsentral’nyj Gosudarstvennyj Arkhiv

Respubliki Uzbekistan (TsGARUz).
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The Soviet city as a landscape in the making: planning,

CONTACT Jonas van der Straeten vanderstraeten@pg.tu-darmstadt.de

Making socialist cities, making cities socialist: literature review and

Table 1. Interviews conducted.

Grounding the urban revolution: building Samarkand’s future in the

houses continued to dominate Samarkand’s cityscape. An inventory report by the city

In practice, municipal authorities had limited resources to monitor private builders’

locally speciﬁc forms of vernacular architecture and neighbourhoods it created. Instead of

The landscape and the plan: making Socialism ﬁt

Figure 5. Sketch created by a respondent showing the transformation of a Soviet-era standardized

61. Interview with Wladimir, #01:03:38-3#.

Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan/Tsentral’nyj Gosudarstvennyj Arkhiv

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