ABSTRACT
A commitment to urban and regional planning was a core characteristic of the USSR, consistent with the Soviet emphasis on a planned national economy. The Soviet planning model also influenced urban and regional development internationally, particularly in the Third World, via the as-yet poorly documented circulation of expertise and individuals. Moreover, Russian and Soviet planning history reflects complicated moments of intersection, convergence, and divergence with planning trends in the First World. Mainstream general histories of planning, however, rarely integrate Second World examples, preventing full understanding of modern planning as phenomenon with diverse regional instantiations and global interrelations. Acutely needed are synthetic studies that integrate socialist examples into global planning historiography, thereby recovering for general historiography what were, historically, related sets of professional planning practices. This chapter responds to that need. One potential model for work in this new direction is historian Kate Brown’s study of Soviet and American atomic cities and settlements (2013), in which she convincingly argues that such Cold War histories should be framed as tandem rather than comparative (see also Brown 2001).
