The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and their Afterlives
Events
Tuesday, 19 May, 19:00 at Book House "Ligamus", the Anthropology Research Centre and PhD Programme at Ilia State University invite you to a book talk with David Leupold, presenting his book The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and their Afterlives.
Abstract
What does it mean to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question – what is left of the socialist city? – David Leupold conducted over the last six years extensive ethnographic and archival research straddling a vast geography that stretches from Armenia in the Southern Caucasus to Kyrgyzstan, a land-locked republic in Central Asia at the feet of the Tian Shan Mountains.
In his research, Leupold not only traces the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city but also shows how the Southern Soviet discourse on the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of the Moscow Politburo itself. Drawing from empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, his book reconstructs competing visions of the urban future that emerged from within the southern republics of the USSR (Central Asia and the Caucasus).
These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country’s Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities urban space does not only transpire as a repository of utopian urban thinking but as a key prism through which citizens from the “post-socialist” geographies of the Caucasus and Central Asia grapple with, renegotiate, and make sense not only of the recent troublesome past – but also the precarity of their own present and impending future.
Bio
David Leupold is a historical sociologist, a scholar of post-Soviet and post-Ottoman memory politics, and winner of the CESS Book Award based in Berlin at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, respectively. He holds a doctoral degree in Political Science from the Chair of Comparative Political Systems of Eastern Europe(Humboldt Universität zu Berlin).
He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, the principal investigator of his own third-party funded research project, and the author of two monographs Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory (2020, with a foreword by Ronald G. Suny) and The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (2026). His research has been translated to multiple languages including Armenian, Kyrgyz, Russian, Ukrainian and Turkish. Currently, he is pursuing his qualification for full professorship (habilitation) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and is a visiting fellow at YCIE Yerevan.
2026