The Gift - by Lukasz Stanek (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The gifting of architecture during the Cold War was a spectacular means for socialist countries to manifest a new vision of international relations for the decolonizing world. Soviet, Eastern European, Chinese, and Cuban institutions donated factories, schools, hospitals, and housing to newly independent states in Africa and Asia, transforming cities and landscapes in Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Mongolia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. This book shows how the moral, temporal, and racial dynamics of gift-giving conditioned the design, construction, and afterlives of these buildings. It debates how the generosity and violence specific to gift exchange, and the social bonds that it creates, shaped and continue to shape everyday urbanism across Africa and Asia. By rereading these encounters, The Gift offers a uniquely differentiated genealogy of global urbanization and its architecture.

With contributions by Fantahun Ayele, Darisuren Azbayar, Boris Chukhovich, Yanjinlkham Dashtseren, David Kojo Derban, Alice Korkor Ebeheakey, Claudia Gastrow, Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Damjan Kokalevski, Vladimir Kulic, Ksenia Litvinenko, Ye Liu, Kulshat Medeuova, Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Jennifer Robinson, Uurtsaikh Sangi, Christina Schwenkel, Alevtina Solovyeva, Setiadi Sopandi, Ke Song, Paul Sprute, and Miruna Stroe

• Explains global urbanization through a focus on architectural mobilities beyond Western Europe and North America
• Offers an innovative perspective on the long lives of buildings across Africa and Asia: from design and construction to their everyday use by inhabitants
• Features a wealth of unpublished contemporary and archival images

About the Author

Lukasz Stanek is a Professor at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020). The latter won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (2020), among other prizes. His edited volumes include Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment by Henri Lefebvre (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Team 10 East. Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2014) and Urban Revolution Now (Ashgate, 2014, with Ákos Moravánszky and Christian Schmid). Previously, Stanek taught at the Swiss Federal University of Technology (ETH) in Zurich (Switzerland) and the University of Manchester (UK), and he was a guest professor at Harvard University (USA) and the University of Ghana at Legon in Accra (Ghana). Together with Michael Gameli Dziwronu, he is the co-founder of the Accra-based urban research collaborative Office Southeast.