EAUH Conference 2026
«City Networks in Europe and Beyond»
EAUH2026 Sessions
Please note that actual rooms are still to be confirmed and minor schedule changes may occur
Session 72 - Transcribing Urbanistic Networks in Europe: Standardization and Symbolism in Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
This session explores the transnational networks, urban policies and spatial strategies that shaped the replication of urban models across Europe and beyond during the Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes of the 20th century, focusing on the dissemination of architectural forms, urban layouts, and planning ideologies.
Coordinators: Katerina Chatzikonstantinou, David Martín López
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Coordinators: Katerina Chatzikonstantinou, David Martín López
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Session 72 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Approaches to iconic or everyday legacies of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes: the experience of the ATRIUM Cultural Route
John Patrick Leech
abstractJohn Patrick Leech
The ATRIUM Cultural Route (Architecture of Totalitarian Regimes of the XX century in Europe’s Urban Memory) was certified by the Council of Europe in 2013. It brings together 23 municipalities
in 9 different European countries, all characterized by a built heritage whose origins lie in
totalitarian or authoritarian regimes (see www.atriumroute.eu). Founded on a rejection of all forms
of apologetics for these regimes, its primary interpretative key is that of ‘dissonant’ heritage, identifying as a starting point the complexities and contradictions of the architectural and urban
heritage of these towns with respect to the political and cultural perspectives of today. But this
heritage can vary greatly, from being ‘iconic’, that is, representing openly the ideology and values
of the regimes, or on the contrary ‘everyday’, that is, without any immediately explicit elements
which recall the regimes and, instead, with a strong functional characterization in terms of present
uses. There is a difference, in other words, between a building with mosaics or other artistic celebrations of a regime and a school or residential structure with no such elements whose links to
the regime remain, instead, implicit. Starting from the experience of ATRIUM, this paper will
explore both these types of heritage, and the different challenges they pose with respect to the
construction of a European ‘urban memory’ relating to these regimes.
Roads of Power: A Transnational Perspective on Authoritarian Infrastructures in 1980s Bucharest and Buenos Aires
Gruia Badescu
abstractGruia Badescu
This paper examines how authoritarian regimes mobilised road construction and monumental boulevards as instruments of ideological expression and political control, tracing the transnational circulation of these spatial models in two capital cities belonging to opposing sides of the Cold War. Focusing on Bucharest in the 1980s under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu and Buenos Aires under the last military dictatorship in Argentina, the paper analyses how two specific road construction projects—the Victory of Socialism Boulevard in Bucharest and the 25 de Mayo and Perito Moreno urban highways in Buenos Aires—borrowed forms of urbanism from different Cold War centers of power, while being rooted in shared imaginaries of modernization, domination, and visibility.
In Romania, Ceaușescu’s new civic axis and systematization roads drew simultaneously on Soviet monumental planning, as well as on pre-communist reference points for Romanian urbanism such as Parisian boulevard construction and entanglements with Italian expertise on systematization and sventramento, while reinterpreting them through socialist developmentalism. These ideological infrastructures were conceived as tools for disciplining space, displaying power, and producing a new socialist subject.
In Buenos Aires, Intendant Osvaldo Cacciatore’s highway system, influenced by North American expressway culture, similarly enacted authoritarian spatial control, erasing neighbourhoods in the name of efficiency, circulation, and geopolitical reorientation toward a North American imaginary.
By placing these cases in conversation, the paper shows how transport infrastructure—rather than only monumental buildings—served as a crucial medium through which authoritarian regimes operationalised political ideologies. Roads became vectors of international borrowing, but also of symbolic rewriting: instruments of rupture with the past, yet deeply embedded in transnational genealogies of authoritarian planning.
The paper argues that these infrastructural projects reveal a shared repertoire of authoritarian urban modernism, highlighting both the success and limits of transnational model transfers. It concludes by reflecting on contemporary debates surrounding the contested heritage of these interventions and their place in current decolonizing perspectives on urban planning history.
The Unsettled Legacy of Socialist Mass Housing in the Czech Republic
Karolina Jirkalová
abstractKarolina Jirkalová
The construction of large housing estates, based on standardized designs and prefabricated concrete panels, was one of the key pillars of the legitimacy of state socialism in Czechoslovakia. After the violent suppression of the Prague Spring’s democratic ambitions in 1968 mass housing programme served as a tool for material pacification of the shaken population. However, the drive to build as many flats as quickly and cheaply as possible shifted real power from architects and the state to construction companies and panel plants. Growing criticism of housing estates, gradually spreading throughout society during the 1980s caused the estates to become a source of delegitimization of state socialism instead of supporting the consolidated regime. The criticism was ranging from urbanistic issues such as monofunctionality, through inflexible technologies, standardized layouts and appearances, to the perceived impossibility of identification and community formation. By the late 1980s, political leaders were acutely aware of this threat; yet they stood little chance against the monopoly of construction companies and panel plants. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, panel buildings and housing estates became emblematic of the failures of the former regime. Modernist urbanism was broadly rejected, while traditional urban forms—streets, squares, and perimeter blocks—gained currency, representing the opposite of the existing housing estates, the so-called “non-cities.”
In the meantime, more than 35 years have passed, and several research projects have examined the legacy of prefabricated housing estates from the perspectives of architectural and urban history, urban geography, and anthropology. Although modernist housing estates have many disadvantages when compared with traditional block-based urbanism, they also offer significant advantages valued by their residents: cleaner environments, generous public space and the separation of vehicular traffic from residential zones. Yet the dominant urbanistic discourse continues to echo the mantra of the 1990s: that modernist housing estates should be densified and built up in order to approximate as closely as possible the rigid grid of the nineteenth-century city. The legacy of state-socialist prefabrication thus remains unresolved in the Czech Republic—even though one quarter of the country’s population, and nearly one third of Prague’s residents, live in these housing estates.
A Grammar of Socialist Urbanism: Standardization and Industrialized Housing in the GDR
David Mesa-Cedillo
abstractDavid Mesa-Cedillo
: Formal repetition in the urban landscape of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is often associated with the direct transfer of Soviet models or with the aesthetic consequences of authoritarian rule. This paper approaches repetition instead through the material organisation of serial housing construction, using grammar to describe the relations among dimensions, components, factories, transport and assembly that allowed different buildings to emerge from a shared productive infrastructure. The early large-panel types P1 and P2 established close correspondences between housing type and production, yet their diffusion across the districts also multiplied component assortments and exposed the difficulties of maintaining factory continuity. The critical research undertaken in Plattenbau 69 reformulated this problem by exploring how greater variation might be anticipated within the system itself, a line of development subsequently extended through the Wohnungsbauserie 70 (WBS 70). As serial housing entered the residential complex (Wohnkomplex), these productive relations also affected the arrangement of buildings, collective facilities and open spaces, while other recurrent elements such as public art contributed to the differentiation of particular places. The Housing Construction Programme of 1973 increased the scale at which this apparatus was expected to operate, tying housing targets to productivity, factory capacity and economic planning. Drawing on archival documents, contemporary technical publications and retrospective accounts, the paper argues that urban homogeneity emerged partly from these interdependencies, while the persistent search for variation reveals the limits, adaptations and contradictions of serial production.
About rivalry and exchange - Urban planning as an instrument of power for European dictatorships
Victoria Grau
abstractVictoria Grau
To this day, the history of hegemonic dictatorships in 20th-century Europe is often narrated primarily from national perspectives. Such a limited viewpoint obscures the complex relationships between these regimes and the broader political constellation of the era. These reciprocal interactions become particularly visible at the spatial level. Urban planning served as a crucial instrument for consolidating power and projecting efficiency, modernity, and creative capacity both domestically and internationally.
This article examines urban planning as an expression of mutual influence, competition, and rivalry among European dictatorships. It draws on examples from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the dictatorships of Spain, Portugal, and the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s. To illuminate the importance of spatial development for these regimes, the contribution first highlights the broad range of urban planning tasks they engaged in, from housing construction to armaments and transport infrastructure, educational facilities, and air force installations.
Rather than advocating a strictly comparative approach, the article argues for a transnational historiography. The relationships between these countries formed a dynamic and complex network of diverse actors. Through selected case studies, the article demonstrates how dictatorships influenced one another, the role that propaganda and exhibitions played in these exchanges, the extent to which urban planning practices were internationalised, and the significance of professional interaction across borders.
Mechanisms and forms of Nazi influence on public space in Slovak towns between 1939 and 1945
Martin Pekar
abstractMartin Pekar
The paper will focus on the question of how Nazi influences were reflected in the public space of selected towns through the interventions of the undemocratic regime of the Slovak Republic between 1939 and 1945, reflecting Slovakia's position as a periphery to the Nazi cultural, power, and political centre. The paper will examine, in particular, the mechanisms of transmission and forms of local transfer of various forms into everyday practice, and the ways in which urban institutions and residents responded to them. Within the historical framework of the paper, the following aspects are considered: the emergence of county administration, the ideological foundations of the regime, minority policy, social policy, and regulations affecting mobility, assembly, and access to public spaces. Methodologically, the paper will adopt a case study approach, focusing on the concept of space production. An analytical grid comprising four dimensions of public space will be utilised: legal, functional, social, and material-symbolic.
Session 72 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Urban trasformations under Fascism.
Approaches to monuments in Italy’s regional cities
Luigi Paolantonio, Andrea Goti
abstractLuigi Paolantonio, Andrea Goti
Within the broader framework of the urban transformations promoted by the Fascist regime, the isolation and enhancement of monuments assumed a central role. In many cities, the reconfiguration of the urban fabric occurred through selective or extensive demolitions, and these interventions created space for new buildings in which the central government sought to express, through architecture, a clear intention of monumentality and representation.
Particular attention was devoted to ancient and medieval monuments, often subjected to liberation from the surrounding built fabric through the creation of open spaces around them. Such operations aimed to redefine their role within the city and to highlight their symbolic significance, linking them to a past regarded as glorious.
This paper seeks to analyse and compare various experiences of this kind, whether completed or only planned, in several medium-sized cities.
These range from interventions on Roman monuments, such as the rediscovery of the amphitheatre in piazza Sant’Oronzo in Lecce and the clearance of the triumphal arches of Augustus in Rimini and Trajan in Ancona, to the celebration of a central figure of the Italian Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri, through the monumentalisation of his tomb in Ravenna.
In cases involving the wholesale clearance of urban districts, the intervention takes on a radical character: the historic fabric is replaced without regard for the pre-existing urban grid, making way for new buildings that reinterpret classical forms in a monumental key, as in piazza della Vittoria in Brescia.
In contrast to this model stands the practice of “diradamento”, based on a selective approach to demolition. Advocated by Giovannoni, it envisaged targeted interventions of urban renewal, as in Siena, where proposals included the requalification of the area near piazza del Campo and the reconstruction of several towers to restore an image consistent with the city’s medieval profile. In Bolzano, by contrast, Piacentini designed a monument inspired by the Roman triumphal arch and conceived a large monumental area surrounded by new buildings.
Similar approaches also emerge in marginal contexts. In Abruzzo, emblematic cases are L’Aquila, where the plan envisaged the clearance of large portions of the historic centre to open new thoroughfares and erect monumental buildings, and Sulmona, where in 1933 a project was drawn up for the liberation of the medieval aqueduct, completed only in the 1960s.
Modernity and tradition in Italian Colonial architecture in the Mediterranean (1912-1943).
Vassilis Colonas
abstractVassilis Colonas
Italy, due to its late involvement in European colonial expansionism, was unable to follow the same policy as other countries in terms of the architecture of its colonies. It did not attempt to impose the architecture of the metropolis, but sought to incorporate into it, and in this case into the emerging rationalism, elements from the local architectural tradition and, above all, from what it believed to be the local tradition, the "spirit of the place."
In Libya, architects tried to highlight the country's Roman past, as in the Dodecanese they did with the knightly period, and then to dress up this past with what they selectively considered to be local.
After some unsuccessful attempts to revive historical styles, architectural creation in Libya is divided between an "African" and an "Italian" interpretation, the latter being mainly academic. The distinction between African "traditional" and Italian "classical" architecture made it imperative to introduce a new term that would overcome the difference between these opposing categories and create a common field of expression for architects who wanted their designs to be both authentically Italian but also to be close to local forms.
At the same time, Mediterraneanity, as it was directly related to the traditional architecture of the Mediterranean and especially the Greek islands, with their white surfaces, geometric volumes, and purity of form, was what so influenced modernists in their early aesthetic pursuits. Purity, Greekness, and Mediterraneanity are the three key terms of this architecture, and Rome, as the successor to classical Greece and the center of Mare Nostrum, was the necessary unifying element of all these trends.
The way was now open for a new Mediterranean rationalism, enriched with elements of local tradition, at the level of principles rather than forms, which would become the basic design tool in all Italian possessions in the Mediterranean. This architectural spring would not last long, as it would soon be subject to the dictates of monumentality imposed by the shift in fascist colonial policy and the proclamation of the Imperium.
"Monumental": Import and reception of American architectural and urban models in late-1950s Spain. The case of Bosch i Aymerich and Catalunya Square in Barcelona.
Rubén Navarro
abstractRubén Navarro
Spanish architect and engineer Josep Maria Bosch i Aymerich (1917–2015) trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked within the Spanish Instituto Nacional de Industria, co-founded the Instituto de Estudios Norteamericanos and collaborated with AESB (Architects and Engineers Spanish Bases) and Frederic R. Harris Inc. in the construction of the U.S. military bases in Spain (1953–1957). He thus became part of a transnational apparatus that channelled U.S. interests and contributed to the cultural expansion of the American development model in Spain. His proposal for a ‘Monumental Building and a Special Urban Plan’ for Catalunya Square in central Barcelona (1954–1961) coincided with the efforts of General Franco’s authoritarian dictatorship to pursue a diplomatic and economic shift towards international rehabilitation (1950–1959) and with a period of significant cultural modernisation in the city (1956–1962). In Bosch’s proposal, the symbolism employed by the regime in its institutional architecture during the autarkic period (1939–1959) was replaced by the new monumentality of the American skyscraper and an imported version of International Style modernism, symbolically anticipating the corporate character of the developmentalism that followed (1959–1973). However, despite the regime’s support and being awarded with major prizes, the proposal encountered local opposition and triggered a debate on the architectural and urban models that the city should follow in the following decades and finally failed to be implemented. Through the selected case study, this paper aims to (1) show the shift in urban monumentality and symbolic architecture in Barcelona during this period; (2) examine some of the political and corporate networks and mechanisms through which real estate capital was channelled for the dissemination of American architectural and urban models in the city during the Cold War period; (3) to analyse the adaptation strategies required for the geographical translocation of these models; and (4) to relate these processes to the wider political, economic, and cultural local context. To this end, it examines original documentation preserved in the Historical Archive of the Association of Architects of Catalonia and the Fundació Bosch i Aymerich, much of it unpublished and still not catalogued, with particular attention to the successive versions of the project drawn by Bosch over the years.
The Great Hall of the City. Totalitarian Parallels between the Plaza, the Piazza and the Gauforum through the Falangist Plans for Guernica and Salamanca (1937-1939)
Carlos Navas Catalá
abstractCarlos Navas Catalá
In large letters on one of the walls of the hall where the exhibition of the reconstruction plans for Guernica was held in the city of Burgos in December 1937, one could read: “The Caudillo and the Falange, even at war, study for peace.” This slogan, clearly propagandistic, referred to the work that a small group of technicians and architects, attached to the Technical Services of the single party, had discreetly begun during the war.
Falangist architects faced the task of rebuilding the country after the war in accordance with their ideology and the principles of the National Reconstruction Plan, yet their activity had already begun during the conflict. From the first meetings and exchanges of ideas among these professionals emerged two plans representative of the new national urbanism: the reconstruction of Guernica (1937) and the Expansion and Reform Project of the city of Salamanca (1938), the results of which were subsequently displayed to the public in separate exhibitions, such as the one mentioned at the beginning. Through photographs, drawings, and models, the future appearance of both towns was recreated, in which the reconfiguration of urban voids played a fundamental role. The Plaza del Imperio in Guernica and the reform of the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca offered two models for the trial of one of the regime’s main stages and its institutions.
Given the intention of Spanish architects to reshape urban form to suit a very specific type of state and society, it is pertinent to consider the contemporary operations that were occurring in a similar manner in Fascist and National Socialist cities, as well as their possible resonances in the Spanish case. At a moment when Franco and the Falange were looking to already consolidated totalitarian experiences in Europe, including in architectural terms, this contribution analyzes the parallels and divergences between the aforementioned Spanish projects and the Italian and German models of the 'piazza' and the 'gauforum', respectively, with the aim of situating the Spanish debate within a broader European framework.
Public space as an arena for democracy: the reshaping of urban scenario in post-Francoist Spain, the case of Barcelona.
Alessandro Scarnato, Antonio Pizza
abstractAlessandro Scarnato, Antonio Pizza
A key element in contemporary Spanish identity has been public space. Furthermore, it is around this theme that the intense relationship between disciplinary culture and institutional practice has often been articulated. This paper offers a reflection on this crucial area of urban developement, considering the turbulent Spanish political climate of the 20th century. It is quite well known that during Francoism squares, promenades, and avenues were the subject of proposals and transformations that, overall, did not coalesce into a reasoned and fully proactive urban planning framework. It was not until the last quarter of the 20th century, under the democratic regime, that disciplinary and administrative attention once again focused on this area. Alongside the necessary infrastructural modernization of the country in the post-Franco era, public space was seen as a convenient opportunity to act quickly and concretely in the city at an affordable cost and with great communicative and symbolic potential. It was in Barcelona that public space acquired the dimension of a constant undercurrent within the diverse chorus of the many architectural, cultural, artistic, and political entities that participated in the city's reconstruction, as Oriol Bohigas defined it in 1985. The examination of Barcelona and its debates, projects, and actions forms the framework of a narrative that explains the different phases through which its strategies for creating public space have passed as a reflection of certain ways of interpreting the city. The enormous impact of the Barcelona projects on disciplinary criticism and public debate resonated, albeit at different times, in other Spanish and European cities. This latter aspect occupies the final part of the paper, offering a retrospective reading of that almost epic period of urban intervention under the sign of democratization.