Urban Design for Mussolini, Stalin, Salazar, Hitler and Franco During the Interwar Period

Session M50 at the 12th International Conference of the European Association for Urban History (Lisbon, September 3–6, 2014)

Conference Publication

Christian von Oppen, Technische Universität Berlin, christian.von.oppen@uni-weimar.de

Urban design played a central role for the European dictatorships during the 20th century, it served to legitimate the regime, to produce agreement, to demonstrate power, efficiency and speed, it communicated the social, as well as design projects, of the dictatorial regimes domestically and internationally, it tied old experts, as well as new, to the regime. Dictatorial urban design also played an important role after the fall of the dictatorships: It became the object of structural and verbal handling strategies: of demolition, of transformation, of reconstruction, of forgetting, of suppressing, of re-interpretation and of glorification. The topic area is, therefore, both historical and relevant to the present day. The discussion of the topic area is, like it or not, always embedded in the present state of societal engagement with dictatorships.

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