Abstrakt
REVIEW ESSAY - In recent years, a growing number of historians translated New Cold War history approaches to the field of architecture and urban planning. Most notably, Łukasz Stanek's groundbreaking Architecture in Global Socialism (2020) shows how global cooperation within and across the Cold War divide shaped urbanization.
Interestingly, Stanek overcomes the prevailing country-of-origin approach (studying the works of one Western or Eastern architect or architecture firm in the Global South) and instead uses six cities in Africa and the Middle East as starting points - from where he traces the complex networks that made these places. While East German architects do not feature prominently in Stanek's book, the past years saw a small yet increasing amount of research on East German architectural exchange with the Global South.
Against this background, the essay at hand traces the most relevant books, chapters and articles of the past three years (2019-2021) that study the entanglements of East German architects in the Global South.