Paper proposals are solicited for the conference, "Second World Urbanity: Between Capitalist and Communist Utopias," which will be held at The Center for the History and Culture of East Central Europe, in Leipzig, Germany, June 21-23, 2013. This project aims to bring together scholarly contributions on the various endeavors in the Second World to conceive, build, and inhabit a socialist cityscape that was an alternative to the segregated spaces of capitalist cities and the atomized world of suburbia.

As a venue for opening a conversation about the new approaches to urbanity and planning, this project (http://secondworldurbanity.umwblogs.org/) goes beyond the geographic boundaries of the Eastern Bloc and seeks transnational, comparative, and global approaches to the study of the socialist city. We propose to think of socialist urban planning from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to China and Cuba, as well as Vietnam, North Korea, and other countries with a state socialist past or present. We conceptualize such socialist urban planning as a distinct and multifaceted division of global urban planning trends. Just as the geographic scope is broad so, too, is our chronological reach, which will span the early post-World War II period through the collapse of state socialism and beyond to the present day.

Paper proposals are invited on a wide range of topics from (but not limited to) the history of professional networks and institutional organization, monumental projects, mass housing schemes, transfers of technologies and styles, the organization of public and private spaces, the political engagement of urban planning professionals, the treatment of gender, ethnic, and class differences in the socialist cityscape, the role of the state, the ideological premises of urban schemes and visionary projects, everyday life, urban residents’ (mis)uses of planned urban spaces. Papers from all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities will be considered. The organizers plan to publish an edited volume of selected conference papers.

Please send paper proposals (a 300-500 word abstract and a 1-page cv) to swurbanitygmail.com by February 1, 2013. Paper proposals will be reviewed by the project’s organizers and program committee. We will announce the papers that have been accepted on March 1, 2013.

The project is presently soliciting funds to cover some of the transportation and/or housing costs of participants. We will know whether such funds are available only in Spring 2013. Therefore, interested participants should plan for covering costs through their home institutions. The conference will not have a conference fee.

Program committee: Andres Kurg, Brigitte Le Normand, Daria Bocharnikova, Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Marie Alice L’Heureux, Steven Harris, and Vladimir Kulic.