Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century

On May 14 2025, European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, hosted a seminar to rethink socialist space in the twentieth century. The event was chaired by Dan Healey, Professor of Russian and Soviet History at St Antony’s, and brought together Dr Jennifer Altehenger, Associate Professor of Chinese History and Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History at Merton College, Oxford; Professor Paul Betts, Professor of Modern European History at St Antony’s College, Oxford; Dr Marcus Colla, Mark Kaplanoff Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, Cambridge; Dr Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations, University of Vienna; and Dr Bethan Winter, Lecturer in History at the University of Oxford. Each panelist explored how socialist states—across China, Eastern Europe and Vietnam—produced distinctive spatial logics that shaped everyday life and collective memory.

Paul Betts opened by recalling that this volume emerged from an online conference during the 2021 lockdown, a collaboration principally between himself and Marcus Colla. He reflected on how the impossibility of travel prompted historians to rethink “socialist space” not as a fixed rubric but as a series of contested practices and imaginaries.

Building on Betts’s introduction, Marcus Colla examined the impact of transnational history on the study of twentieth-century socialism. He argued that after 1945, scholars stabilised categories—socialism versus capitalism—that now appear insufficiently nuanced. Colla asked: how did socialist authorities govern space as an instrument of power? He showed that Soviet planners sought to shape spatial imagination through schools, factories and collective farms, embedding ideological content in the built environment. Colla’s chapter interrogates whether “socialist space” remains a meaningful category, emphasising its ties to physical and emotional experiences of loss. He further traced how COVID-19’s brutal lockdowns provided historians with fresh insights into the material and affective dimensions of confined spaces.Jennifer Altehenger turned to China’s 1980s furniture rationing and the emergence of the “marriage chamber” as a lens on post-Mao state socialism. She showed that furnisher allocation was not merely functional but deeply symbolic: new couples received apartments and furniture according to seniority, while older generations feared conspicuous consumption amid memories of the Cultural Revolution. Drawing on the magazine 家具与生活 (Furniture and Life), she identified four elements—space, idea, dream and problem—that shaped designers’ proposals for the socialist home. Altehenger argued that this material culture enabled individuals to imagine personal autonomy within the constraints of state planning, even as architects lamented shortages of materials and space.

Shifting from material to sensory dimensions, Bethan Winter explored East Berlin’s soundscape as a site of contested socialist authority. Through parades, factory sirens and radio broadcasts, she demonstrated how citizens actively listened to—and sometimes subverted—state rituals. Winter argued that collective acoustic experiences could both reinforce and undermine official power, producing a “sensory history” of public space in which the distinction between passive reception and active hearing reveals the limits of top-down control.

Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ presented her work on a Polish language school for foreign students, illustrating the intersection of space and mobility in late-socialist Eastern Europe. She showed how the school transformed from a Cold War institution into a node of transnational circulation, enabling upward social and political mobility for rural youth and ethnic minorities. Nguyễn Vũ then turned to Vietnam during and after the Sino-Vietnamese war, arguing that war-time displacements and post-war reconstruction created new spatial practices that both echoed and diverged from the Eastern European experience.

During the Q&A, questions ranged from inequality in socialist urban housing (with Kazakhstan as a case study) to cultural cooperation between Vietnam and Poland. Jennifer Altehenger noted that Chinese housing inequalities materialise through labour conditions and differential access to state-issued goods. Nguyễn Vũ observed that in Poland, housing became a market commodity in the 1990s, fueling nostalgia and generational divergence. Finally, participants debated how socialist spaces aimed to produce homogeneous citizens: Altehenger pointed to cramped one-room flats that fostered functional living, while Healey highlighted youth groups and trade unions as arenas of negotiated autonomy.

In sum, the seminar revealed that “socialist space” cannot be reduced to architecture or ideology alone. Instead, it emerges from the interplay of material provision, sensory experience, transnational circulation and personal aspiration—each of which reshaped socialist societies and continues to inform our historical imagination.

by Yangyang Zhao (ESC Research Assistant)