This talk presents the interim results of an ongoing research project on architectural mobilities between socialist Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia during the Cold War.
Against the dominant reduction of architecture’s globalization to Westernization, it points at the contributions of actors mobilized in state socialist networks within a multiplicity of competing projects of worldwide cooperation and solidarity from the 1950s to the 1980s. In so doing, this research does not simply add Moscow, Warsaw, or Belgrade to the Western centers from which architectural expertise was diffused. Rather, it replaces such a diffusionist model with a study of transactions between actors circulating in competing networks at a variety of scales, and argues that this perspective is more useful in order to understand their agency on the ground.