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Planning the capital city of a "community of fortune" in the Soviet Far-East: the Hannes Meyer brigade's scheme for the Jewish autonomous oblast of Birobidzhan (1933-1934)

par Fisher, Axel
Editeur scientifique Da Silva Leme, Maria Cristina
Référence “Cities, nations and regions in planning history”(15th: 15-18 juillet 2012: Sao Paulo, Brésil), 15th IPHS Conference, International Planning History Society, FAUUSP, Sao Paulo, Ed. Cd-Rom
Publication Publié, 2012-07

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Résumé :

The creation of the first modern-era Jewish state, Birobidzhan, in early 1930s’ Soviet Union, can be considered as a curtain-raiser attempt to propose a socialist solution to the “Jewish Question” which, as a second thought, also had a part in the regime’s propagandistic maneuvers enacted to downsize the rising influence of Zionism in the country. Nevertheless, this experiment aroused a widespread enthusiasm and called for the participation of both Jews and non-Jews to this “small step in the realization of the Leninist policy on nationalities”. Among these stood Hannes Meyer (1889-1954), the Swiss-born Marxist architect and former director of Dessau’s Bauhaus (1928-1930), which – assisted by his “planning brigade” – offered its expertise to the Soviet Institute for Urban Planning (GIPROGOR) from 1930 to 1936 as chief-planner for Siberia and the Far East.Within this context, Meyer’s brigade was entrusted with the preparation of a scheme for the transformation of the small town of Tikhonkaya situated along the Trans-Siberian Railway into the new Capital of Birobidzhan. This scheme, one of Meyer’s last projects in Soviet Union, represents a step in the planer’s line of research focused on the forms and principles of the “socialist city” – the “elastic city” theory – but, unlike his previous schemes, this work also had to face an additional challenge: expressing the new Jewish national identity of the city and its role as the Soviet Jewish people’s Capital city.How did the planner achieve these goals and what place did modern planning models, the “rhetoric of rationality”, Jewish culture, vernacular architectural and urban forms, the local geographical features and landscape hold in the design and figuration process?