“The Master Rarely Casts His Eye Here”: Water and Urban Infrastructure in Postwar Vladivostok

Abstract

The keyword socialist modernity has often served as the yardstick for scholarship on socialist urban histories. Many have stressed the so-called fundamental and micropolitical characteristics of ideology to understand the material and social lives of their cities. I argue that such a historiographical stance not only sidelines the variegated and conflicting experiences of urbanization, but also marginalizes how nature and space actively conditioned urban life and its social fabrics. By looking at water and its infrastructure in post-WWII Vladivostok, I argue how groups ranging from technical experts to everyday residents built the city around the cruciality of water supplies. This spawned debates about the limits of urban planning, the corruption of the municipal authorities, and the fight against epidemic diseases. Reframing socialist urbanization as that of “assemblages” opens new avenues that fuse the work of environmental and urban histories of socialism.