Blackwell Reference Online

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For much of the twentieth century, cities in socialist societies received a fraction of the attention devoted to examining the urban process under capitalism. Over the last 20 years, however, a growing body of international scholars have documented how centralized planning, the absence of market forces, and other features of a socialist “regime of urbanization” (Angotti 1993) created a variety of distinctive metropolitan forms (e.g. French and Hamilton 1979; Szelenyi 1983; D. M. Smith 1989; among others). In the 1990s the transition to postsocialist regimes intensified scholarly interest in the cities of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (see Andrusz, Harloe, and Szelenyi 1996; Hegedüs and Tosics 1991). However, with the notable exception of a burgeoning literature on China (e.g. Chan 1994; Davis 1995; Gaubatz 1996; Wu 1997), the discourse of urbanization in the so-called socialist third world (Forbes and Thrift 1987) remains comparatively underdeveloped.This chapter is intended as a modest contribution towards filling this discursive void by exploring the changing patterns of sociospatial organization in Havana, Cuba. Although in many respects a classic example of a primate city produced by the processes of dependent urbanization, in other aspects Havana resembles both the cosmopolitan cities of the American mainland and the erstwhile workers' paradises of the former Eastern ... log in or subscribe to read full text