Document Type

Chapter in a Book

Publication Date

1-15-2025

Abstract

This article illuminates the significance of aesthetics, architecture, and political struggles by turning to concrete historical examples of socialist urbanism and city planning. In addition to drawing out architecture as a prime exemplar of political art, I find it a useful model for pedagogical politics. More specifically, these examples illustrate the inherently political nature of all education and of Paulo Freire’s utopian pedagogy. Although some mischaracterize Freire’s conception of the educational relationship as one of absolute equality, Freire always maintained the teacher can start as a learner but can never stay a learner. To start implies direction, and political pedagogy implies a political direction. The political educator, like the utopian architect, begins from learning from the people as part of understanding the current conjuncture. Yet what defines the educator as such is that they depart from a certain point toward another [...] there exists within the verb to start out a connotation of movement, and another of intentionality, and another of directivity.” With this in mind, I turn to the role of architecture and planning in revolutionary pedagogy before turning to concrete examples of political architecture that add an additional element contributing to its status as the exemplary form of political and pedagogical art: its role in the revolutionary process of transforming society and the creation of socialist urbanism, as well as its capacity to endure and persist in the face of counterrevolutions such that, socialist architecture is still with us in“post-socialist” states.

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