Between the Past and the Plan: Urban Heritage Planning in Tbilisi During and After Socialism

Abstract

What role could a medieval city reconstructed under bourgeois imperialists play in the construction of a modern socialist utopia? And what happens when the socialist future disappears, but the narratives and practices animated by it persist? Through an analysis of the Georgian capital city Tbilisi, this dissertation examines how and why architectural conservation became integrated into the Soviet planning apparatus—what historian R. Antony French described as “the relationship between the past and the plan”—and traces those legacies into postsocialist practice. This project aims to situate Soviet architectural conservation within the context of a broader transnational movement to incorporate heritage into urban planning and national cultural policies. In adopting the perspective of design professionals rather than policymakers or local elites (although there was certainly some overlap), this dissertation offers a much-needed reassessment of cultural heritage scholarship in the region, which has historically privileged the role of internal nationality or religious policies. A state- or nation-centric focus operates entirely within the logic of the Soviet system and often overlooks transnational developments and networks. That Soviet cities like Tbilisi ultimately developed parallel conservation planning practices to those found elsewhere in Europe and America, despite profoundly different economic and political regimes, underscores that traditional understandings of preservation’s role and significance within urban planning history remains incomplete. This dissertation proposes that, contrary to scholarly emphasis on revolutionary iconoclasm, Soviet architects did not necessarily view historic buildings and modern planning as mutually exclusive. In fact, professional discourse increasingly framed urban heritage as an essential component of the modern socialist city, a formulation that was distinctly Marxist and yet entirely in keeping with international conservation trends. Through professional debate and practical experimentation in an arena increasingly mediated by transnational networks of expertise, Soviet Georgian architects and planners generated a distinct model of urban heritage conservation that continues to shape Tbilisi today. And yet this Soviet perspective remains largely absent from heritage conservation scholarship, which more often attributes the field’s development to nationalist revivals and local activist cultures, all later subsumed within a global conservation ethos canonized by international (but predominantly Euro-American) bureaucracies. Understood in the context of transnational urban planning discourse, the Soviet reconstruction of Old Tbilisi illustrates that conservation represented more than nationalist impulses or state propaganda—it was also a generative practice, contributing to a set of new expectations for urban life that both reacted to and drew upon modern planning approaches.