Towards a Global and Transnational Approach to Architectures and Landscapes of Land Reforms Introduction [EN]

Abstract

Over the twentieth century, modern architecture and planning have privileged the urban realm as their pre-ferred field of operations, engaging with therural realm through different but mostly distant attitudes. This themed issue of CLARA Architecture/Recherche examines architectural designs and planning schemes developed within the frame of large-scale transformation of the rural landscape in different national and chronological settings (mid-century Portugal, post-Second World War Italy, interwar Soviet Union, post-First World War Greece, and independent Morocco). This introduction argues that the rural needs to be more conceptualized by architectural and planning practices and their histories. It proposes land reforms as a unifying term to designate this issue’s research object and enable transnational comparisons of similar cases. Building on recent scholarship in global and transnational (agricultural) histories, it provides a framework for situating these case studies within broader agricultural and rural modernization policies and European and bordering countries’ historical contexts. It delineates the discipline-specific issues they raise and the streams of scholarship to which they may contribute.