Concrete Contracitctions of Socialist Urbansim:
Urban Property in the Soviet Cooperative Garage
Urban Property in the Soviet Cooperative Garage
Amid the planned order of the Soviet socialist city, with its
mikrorayony, mass housing, and rationalized infrastructures, an
unexpected typology emerged: the cooperative garage. Built on
state-owned land but governed by individual cooperatives, charters,
and informal adaptations, it operated as a paradoxical institution
within socialism?s collective spatial order. This research situates
the Soviet garage as a para-private property apparatus, an
architectural and legal formation that translated the abstract ?right
of use? into durable, spatialized entitlement. Through standardized
modules and serial geometry, the garage converted planning norms and
citizen initiative into a self-organized infrastructure of everyday
production, repair, and exchange. Over time, these peripheral belts
evolved into micro-urban formations where law, architecture, and
informal economy converged. Far from being a residual by-product of
modernist planning, the cooperative garage reveals a central
contradiction of the Soviet project. A system designed to abolish
private property inadvertently produced new spatial logics of
quasi-ownership and self-reliance. The dissertation reads the garage
not merely as infrastructural excess, but as a critical lens through
which property, ideology, and adaptation were continuously negotiated
at the urban edge.