Events

The gifting of architecture during the Cold War was a spectacular means for socialist countries to manifest a new vision of international relations for the decolonizing world. Soviet, Eastern European, Chinese, and Cuban institutions donated factories, schools, hospitals, and housing to newly independent states in Africa and Asia, transforming cities and landscapes in Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Mongolia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. This talk argues that the moral, temporal, and racial dynamics of gift-giving conditioned the design, construction, and afterlives of these buildings. It debates how the generosity and violence specific to gift exchange, and the social bonds that it creates, shaped and continue to shape everyday urbanism across Africa and Asia. Based on a recently published edited volume, this talk shows how the focus on architectural gift-giving offers an opportunity for a more differentiated genealogy of global urbanization and its architecture.

Łukasz Stanek is Professor at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020). His most recent edited volume is The Gift: Spaces of Global Socialism and Their Afterlives (Jovis Publishers, 2026). Previously Stanek taught at the Swiss Federal University of Technology (ETH) in Zurich (Switzerland), and the University of Manchester (UK), and he held guest appointments at Harvard University (USA), and the University of Ghana at Legon in Accra (Ghana). He curated several exhibitions, including The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture (Architekturmuseum der TUM, Munich, 2024). Together with Michael Gameli Dziwornu, he founded Office Southeast, the urban research collaborative based in Accra, Ghana. He is currently a NOMIS Senior Fellow (2026-27) at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich, Switzerland.