Urban planners between secrecy, automation, and human-centered design: visions of environment management in late Soviet city

Abstract

ABSTRACT The former chief architect of the Lviv region described urban planners as people who ‘own the territory’ in terms of knowing the land specifics, available resources, possibilities and restrictions of each spatial intervention. At the same time, such implicit knowledge had to be codified to become usable in the decision-making process. The Soviet city constantly collected information but lacked the tools to administer all this totality. The paper discusses the role of urban professionals in conceptualizing urban environment management developed during the last decades of state socialism in Lviv, western Ukraine. It outlines the connections between academics from the Lviv Polytechnic Institute and party authorities, and between scientific approaches to automated management systems and a specific location. How could the information about the city be organized? What kind of data was necessary to build a model for urban planning? Who could (and how could they) access these materials? How were experts involved in the discussion about urban management? What were their strategies? Based on oral history interviews, memoirs and publications from the period, the author discusses how the ideas of scientific urban environment management became one of the last Soviet urban utopias, which combined technological optimism and striving towards automation with rediscovering the user and attempts to reform the decision-making process.