ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on critical heritage scholarship to explore heritage work around socialist architecture, with a special focus on mass housing. Through a range of examples drawn from Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (former Czechoslovakia), it examines assumptions, contexts and circumstances that have variously shaped the link between socialism, architecture and heritage. The argument is in three parts: after providing an overview of the state-socialist debate on architecture and heritage, the chapter’s main focus is on two contemporary forms of othering socialist architecture as, respectively, antithetical to heritage and a form of dissonant heritage. Drawing attention to the role of architects, historians, heritage professionals, policymakers and activists in this process, the chapter argues that the patrimonialization of socialist architecture is symptomatic of, and adds to, the postsocialist condition in which socialism is consigned to the past.
