Project

What this is

Concrete Wastelands is a catalogue of maps, photographs, and research documenting the monumental art and architecture of the socialist period across Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia. It covers monuments, mosaics, sgraffito, reliefs, sculptures, war memorials, bus stops, and buildings — treating art and architecture as inseparable, because they often were under socialism.

Soviet-era bus stops functioned as miniature architectural statements, incorporating some of the most creative artistic elements. Government and cultural buildings alike were completed with mosaics, bas-reliefs, and other monumental decorative art. Memorials blurred the line between structure and sculpture.

Most existing documentation or preservation projects focus on either art or architecture. Concrete Wastelands captures their intersection.

Why it matters

These works are disappearing faster than they are being documented. Concrete decay, redevelopment, privatisation, contested memory, and stigmatisation leave most structures legally unprotected and practically invisible.

This is a waste — not just culturally, but practically. Maintaining existing structures is cheaper than demolition and rebuilding, both financially and in embodied carbon. Preserved heritage generates tourism, cultural production, and adaptive reuse. Contested memory invites reinterpretation rather than erasure.

At times, modernist and socialist realist art are associated purely with repression and propaganda. This is a mistake.

No one chooses where or when they are born. Creative spirits endure through wars, famines, and repression. These worksand their authors deserve our respect — not despite where they came from, but precisely because of it.

Architects, sculptors, and painters found rare opportunities for individual expression during the socialist period. Out of the tension between the centre and the periphery emerged fantastical creations: outrageous modernist buildings, abstract avant-garde artworks, and unrivalled cosmic architecture. Many offered space for experimentation, local symbolism, and artistic autonomy, despite the imposed political limits.

In a misguided effort to distance themselves from this past, many communities have been actively erasing these structures since the collapse of the USSR - despite the distance of the artworks and their creators from the authoritarian regimes that commissioned them.

Concrete Wastelands rejects this erasure.

What's inside

• Map — explore and filter entries by country, category, typology, and period.
• Chronology — trace the evolution of styles from Revolutionary Experimentation (1917) to Contested Heritage (2026).
• Entries — photographs, location data, authorship, historical context, and sources for each documented work.
• Digest (coming soon) — essays and articles exploring the art, history, and ideas behind the archive: who made these works, why they matter, and what it means to lose them.

Where we are

The project's monumental scope requires a phased approach. Current focus:

• Moldova — active and under development (2026)
• Armenia — planned (2026-2027)
• Mongolia — planned (2027)

A growing movement

Concrete Wastelands did not emerge in a vacuum. Since the mid-2000s — and especially over the last decade — a growing body of projects has advanced the documentation and preservation of socialist-era heritage. The topic has exploded on social media, with accounts gathering millions of followers. Books on socialist architecture now appear on bestseller lists.

The creative seeds of this project lie with the work of Christopher Herwig (Soviet Bus Stops), Anna Bronovitskaya (Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955–1991), Frédéric Chaubin (Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed), Romania's Bureau for Art and Urban Research (Socialist Modernism), Nini Palavandishvili (Mosaics of the Soviet Period in Georgia), and the Spomeniki Database. This archive is indebted to their work in bringing this topic to a global audience.

Global initiatives (The Atlas Sovieticus, SOS Brutalism) and regional ones (Monumental Almaty in Kazakhstan, Mosaics of Moldova, Soviet Bus Stops in Georgia, Soviet Caucasus, Armenia's АР_АР_АТ and ArmArch, Monumental.by in Belarus, Tashkent Modernism and Mosaics of Tashkent, Soviet Mosaics of Ukraine and Bachyla in Ukraine, Soviet Mosaic Fund in Russia, to name but a few) are now multiplying.

Concrete Wastelands aims to complement and strengthen these efforts through collaboration, shared research, and cross-referencing.

Signs of hope

Preservation is possible, and it is happening.

In 2024, Uzbekistan recognised the mosaics of Tashkent as cultural heritage, legally protecting 157 mosaic facades and launching a dedicated digitalisation project. In 2023, the municipality of Chișinău added 30 mosaic panels to its Register of Public Monuments. In Almaty and across Ukraine, activists such as Monumental Almaty and Mom_of_Modernism have helped save and restore individual bas-reliefs, mosaics, and bus stops.

They are proof that visibility - and community engagement - can lead to protection.

The name

The "wastelands" speaks not just to physical decay, but to a wasted opportunity: to appreciate, explore, and preserve a cultural legacy that is routinely dismissed. Reading Stefan Rusu's Architectural Guide to Chișinău, I came across a line by Vlada Ciobanu: "The city grew younger and became wider and taller. The wastelands gave way to residential districts" - originally from a 1979 tourist flyer for Chișinău. Soviet-era authors were describing the reclamation of areas devastated by the Second World War. Concrete Wastelands reclaims that spirit — and these structures.

The person behind it

My Polish grandfather fled east during the Nazi invasion, only for the Soviets to invade too — forcing him home to Rybnik in Silesia. Conscripted by the Germans, he served in Dresden and Italy before defecting to the Americans in 1942 and joining the Polish First Armored Division to help liberate France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Wounded in combat, he settled in Belgium. Unable to return home permanently, because the socialist government back in Poland considered anyone who had served with the capitalist West a traitor.

Despite losing his youth to wars driven by both fascism and communism, he loved the German language and its people, and the Russians too. In the 1970s, he took my mother on holiday to St Petersburg, Moscow, and Tbilisi — a Polish veteran, previously banished from his home country by Moscow, wandering the streets of the Soviet Union with curiosity rather than bitterness. He joyously recalled chatting in Polish with Russians fishing and understanding each other. (Coincidentally, Rybnik comes from "ryba" - fish, in both Polish and Russian).

People, language, culture, and art outlast the governments that claim to represent them. The mosaic in Chișinău, the monument in Yerevan, the bus stop in Almaty — these are not the Soviet Union. They are what people make when given even the smallest space to create.

Concrete Wastelands continues that spirit.

How you can help

1. 1. Document — photograph and record works before they vanish
2. 2. Share knowledge — contribute historical context or corrections
3. 3. Engage institutions — connect archives, museums, and local authorities
4. 4. Seek protection — advocate for heritage listing and legal safeguards
5. 5. Increase visibility — cite, reference, and share the archive
6. 6. Support restoration — fund or volunteer for conservation efforts

Get in touch

Have a story to share? Spotted an error? Found an overlooked piece worth remembering? Want to chat? I look forward to hearing from you.