PGIS and Interwar Totalitarian Planning

Summary

Massive building programs undertaken in Europe between the world wars present a challenge for cultural resource management. While these projects' ambitious goals and often radical reconceptualization of space and social relations are historically noteworthy, their association with totalitarian regimes and repressive politics require careful contextualization. Through the example of agricultural reform in Fascist Italy, this paper advocates for an approach to this challenge through an archaeological methodology based on Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS). By combining archaeological, ethnographic, and geographic methods, PGIS can help distinguish totalitarian planning from practice, investigate how interwar building projects actually impacted the everyday lives of local people, and explore the role these projects’ material remains play today. In this manner, we can use archaeology as a tool to help think through a complex history still within living memory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology Of Interwar Europe (1918-1939)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 419