Former Fellows

The research project is a comparative study of social mobility in the new towns, built in the 1950s and early 1960s in Bulgaria, former Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It is a cross-European investigation into how these radical urban development projects, which aimed to improve social advance opportunities, were translated into reality. The research examines the similarities and divergences between East and West on the evolution of gender roles, the tensions between generations, old and new elites, rural and urban groups.After The Second World War new towns emerged across Europe on clear grounds. From the United Kingdom to the countries of the Communist Bloc, states engaged in sweeping projects of new town construction. Driven by pressing problems of urbanisation or urge to exploit natural resources, in almost all cases they were also aiming at boosting social mobility. The social history of these urban projects across have attracted attention - more significant regarding the Eastern Bloc and growing in the West. However the history of social mobility in new towns has never been seriously compared across national borders. The absence of comparative perspectives is somewhat paradoxical, since some parallels stand out clearly from the research in the East and the West. The investigations of these parallels are the research objectives of this project, aiming to discuss comparatively the nature, the effect and the renegotiation of the paradigms for equality, which motivated the new towns’ construction. It enquires if, how and for whom did the new towns provide social mobility in Europe across four division lines, visible from the extant literature: gender social mobility; social mobility between old and new elites, urban-rural social mobility, social mobility and generations.