During the Cold War, the gifting of architecture was the most visible manifestation of exchanges between socialist countries and the decolonizing Global South. Soviet, Eastern European, Cuban, and Chinese institutions, in collaboration with African and Asian actors, designed and constructed hundreds of factories, schools, hospitals, and housing neighborhoods in Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mongolia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. These buildings linked newly independent countries with their socialist allies but also cascaded into gifting relationships across the Global South. The book’s contributors show how the moral, racial, and temporal dynamics of gift-giving shaped the design, construction, and afterlives of these buildings. The 24 contributing authors debate how generosity and violence inherent in gift-giving, the social bonds these practices created, and the geopolitical context impacted—and continue to impact—everyday urbanism across Africa and Asia today. Discursive essays and image-based stories offer a more differentiated genealogy of global urbanization and its architecture.

Łukasz Stanek is professor of architectural history at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He studies worldwide urbanization by focusing on architectural exchanges between territories that have often been considered “peripheral.” The Gift (Jovis Publishers, 2026), edited by Stanek, advances this intellectual project both in terms of the topic and as a collaborative framework. Stanek published Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020). After receiving his PhD from Delft University of Technology (2008), he taught at the ETH Zurich, the University of Manchester, and held guest appointments at Harvard University and the University of Ghana. He cocurated the exhibition The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture (Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich, 2024).