The Italian historian Manfredo Tafuri didn’t believe that there could be an architecture that was distinctively socialist, given that we did not live under socialism. “There is no class architecture, only a class critique of architecture.”

Tafuri, in his influential, sharply argued 1970s works — Architecture and Utopia and The Sphere and the Labyrinth — closed off a debate that had existed for nearly a century: whether it was possible or worthwhile to even think about a specifically socialist city under capitalism — and, more to the point, whether we could build fragments of it within capitalism. Tafuri’s strident “no” to the second question accompanied a quieter “no” to the first.

But since the rise of neoliberalism, those little fragments of the “socialist city,” unevenly built in the hundred years between William Morris and Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council, have gradually started to be seen not as a way of maintaining a quiet and healthy population for capitalism to exploit, but as objects of nostalgia.