The vast, proverbially windswept plazas built under "really existing socialism" from the 1920s to the 1980s are widely considered to be useless spaces, designed to intimidate or at least impress. Yet if they are only of use to those in power, why is it they have been used so successfully in protest? From Petrograd in 1917 to Independence Square in Kiev during the Orange Revolution, these spaces have become focuses for mass protest. Beginning in Berlin's Alexanderplatz, and taking in Warsaw, Ljubljana, Kharkov and Moscow, Owen Hatherley heads in search of revolt, architectural glory and horror. Along the way he encounters the more civic squares that replaced their authoritarian predecessors and finds that, paradoxically, the old centres of power are more conducive to dissent than these new, ostensibly democratic plazas.

Owen Hatherley is a freelance writer on political aesthetics, based in South-East London. He is the author of four books: Militant Modernism, 2009; A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, 2010; Uncommon, 2011 (an essay on the British pop group Pulp); A New Kind of Bleak, 2012.

Berlin-Alexanderplatz's reputation already precedes it, thanks to novelist Alfred Döblin and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Its reputation is also strictly speaking inaccurate. The place that Döblin wrote of in 1928 was slated to be obliterated then, and by the time Fassbinder filmed it in 1980, it long since had been, to the point where location shots in the Alexanderplatz itself were completely impossible. Fassbinder's TV series is a succession of interiors - a seedy rented room in one of Berlin's notorious Mietskaserne ('rental barracks'), U-Bahn stations lined with glazed tiles, canvassing Nazis and communists, and peeling political posters. Neon shop signs just outside are all we ever see of 'Alex' itself, which makes it all the more striking how clear a picture there is of this absence. The name itself sounds ineffably romantic to a certain kind of English ear. And though the landscape doesn't even slightly resemble the one that Fassbinder's characters traversed, that ear creates a certain mental picture. East Berlin. The Wall. The Cold War.Post-punk. David Bowie, somewhere, wearing a long coat and sucking in his cheeks. The sound is electronic, the architecture is modernist, the season is winter.