The cities of Socialism

by George Μ. Chatzistergiou

The collapse of the socialist bloc, just fifteen years ago, took down with it all references to the way of life in the countries which operated under this system. There is a sense of ‘black hole’ in time and space, almost as if this life never existed. This gap is belied by the surviving traces of that era’s “material culture” which still form a large part of the built environment in these countries. These are the buildings in cities and villages, the roads, squares and parks of which many were constructed or remodelled from the 1950s onwards, and now remain integrated into the contemporary urban web. All this is a vast field of data which is open to research. Moreover, a cognitive approach to socialist-bloc societies through the study of the surviving built environment presents some strong comparative advantages, since it addresses directly the way of life and sidesteps the rhetoric of “grand politics”, which is obviously unsuitable for a creative approach.

The bibliography which bears directly upon the built environment of Eastern-bloc countries is very limited, and the ‘pre-collapse’ books are clearly influenced by the cold-war atmosphere; the emphasis is often on propaganda, either to demonstrate the ‘care of the state’ or to point to the ‘impasse of socialist economy’. One category of books that came out soon after the collapse were ‘easy’ of subject, with a ‘denunciatory’ content about “Ceausescu’s palaces”, “Stalin’s monuments”, and so on. After that there were some serious approaches, as in the essay collections “Architecture and Revolution” by Neil Leach (Routledge, 1999) and “Cities after Socialism” by Andrusz, Harloe and Szelenyi, (Blackwell, 1996). As we see it, the main drawback of such books is that they attempt general theoretical approaches without a systematic analysis of the in-situ material.

The book “Socialist Spaces, Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc” represents a turning point in the bibliography on “socialist cities”. Its thematic axis is the relationship between everyday life and the built environment. Some of the titles of the essays are characteristic: “Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life” by Crowley and Reid; Bren’s “Weekend Getaways: the Chata, the Tramp and the Politics of Private Life in post-1968 Czechoslovakia”; “Soviet Exurbia: Dachas in Postwar Russia” by Lovell; “Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment” by K. Gerasimova, “Warsaw Interiors: The Public Life of Private Spaces, 1949-65” by D. Crowley, A. Ihle’s “Wandering the Streets of Socialism: A Discussion of the Street Photography of Arno Fischer and Ursula Arnold”. It is noted that D. Crowley, who teaches at the Royal College of Art in London, has co-edited, together with Sheffield University’s S. Reid, the book “Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe” (Berg, 2000), while Reaktion Books is about to publish his work on the post-war rebuilding of the Nazi-destroyed Warsaw.

A complex reality unfolds as one reads this book, with differences among the various countries –partly due to the cultural and economic background in each case– as well as some interesting parallels with trends observed in Western-European societies about the same time. There is no doubt that the angles like the one adopted in this book are still at the beginning of the process towards a holistic approach, since many questions have not even been posed yet: exactly how did cities evolve in the three or four decades after the war, and how were they structured? At what speed did the issues around the built environment evolve? What were the phases of stagnation and mobility? What was the functionality of these cities from the perspective of everyday life? How do these buildings compare with the post-war high-rise apartment blocks of Milan or Glasgow?

The Greek case

The enumeration of these issues brings us directly to the unexpected interest that a study of the built environment of eastern-bloc countries may have for students of the Greek case. If, as we believe, it is pointless to talk about the present and the future of Greek cities without having understood sufficiently the building activity in post-war Greece, a comparative examination of the evolution of the built environment in Balkan countries –particularly in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria- might shed light from unexpected new angles; at any rate, it would move on the discussion beyond the usual stereotypes. Among other things, such an approach could reveal some unanticipated parallels in the “lifestyles” that evolved after World War II under theoretically different socio-political system: the unprecedented urbanisation combined with de-ruralisation phenomena, the decline of the pre-war “upper middleclass establishment” and the gradual spread of a lower middle class, the emergence of a ‘new-type’ family, drastically smaller than before the war, the new phenomena of anthropological interest, such as “living in flats”, in conjunction with the diffusion of a technological culture of television, washing machines, cars and industrial goods…

Given that the built environment, as a physical manifestation of a society’s way of life, constitutes a functional vehicle for a meaningful approach to things, it should be usefully exploited while these traces of material culture still remain. Until the bibliography finds its way in this area, some inspired photographic exhibitions or collections of photographic essays could highlight many interesting aspects.

David Crowley and Susanne Reid, ed

Socialist Spaces, Sites of Everyday Life

Berg, pp. 260