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Introduction
[T]hus, when the universal sun has gone down, the moth seeks the lamplight of the private world.
Karl Marx
One of the most enduring images of the twentieth century was the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Erected overnight in 1961 with barbed wire and later reconstructed with concrete and reinforced with guards and traps, the Wall was far more than an ugly physical barrier. It was â and for many of us, still is, even in its extinction â the iconic emblem of fear and division, the ultimate material symbol of âusâ and âthemâ apart. The Wall was dismantled by ecstatic crowds on both sides of Berlin during several weeks in late 1989 and early 1990. The popular slogan âNo more wars, no more walls, a united worldâ remained graffitied on its decrepit but still-standing blocks well through 1990.
Today, more than twenty years after the Wall's collapse, it is obvious that the united world, whatever the meaning of this elusive term may be, never materialized. Some walls fell, but many others were erected: some visible, like the USâMexico border walls; and some less visible, like the new borders of the European Union, which now set apart a slightly expanded geographic version of the civilized West from its less deserving East European âothers.â
This book is about wall-making in Eastern Europe since the end of socialism. I believe that contrary to the expectations raised by the optimistic images of 1989, the last twenty years of East European history have been an exceptionally prolific period as far as wall-making goes. There are now all kinds of walls, material and immaterial, economic and political, legal and social, which separate the newly rich from the newly poor, and the ârightâ from the âwrongâ ethnicities. Some walls, of course, existed well before 1989 but have now become more solid. There also are many brand new walls in the form of state borders and partitioned cities.
Perhaps none of this new partitioning should be surprising. Spatial instability and border reconfiguration accompany most major societal overhauls, and the post-1989 systemic transformation â a time of radical âboundary instabilityâ (Andrusz 1996) that brought an end to socialist multi-ethnic federalisms â has been a perfect illustration. The borders of what was once intended as a politically and economically homogeneous super-bloc stretching from the heart of Europe to the Far East corner of Asia â a super-bloc demarcated on its western side by the Berlin Wall â were dissolved. As globalization and the communications revolution undercut the ability of states to remain the primary scale on which socio-economic management is performed (Brenner et al. 2003; Brenner 2004a, 2004b), state borders caved in too; some vanished altogether, and new ones were created as new identities and alliances were formed. Still, what I find surprising is the raw dynamism with which a new border-building erupted after 1989 on a smaller, urban scale. The cities of Eastern Europe â sites of stark new social contrasts â were in a few short years invaded by a myriad of new ruptures and enclosures. In the process, their open, borderless, shared spaces were severely depreciated. Peculiarly then, the global âspace of flowsâ that the Information Age (Castells 1989) brought to us all seems to be making its own anti-thesis: a local space of bounds.
This book tells the story of boundary-building, vanishing public space, and the rescaling of enclosure in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. It is a personal book: I tell the story of my hometown even if I tell it through the lens of my experience as a scholar and professional who has spent the last eighteen years in the United States. My subject matter is the city, its form, its style, its planning. I analyze the changing urbanity of Sofia and show that the post-socialist period has been one of intensive corrosion of the collective urban realm and equally intensive construction of divided, explicitly private spaces, many of which are bounded by daunting physical barriers. The most obvious example is the new generation of fortressed homes â the local version of the âblock-homesâ that Steven Flusty (1997) described in Los Angeles. Such homes, which barely existed during socialism (only the top echelon of party apparatchiks had them), are individually fenced off, likely in response to the security concerns of a newly rich class surrounded by a sea of poverty. They began to spread around Sofia right after 1989 and attained the status of the new norm in residential architecture in the late 1990s. Their latest incarnation comes in the form of large, Western-style gated communities, many of which now âadornâ the city's sprawling outskirts. The phenomenon is not limited to Sofia. There is a burgeoning literature on expensive gated housing in the post-socialist world, especially in wealthier cities like Moscow, Prague and Budapest (e.g., Bodnar 2001; Blinnikov et al. 2006; CsĂ©falvay 2009), where social contrasts are equally stark but global capital is more abundant. In fact if one combined all the iron, concrete, bricks and mortar that surround the new gated homes in East European cities (not to mention other types of enclosure), the sum would likely dwarf the volume of concrete used in the 150-kilometer-long, four-meter-tall Berlin Wall by a massive ratio. I do not mean to ignore the blatant contrasts between the Berlin Wall and its miniature successors: there is a principal difference between walls made to keep insiders in (e.g., the Berlin Wall and prison gates) and walls made to keep outsiders out (e.g., those around residential compounds; Marcuse 1997). Still, there is an intrinsic commonality: walls set borders; they part; they make an âusâ and âthem.â
The example of upscale, walled housing in Sofia is but part of the story. A wider process of border-setting and fragmentation (and, since we are in the Balkans, shall we say balkanization?) of urban space is occurring. This process elevates the protection of private space, not only from crime but from any other perceived intrusions by âothers,â as a dominant cultural ideal at the expense of a perpetually shrinking public realm. I see it in dilapidated housing towers left over from socialism, where even urban residents of the most modest means have collected sufficient funds to install new locks and hire security guards to monitor the building entrance twenty-four hours a day. I see this in shiny supermarkets and glitzy business parks, often built by Western developers, which turn their backs to the city and are accessible only through a few controlled gates. I see this in vanishing playgrounds, quickly turned into paid parking, and in disappearing parkland transformed into private sports complexes, whose fences are installed before the local government could issue building permits. I see it in the exclusive far-flung new suburbs, where public infrastructure is so minimal that owning a Land Rover is a prerequisite to visiting them. And I see it in the new architecture â a generation of triumphantly individualistic buildings, whose stylistic purpose is to stand apart, shine alone, disconnect themselves from the street, or, in the words of one Bulgarian cultural critic, declare âwarâ on their neighbors (Dandolova 2002). I call it the architecture of disunity.
What drives this extraordinary process of urban partitioning, of shrinking urban publicness? To a great extent, its roots can be found in the changes in economic and political environment that ensued after 1989, especially the shift of power from the public to the private sector. The hypothesis this study explores, however, is that changes in the urban environment are not only dependent on post-socialist changes in politics and economics. Rather, to the extent to which space is a medium of culture,1 the changing urbanity of Sofia is the story of the post-socialist cultural condition. The story follows from forty-five years of failed totalitarian attempts to sell a heroic philosophy dedicated to elevating the public good and defeating petty private interests â a time when the private home was the sole place of passive resistance against the state. The story continues for another twenty years, during which another heroic narrative â that of Western democracy â also grounded in some brave assumptions for a noble public realm, produced ambiguous results at best: results including the quick turnover of public resources to private parties, many of whom abused their public positions (e.g., the old nomenklatura) or rose to wealth by breaking the rules designed to keep a public realm alive (e.g., the new mafia). In this sense, I see the story of fragmenting public space in Sofia as a subset of a much broader condition. I call this condition privatism, privatism with a passion and a vengeance. Unlike privatization, which is an economic and political process of transferring material resources, privatism is a cultural condition which comes in reaction to the perceived gross failures of the socialist and post-socialist public realm. I believe it expresses itself in space much as it expresses itself in, say, corruption, law-breaking and tax-evasion â all common post-socialist social practices.2 Privatism in my definition is the widespread disbelief in a benevolent public realm and the widespread sense that to appropriate the public may be the best way to thrive in private: To secede is to succeed.
I use the term Iron Curtains, which Winston Churchill coined fifteen years before the Berlin Wall was built, to express this process of urban secessionism and turning inward. It is a process of expanding the private, shrinking the public, and firming the border between them; it is a process of curtaining off, walling off and cutting off. Perhaps ironically, I find a metaphor that Karl Marx used in his dissertation to most vividly capture the swing from official socialist publicness to popular post-socialist privatism, in culture and in space. It is the metaphor of the nocturnal moth: when the universal sun goes down, Marx said, the moth seeks shelter in âthe lamplight of the private worldâ (Marx and Engels 1975). Socialism â arguably the culmination of Western modernity (Bauman 1991; Havel 1992b, 1994) â promised to be that universal sun. Its demise ushered in, in Zygmunt Bauman's words, the ultimate âswarming time for nocturnal mothsâ (Bauman 1995).
Notes on Significance and Methodology
Through an in-depth case study,3 the book contributes to the literatures on post-socialist social, spatial and cultural change, modernity and post-modernity, and globalization and urbanization. Even though empirical observations are derived nominally from a single city, their analysis is positioned within a global theoretical framework and is further enriched by perpetual references to processes of urban transformation that occur in other parts of the world â not only in other post-socialist contexts in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in Western Europe and the United States. Therefore, the study is an example of the implicitly comparative or quasi-comparative method (Bodnar 2001).
Countries like Bulgaria and cities like Sofia occupy a peripheral position in the literature (that is, Sofia's urbanism has never been the subject of an analytical English-language monograph, and Bulgaria is one of the most understudied East European nations; Ganev 2007). Sofia is neither a London nor a New York; it is not even a Moscow. It does not belong to the world of privileged âglobal citiesâ that seem to arouse an insatiable curiosity in urban scholars. Yet, in focusing on it, I second Robinson's (2006) call for studying âordinary citiesâ (or, rather, her call for treating all cities as ordinary) â an approach that allows us to explore the complexity and uniqueness of urban places without perpetually forcing them into some hierarchical system and, consequently, neglecting all but the top tier.
So what exactly can one learn from a book on Sofia? Why should a scholar of post-socialist cultures or post-socialist urbanism read a case-based monograph? More broadly, why should a scholar of global urban transformations read about a particular post-socialist city?4 My answer is as follows. The book is ultimately about privatization as a socio-economic process and privatism as a cultural condition, both of which are global in scope and integral to contemporary, post-modern capitalism. Post-socialist urbanity embodies privatization and privatism in such an unmediated, unrestrained form that it allows us to observe them with greater clarity than in Western settings, where their socio-spatial outcomes have been more gradual and subtle (Bodnar 2001; Humphrey 2002). Sofia, where predatory privatization and a dramatic decline of publicness have been the leitmotifs of the post-socialist period, provides an especially poignant example â one that comes very close to the extreme, exemplary case study that theorists of qualitative methodology describe (Yin 1984).
The study focuses on the privatization of space â one of the most important aspects of post-modern urban change, which has been thoroughly studied in Western cities (Sorkin 1992; Davis 1990; Ellin 1996, 1997; Dear 2000). It does so, however, in the under-analyzed post-socialist context. It makes the case that although privatization of urban space may be a global process, in post-socialist settings it has erupted with an astonishing virility not only because of the specific political and economic circumstances, but also because of the vigor of post-socialist privatism as a cultural condition.
In short, then, as the sole monograph on contemporary urbanism in a Southeast European capital, the book seeks to make a broader statement on issues of post-socialist urbanism in the tradition of several recent in-depth studies of East-Central European cities, such as Budapest (Bodnar 2001), Berlin (Till 2005), and St. Petersburg (Axenov et al. 2006). What distinguishes the book from other contributions, however, is its unique focus on urbanism observed at the ground level as a means of telling the story of post-socialist cultural privatism. Because of its insights into post-socialist cultural change and post-modern urbanization, the book is intended for a wide audience of scholars in urban sociology, urban history, urban geography, cultural anthropology, urban planning, architecture and art history, as well as scholars who specialize in the study of Eastern Europe and the post-socialist world. Furthermore, as Ghodsee and Henry (2010) recently observed, in light of the intense debate about the proper role of the public sector in the economy and society that has spread in today's recession-struck Western societies, studies of East European-style privatizations may present an informative (and cautionary) tale for policy-makers, not only in post-socialist contexts, but in Western contexts as well.
The book takes an explicitly cultural approach without attempting to downplay the significance of political or economic forces as space-makers. As Eade and Mele point out, the task of âunderstanding the cityâ is not to establish a hierarchy of the three main factors that shape urban form (the social, the economic and the cultural), but rather to problematize their connections in particular cities and particular periods and continuously strive to develop ways to comprehend their intersections (2003: 3â4). Indeed, all of the aspects of spatial change discussed in the book, like all non-spatial social practices, can be viewed through an alternative, non-cultural lens. However, I have chosen to focus on culture, because it has remained surprisingly understudied as a causal factor in post-socialist urbanism. As I mention in Chapter 2, among the many books on the subject just a handful highlight culture. In ignoring it, scholars are neglecting a powerful variable that is not only shaped by the economic and institutional contexts but intersects with them and shapes them in return, a variable that affects space both directly (through people's views and ideals of space) and indirectly (by influencing economic and institutional behavior). Take, for example, the intense suburbanization process after 1989. The new spatial phenomenon is clearly influenced by the economic and institutional logic of post-socialism, as I reiterate in Chapter 6. The green and agricultural land that once surrounded the compact city was privatized, the regulations constraining the type of construction allowed at the urban edge were lifted, and building on the greenbelts became a profitable activity for the burgeoning private sector. The fact that construction intensified after economic stabilization around the year 2000, when the economy began to recover, affirms the link between economic growth and the pace of suburbanization in post-socialist cities, as others have shown (TimĂĄr and VĂĄradi 2001). Still, can it all be explained without culture? Without it, how can we account for the views of many new suburban residents who express their intense desire to get out of Sofia and fulfill their dream of claiming their own space (i.e., suburban, private space) â the type of space they say they craved yet could not attain in socialist housing? How can we explain the proliferation of media and scholarly articles touting the virtues of the old (pre-socialist) Bulgarian family home? And how can we explain the facts that Sofia's new plans have portrayed suburbanization as a progressive, Western-style trend, and that Sofia's Mayor goes around proudly cutting ribbons at the opening ceremonies of new gated suburban communities? Aren't suburbs more than the spatial outcome of economic and political forces; aren't they also an ideal?
Because the study takes a cultural approach, the main method of investigation is qualitative and the main source of data is the semi-structured in-depth interview. I have conducted nearly one hundred formal and informal in-depth interviews over several months-long trips to Sofia. Of these interviews, thirty-six were conducted with âexpertsâ: actors who have actively participated in or influenced the production of urban forms in recent years or actors who have special knowledge of it.5 The remainder of the interviews targeted residents and users of the new spaces of Sofia, especially in gated and suburban environments. In Chapters 6 and 7, I rely partially on quantitative data obtained from a standardized survey of a random sample of residents in the affluent southern outskirts of the city (this survey was conducted by the Institute of Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). Subjects for follow-up, in-depth interviews were selected from the survey respondents. For Chapter 8, I interviewed a selection of residents of six new gated communities.6 In the interviews, residents were invited to share their views on the city (including its public spaces), their neighborhoods, their neighbors and their homes. Subjects responded to specific questions about where and how they lived before the end of socialism (assuming they were old enough to recall), how their lives and residential environment changed after 1989, how the city and their views of the city have changed since then, and what their ideal residential environment would be. They were also asked about their views of public institutions and their views of their neighbors and people generally,7 as well as about their willingness to engage in voluntary civic activities. The overall goal of the interviews was to âmeasureâ in qualitative terms people's ideals and preferences when it comes to common (urban) and residential (private) spaces, as well as their views on the state of the c...
