Dariusz Aleksandrowicz Aleksandrowicz - Europa-Universität ...

10 F.I.T. Discussion Paper 10/99
In the case discussed, the major adapting actor is the planer respectively the planning
authority. Their adaptive efforts are due to giving up the original plan and at the same
to explaining the retreat by way of some new interpretative scheme. The imperfectness
of what is given appears now as what the people in their ordinary lives “really
need.” The “people” in question as well as the patterns of “ordinary live” and of
“needs” specific to them do, however, not represent any universal anthropological
standard. The respective features are but habitual consequences of the type of existence
in the peculiar environment of an ill-concepted “socialist city.” But as far as
the modernized views of the planers are concerned, the respective habits are about to
substitute the usual standards of urban life.
After the collapse of the communist system there emerged, however, some new ideas
as to how the future centre of the city is to be constructed. What the ideas substantially
aimed at was to change and at the same time to re-introduce the communist
concept of a centre as a “centre of power” according to what “power” in the altered
situation means. The two key objects designated for the new centre were therefore a
business centre of the Kamaz “nomenclatura joint stock companies” and, close to it,
an impressive building of the American-Russian Fund Dialogue Inc. 19 The huge dimensions
of both of them is exactly what the image of the centre is to be expressed
by.
IV. Transformation of a socialist city: constructive and destructive adaptation
The very design of the new socialist city followed the ideal of a plan- and ideologyconforming
society which had to overcome the spontaneous social process based on
individual activity. The adaptive counter-tendencies which resulted from behavioural
strategies of individuals and groups, however, as already mentioned in the
previous chapter, consisted in changing the original functional order and the
image of the socialist city according to the spontaneous forces and needs. This adaptation
took place long before both the breakdown of the communist system 20 and
19 Despite of the practical function of it – that is, selling software - there was also some ideological
justification for the Russian-American joint venture to be part of the institutional as well as
symbolic centre of the city. As far as we can speak of “Westernization” with respect to the postcommunist
Russia, this word would there especially mean a superficial “Americanization”, without
any deep reference to respective institutional re-arrangements or people’s behavioural patterns.
(It may be an accidental illustration of this problem that during the interview mentioned
above Stepanovitsh exposed on his desk a few two-years old issues of “New York Post” to
document that he once had “unforgettable luck” to be there.)
20 Socialist cities, to be sure, finally owed their real character at least as much to the ideological
design as to the efforts of the local apparatshiks to adapt it to the particular interests rationally
defined by them. It was, for instance, in accordance with these interests to have the biggest possible
production plant in one’s own sphere of influence and to guarantee as much as possible resources
to be planned for it. For the general problem of correlation between objectives of the
plan and particular interests of the apparatshiks cf. Hoessli (1989: 54p.): “Bürokratie gegen