Dariusz Aleksandrowicz Aleksandrowicz - Europa-Universität ...

4 F.I.T. Discussion Paper 10/99
individualistic monotony of the urban space. 6 The human individual as an inhabitant
of the city was confronted by the urban space in the same manner as he/she was confronted
by the institutions of the socialist state. He/she was integrated into a spatial
order which widely determined his/her behaviour, leaving him/her very few alternatives
to use the urban space as a field of his/her individual creativeness. This determination
manifested itself in everyday-life – with respect to both the individual’s
work and leisure-time – as well as in the specific forms of public activity which was
organized within and by way of the structures of the urban space.
In the traditional (“bourgeois”) city which has developed owing to the economic
process, the centre of the town is obviously marked by mercantile factors. “Centre”
means there above all “shopping –“ and “business centre.” The aim of the socialist
city planers was in turn to give the centre of the new city an ideological character.
That is, instead by the market-place the centre of the town was here to be organized
by political institutions and by official ideology. 7 This very idea was, for instance,
the background of the reconstruction of Bucharest at the time of the late Ceausescu -
a project which can be interpreted as an effort to make a socialist new city out of a
traditional one.
Except obvious similarities there are also differences between the socialist and the
“pre-bourgeois” concept of the centre of a city. In the latter, the principal area was
defined as a centre of religious cult and of administration. The socialist city, in turn,
tended to marginalize religion and to somehow substitute it by secular ideology.
What added here to the administrative function of political power were, among others,
its manipulative and mobilizing efforts attempting the masses of inhabitants to
act in a particular way within the spatial order of the city. But still good arguments
could probably be found to support the thesis that something similar occurred also in
at leas few representative cities of the absolute monarchies.
According to the concept of a socialist city, the centre was to be defined as the space
where some specific form of collective life of the inhabitants of the city takes place.
By its very nature, it was an ideologically controlled collective life. A particular
political directive or a regular official occasion, such as a state or party festival,
were the source of activity which tentatively united the passive and isolated
6 Some substantial ideas underlying the design of a city in a communist-type society are, however,
not of Stalinst origin, but can be traced back to the early writings of the founders of Communism.
This refers especially to the concept of dwellings which were intended to promote a “collectivist
way of life.” 1847 Engels pleaded for “construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal
dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture.” Engels
(1847).
7 Cf. Kotarbiñski (1985: 54): “... the city should have a centre of a social and political type as well
as squares and streets as the space of collective life.” Szczepañski (1993b: 152), suggests an
analogy between socialist and “oriental” concept of the centre of a city. According to Szczepañski,
the common feature shared by them is emptiness of one part of the central space with the
other part occupied by monumental buildings.