Dariusz Aleksandrowicz Aleksandrowicz - Europa-Universität ...

D. Aleksandrowicz: The Socialist City and its Transformation 5
“socialist people” into an active whole which had to play a special role within the
ideologically determined ritual.
Besides the political centre, another dominant factor of a socialist city was the production
plant. Many new socialist cities have been built for the staff of a single large
production plant or for a single branch of heavy industry. 8 The role the production
plant played in the life of a socialist city went far beyond the process of production
and of work. Because of the permanent supply shortages, the plant provided the supply
of commodities for the members of its staff. 9 It also provided cultural life for
them and kindergarten for their children. Holidays were organized by the production
plant in the plant-owned “recreation settlements.” Despite the fact that these settlements
were geographically distant from both socialist city and socialist production
plant they belonged to the very same context and were thus an extension of the behavioural
and cultural patterns determined by it.
The new socialist city essentially consisted of (1) the centre of political and ideological
manipulation, (2) the place of production and of work, and (3) the private
dwelling-place. In each of these specific spaces the individual was dominated by
political manipulation (which was daily present at least in form of visual propaganda
and of monumental architecture of the central square or of the official buildings),
by the plant, and by the anonymity and monotony of the living blocks. As a
result of an extremely poor infrastructure of the urban-specific services (including
cultural services) there existed hardly any mediating instances between the individual
space, which was reduced to the inside of the dwelling-place, and the public
space of the city, which was the spatial representation of the authority of the socialist
state. This type of relation between the individual and the collective (or:
between the private and the public) was, to be sure, also an essential issue in the
above mentioned ideas of the Western socialist city planers. In Garnier’s design of
the cité industrielle, for instance, “it is only the threshold of one’s own house which
(...) marks the very narrow border between the privacy of living and the public
space. Crossing the threshold one already finds himself outside, in a space that belongs
to everyone.” (de Bruyn, 1992: 537). In the actual socialist city the problem,
however, was that this space which was originally designed so as to belong to eve-
8 The process of construction and of existence of a socialist city in its function as a dwelling place
of one single production plant is impressively documented in Beier (1997). (The central issue of
the volume is, however, to demonstrate similarities between a planned city in East and in West
Germany: Stalinstadt/Eisenhüttenstadt and Stadt des KdF-Wagens/Wolfsburg. I do not deal with
the related questions in this paper, because it would imply an detailed discussion of some other
complex problems. One of them would be the relation between the respective aspects of the two
totalitarian systems: Communism and National Socialism. It is due to the fact that Wolfsburg
owes its very character as a “planned city” to its origin in the industrializing and city-planning
concepts of the Nazi state.)
9 From the end of the 70‘s onwards, when the crisis of the socialist economy consequently approximated
its peak, some of the industrial production plants in socialist Poland even started
breeding pigs in order to improve their respective services. These initiatives were glorified by the
media and supported by the officials of party and state.