Preliminary Programme

This paper is based on the wider research conducted in the Archive of Yugoslavia, Archive of Serbia, Historical Archive of Belgrade and Tito’s Archive. The author will try to address the housing problem in Yugoslavia in the first decade after the WWII. The questions of chaotic urbanization, provisional urban planning, insufficient house building, communal flats and social segregation in the fast growing Yugoslav towns will be tackled. Special attention will be given to the life of ordinary people in such conditions (fear of an eviction decree or unwanted cotenant; loss of privacy for the tenants of communal flats)
Urbanisation and the process of industrialization that European countries had gone through back in the 19th century took place in Yugoslavia only after the Second World War. Towns were under enormous pressure as a result of the Party´s political and social programs and according to estimates, around two million people (out of 17 million in total) moved from rural areas to the towns during the period 1945 – 1961. The combination of rapid population growth, slow building and poor quality of housing maintenance led to a constant decrease in the amount of urban dwelling space available to each person. The housing construction in the first postwar decade was a byword for bad, non-functional and half-finished flats. During the construction, political directives were more important then the technical regulations and expert opinion regarding the projects and pace of the work . New settlements emerged on the outskirts of towns and usually had neither electricity, water, paved streets, nor the most essential infrastructure. Architects warned that the new settlements were „plain and ugly“, and especially criticised the absence of any even minimal efforts to fit the newly erected structures into the architecture of the surroundings.
The only solution the Party was able to offer to the housing space crisis was the institution of the “communal flat.“ The heads of the Party used newspapers to appeal to city dwellers to denounce their neighbours who apparently had surplus housing space, so ensuring the „correct“ usage of flats was declared each citizen’s obligation and “responsibility“. The campaign for revealing surplus housing space assumed the form of a real pursuit where the newspapers reported on the names and addresses of the people who, according to the Party standards, “used their flats uneconomically“. Shared flats brought about the loss of privacy and intimacy, as different families, on their way to the kitchen or bathroom, passed through each others’ bedrooms!
Although in theory Communist Party wanted to provide cheap housing for everyone, paradoxically, socialist urbanisation was a synonym for social segregation in practice. Newly founded socialist companies fought with each other for the few available engineers and expert technicians who, in order to accept the job, demanded a solution to their accommodation problem. In such circumstances, living in uncomfortable settlements or cramped communal flats was a sheer luxury in comparison with the quality of life in primitive and provisory factory colonies. In the far suburbs, totally isolated from the town and any sort of urban life, the time passed in factory halls and insanitary scantily furnished communal rooms with up to 10 people dwelling together.
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The present paper aims to examine conceptualizations and practices of urban transformation during state socialism, taking as a case study the city of Iasi, in eastern Romania. The former capital of the medieval state of Moldavia, the city of Ia?i used to have a consistent Jewish population (around 35,000 inhabitants in 1930), which had brought a significant contribution to the modernization of the town during the 19th and early 20th century. Before the Second World War, the cityscape of Ia?i was often described as a “garden-city” with precious examples of medieval religious architecture and a lively commercial core developed around the turn of the century in the area of the former princely court.
In the postwar period, the survival of the existing urban layout was strongly challenged especially after 1960. In the context of major social transformations determined by the industrialization policy, the Party promoted high modernism as a dominant vision of urban transformation, expressed through such concepts as the socialist reconstruction and later, the socialist transformation of cities. Party leaders and planners criticized the “heavy burden of the bourgeois heritage” characterized, among others, by low densities, chaotic development and unsanitary living conditions in seemingly decrepit buildings. Against the demolition-and –building- anew strategy advertised in the propaganda, the Bucharest-based Commission for Historical Monuments suggested its own vision of urban transformation in the historic city center: restoration and functional modernization.
This paper argues that it is important to observe not only the obvious conflicts between modernists and preservationists in debating the transformation of the built environment, but also the shifting conceptualizations behind their arguments. While political directives forced planners to locate new housing estates in the city center instead of the outskirts and therefore to disregard most of the exiting architectural heritage in this area, preservationists were also pushed to re-evaluate their positions. Faced with the threat of large scale demolitions, they began to value not only medieval churches, but also the previously despised examples of 19th century architecture. Moreover, under the influence of the 1964 Venice Charter, they adopted the new definition of the historical monument, extended from that of an individual building to the entire historic center, now delimited as an “architectural reservation”. By such re-conceptualizations, the Commission’s practitioners hoped to broaden their space for negotiation in the discussions with the local Municipality and the Institute for Urban Planning.
However, ultimately demolitions could not be avoided as the Commission was disbanded in 1977. Yet, the razing of the 19th century buildings brought to light the relics of the medieval town, which immediately became the object of archaeological investigation by local experts. Their efforts not only opposed once again the modernist plans, but also contradicted existing theories regarding the supposed late and spontaneous urbanization of Moldavian towns. Therefore, I argue that such case studies are highly relevant for investigating the policies of architectural heritage in Eastern European cities, which could not be easily integrated into a Western or Central European urban typology.
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The period of transformation is receding into the past and therefore becoming an object of research for contemporary history. The presentation shows the unexpected convergence of postcommunist with western European metropoles in the past 25 years. The findings are based on a range of social and economic data from and cultural factors shaping Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Vienna and other regions of rapid growth. Based on this comparison the presentation tries to explain the boom of Warsaw and the problems of Berlin, the two cities which range on the top and the bottom of this comparison until 2009. The project also reaches beyond the capital cities by showing other common patterns of development in the former East and the former West of Europe, such as the increasing divergence of metropolitan and rural regions. Although the presentation is based on some “hard” data it also uses cultural and longue durée historical arguments to explain the findings of the comparison. A more general question is whether this convergence of metropoles and the divergence is a phenomenon of the “New Europe”, or whether it can be observed in earlier periods such as the late 19th century or the interwar period. (Show less)

Constructed from concrete poured into timber forms the South Bank arts complex is, in effect, a vast, brutalist sculpture and, as an art-object, might be located within Gell’s view of ‘art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it’ (Gell 1998). However including the social relationships of production, so that the structure is analysed not in purely design terms but through the nexus of social relationships engendered at each stage of its realisation can expand this interpretation. Thus the commissioning, financing and designing stages cannot be dissociated from the stage of the physical process of making.

This paper uses oral testimonies from men who worked on the construction of the South Bank Arts complex: a scheme that exemplifies exquisite workmanship in concrete. The recollections of the men who worked on site highlight the rigour, precision and co-ordination required for building this complex urban structure. The Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery demanded high levels of skill at site level to create a masterpiece of in situ concrete construction. The site foremen spoke of a shared, remembered past and of entire working lives spent with a paternalistic company, Higgs and Hill. They recalled the life of the building site, its humour and camaraderie and also the wider social world of 1960s London. They insisted that the stable, directly employed workforce and apprentice training scheme operated by Higgs and Hill was essential to the quality of the construction.

Traces of the building process are relatively easy to find on ancient buildings with the carpenter’s mark on an oak frame or the medieval mason’s signature on a piece of dressed stone providing essential evidence for the conservationist. With the advent of modernism and the industrialization of the building industry traces left by those who worked on site are rare and twentieth century buildings, especially those constructed in concrete, seldom reveal clues as to how they were made. Although the concepts of ‘process’ and ‘production’ were central to architectural thought in the mid-twentieth century, accounts of how architectural intentions were realized at the point of production – the building site - have not become part of the way in which these structures are assessed and valued. This paper argues for including the testimonies of site workers into assessments of the urban fabric, which in this case, gives a far more sophisticated analysis of the historical importance of a large, publicly funded, urban structure.


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