MEMORY AS TRAUMA. Metamorphoses of urban topographies in the post-communist city of Bucharest

This paper attempts to explore the theme of memory in its relation to the embodiment of ideology, in order to investigate the symbolic understandings of the architectural and urban metamorphoses affecting the communist and post-communist city of Bucharest. It seeks to explore how such understandings affected the reshaping of national identity under communism and after its fall in 1989. A wide range of symbols pertaining to the urban topography was mobilized during the communist era in order to legitimate and institutionalize the ideology of the new regime. The transformations were extremely violent and attempted to erase any trace of the past which didn’t serve to enforce or acknowledge the imposed order. During the final years of Ceausescu’s dictatorship, significant portions of the old urban tissue of Bucharest were demolished. The city would lose almost thirty historical places of religious significance, such as orthodox churches or synagogues, and around 40 000 people were expropriated from the Uranus district in order to demolish their houses. The aim was to build the Civic Centre, having the People’s Palace at its core, as the new representational center of power. Oddly enough, the same building houses today the Romanian Parliament. The city, thus, is able to metabolize destructive traces, and architectures of power could be associated both with totalitarianism and democracy. The paper explores the nature of this complex and conflicting re-appropriation. Deeply modified by the actions of the communist regime, accentuated also by the rapidity of the events, the re-appropriation of part of the city still carries the material, political and ethical traces of the affected structures. Central elements of urbanity during socialism, which manifested as a reification of ideology, are interrogated. Analyzing communist urban praxes, the paper argues that they resulted in a normalization of ideology, creating a pseudo-memory which still manifests in contemporary Bucharest's topography, both in physical and symbolic/perceptive terms. The paper proposes to explore thematically the role of the concept and phenomenon of memory in the historical process of architectural/urban metamorphoses in the communist city of Bucharest. It seeks to explore understandings of the contemporary post-communist urban topography in terms of the relationship between explicit representations of the city as a constructed image, and latent city-images, grounded in memory and imagination. The paper attempts to unearth the fundamental relationship between memory, urban form and ideology, as these conditions both fragment and contribute to the historical understanding and contemporary experience of the city.