Urban Phantasmagorias: Re-assessing Ideology and Memory in the Understanding of the (Post)communist City of Bucharest

This dissertation presents an interpretation of the image of the post-communist city of Bucharest through an inquiry into transformations of urban meaning and praxes over the course of its modern political history. The thesis demonstrates that specific theoretical paradigms derived from Walter Benjamin’s analyses of capitalist societies can be appropriated and re-conceptualized in the context of communism, offering original insights into contemporary post-communist contexts. Following the instauration of communism in 1947, the weakness of the social body and of the economic circumstances became the premises for the implementation of extensive reforms of industrialization that would radically change the character of the city, creating at the same time a new mass: anonymous, isolated from tradition and easy to be controlled. As the driving force of the new economy, the new industrial spaces determined the emergence of massive new housing districts and consequently an extensive migration of the population from the countryside to the city. The peculiarity of these two urban programmes - industry and housing - constitutes the spatial ground for the investigations of the dissertation. The dissertation argues that the extent to which the communist regime manifested was not limited to its ‘standardized’ general characteristics, but determined peculiar phenomena that could be interpreted in light of Western mechanisms of modernization, which further constituted the premise for distinct understandings of the city within the capitalist democracy that followed after 1989. In relation to this, the dissertation situates the complex condition of Bucharest within the dyadic theoretical paradigm of the phantasmagoria-allegoria in the work of Walter Benjamin, which was employed to endorse the commodified capitalist society. In this sense, the study investigates the fragmentation of the image of the city as constituted in the interaction between architecture, urban form and (post)ideology. Furthermore, within this general framework where the spaces for production constitute the main vehicle of interrogation, the concept and phenomenon of labor, guides the interpretation of the complex condition of the city of Bucharest in its contrasting epochs. The dissertation proposes that during communism the understanding of ‘labor’ as a homogeneous, centralized expression of the Party ideology was manifested as a powerful theme, becoming simultaneously an explicit object of power, social cohesion and coercion. After the fall of communism, the vast theme of spatial ruination entailed a ruination of labor itself, bringing about fragmentation and duplication of the image of heterogeneity defined by the capitalist market.

La tesi si vuole un’interpretazione dell’immagine della città di Bucarest, dopo il periodo comunista, attraverso un’inchiesta sulle trasformazioni del senso urbano e delle prassi durante la storia politica moderna di questa città. La tesi sostiene che il regime comunista non abbia conosciuto alcun limite nelle sue caratteristiche generali “standardizzate”, bensì che abbia determinato un insolito fenomeno da interpretare alla luce dei meccanismi occidentali della modernizzazione, che hanno costituito la premessa per le varie comprensioni della città dentro la democrazia complessa di dopo il 1989. A questo fine, la tesi colloca la condizione complessa di Bucarest nel paradigma teorico diadico phantasmagoria-allegoria di Walter Benjamin e sostiene l’idea di commodity comunista. Tale paradigma teorico stabilisce il quadro metodologico dello studio e consente l’inchiesta dell’immagine della città come costituita durante l’interazione tra la forma urbana, la cultura materiale e la (post)ideologia. La struttura urbana – soprattutto quella rappresentata nei temi di produzione e di alloggiamento – assume la forma di mediatore tra l’ideologia e le masse, trasformandosi allo stesso tempo in mezzo per il controllo politico e ambiente per le prassi sovversive generalizzate. In questo quadro generale dove gli spazi di produzione ed il gruppo media dei lavoratori costituiscono il principale mezzo d’interrogazione, il concetto ed il fenomeno di labor (lavoro) guida la trasformazione e la comprensione della condizione di Bucarest durante il periodo comunista e dopo.