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On the Socialist Balcony. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, Dec 2008, Pages: 60
While mainstream research on socialism privileged
suprastructural approaches, issues of everyday life
processes remained under-researched. By placing
balconies at the critical juncture of the socialist
state and its citizens, that is, of global phenomena
and micro processes, this book seeks to recapture a
sense of everyday socialism and of various socialist
common places, in an effort to bring forth people and
their diverse surviving strategies. The various
architectural discourses and ideologies attached to
balconies are traced historically from the bourgeois
inception, through Lenin’s revolutionary conceptions,
Stalin’s distortions and to Ceausescu’s regime. The
ethnographic part contrasts and depicts the
intersection and collision of state’s official
disposition of balconies with people’s agency and
space practices, as it unfolds in a Romanian
neighborhood since the 1980s.
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