Abstract
This short essay introduces three articles about Socialist prefabricated apartment buildings in the Czech Republic and Poland. The essay begins by noting the impossibility of replacing the apartment blocks of the Communist bloc after 1989, despite their clear connotation with the undesirable gray uniformity of the old regime, and asks what their legacy has been for their inhabitants in the twenty years since. Based on summaries of the three articles by My Svensson, Adrienne Harris, and Kimberly Zarecor that follow, it draws some conclusions about the prefab neighborhoods. While the first two authors, who consider filmic and literary depiction of life in the blocks, tend to focus on the despair and entrapment people feel there, Zarecor, who notes the pre-socialist origins of prefabricated apartment buildings, uses contemporary surveys and other sources to demonstrate ways that they have proven adaptable to post-socialist life. All three articles suggest that the blocks of the former Communist bloc may be more similar to the “projects” of the West than formerly thought. It seems that the buildings’ gray uniformity has meant that they can serve both as the backdrop for slums and degradation, or, if refurbished and repainted, as an adequate post-socialist living space.
The fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 was welcomed with enthusiasm on both sides of the crumbling Berlin Wall. The historical cataclysm ushered in a major reconceptualization of the political, socioeconomic, and cultural life of the liberated states. While the West encouraged a rapid and thorough demolition of the socialist system to prevent its eventual resurrection, there was a growing uncertainty within the changing societies about the outcomes of the fundamental transformations. After all, there had been no previous transitions from socialism to liberal democracy and no test-proven models existed. Western observers generally assumed that the system was uniform and all of its aspects were completely dysfunctional and needed to be either abandoned altogether or replaced with new ones of democratic quality. The truth however was that in its constant struggle for legitimacy, the utilitarian socialist culture had developed a sharp survival instinct and the skill of mimicry. It had adopted carefully distilled values from local traditions and Western culture to make itself more appealing to its consumers. As Vacláv Havel observed in “The Power of the Powerless,” state socialism after 1968 “was built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society” and as such its “greyness and emptiness” could be seen as “an inflated caricature of modern life in general.” Eastern Europeans were at once “far behind” the West in terms of civilization and “a warning to the West, revealing . . . its own latent tendencies.” 1 Despite the ardent hopes of ordinary people and experts alike for a rapid and thoroughgoing transformation, it soon became clear that the demolition of the socialist system and the construction of a democratic one in its place could be not completed overnight.
After the fall of communism the most iconic symbols of the previous epoch such as party administrative buildings, mausoleums, and monuments became the first target of the accumulated frustration and the desire to raze the past and start anew. Yet other prominent landmarks carrying the stigma of the regime, such as the ubiquitous housing projects, which still sheltered the vast majority of the population in the former socialist countries, could not be as easily destroyed because of their practical value. The quick en masse replacement of the bland gray buildings with new stigma-free and better quality architectural designs was simply not realistic. Twenty years later, most of the neighborhoods still stand. What has their legacy been? What has the transition to capitalism meant for the inhabitants of the prefabs? The purpose of this forum is to trace the development of the prefabricated housing buildings after the fall of communism by examining their depictions in contemporary Polish and Czech literature and film and by investigating the architectural practices of the new democratic states.
The idea for this cluster arose two years ago at the conference “Central Europe 1989: Lessons and Legacies” organized by the Center for Russian and East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. The three contributing authors were then presenters at the panel “Popular Culture and Everyday Life” chaired by Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova. The enthusiastic reception of the papers, the shower of questions, and the lively discussions that followed convinced us that the topic of socialist housing projects and their post-collapse life was a fascinating and underexplored scholarly subject that deserved further attention.
When we met to brainstorm strategies for approaching the introduction to the cluster, we found ourselves spontaneously recollecting our own experiences with socialist housing projects in Poland and Bulgaria and perhaps subconsciously competing for the title “the most absurdist story.” We recalled our experience of the prefabs shortly after the collapse of communism, the smell of alcohol of urine in the entrance-way and the graffiti on their exteriors, coupled with the contradictory fact that life within individual apartments could be cozy and comfortable, depending on who lived there. One aspect of life in a blok/blokowisko/panelák that persisted in our recollections and never ceased to astonish us was the socialist idea of egalitarianism that made a Bulgarian factory director and his college professor wife live door to door with a Roma family of six and a horse (!) while a descendent of a long line of Polish aristocrats could share a floor with a troublesome working-class alcoholic couple. In the same building and on the same floor, one could find an apartment with a padded leather door, brass name plaque, opulent rugs, and crossed sabers on the wall across the hall from an apartment barely furnished with Spartan, utilitarian accommodations.
But over time, this dynamic of social intermingling seems to have changed. Two of the contributing authors to the current issue, My Svensson and Adrienne Harris, assert that ironically, after the fall of communism the housing projects in Poland and the Czech Republic achieved a sort of perverse version of the uniformity their designers had hoped for, as they became a home for those who fell off the rail of the transition and got stuck between the undesirable past and the unattainable future. In this regard, the buildings have begun to approximate more closely the “projects” of similar-looking buildings surrounding Western European and American cities, where immigrants, the poor, and the less educated are most likely to live.
My Svensson’s article focuses on the literary and film representations of the post-1989 fate of the socialist housing projects in Poland. She argues that after the fall of communism, the Polish blokowisko has acquired a global meaning by transforming itself into housing for the underprivileged while joining the international list of marginal neighborhoods. Her analysis is based on three different genres: Krzysztof Bizio’s collection of short stories Zresztą latem wszystkie kwiaty są takie piękne, 2003 (Besides in Summer All Flowers are Beautiful), Robert Glinski’s feature film Cześć, Tereska, 2001 (Hi, Tereska), and Sylwester Latkowski’s documentary Blokersi (2001). The Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever by Lukas Moodyson which opens and concludes the analysis of the Polish works serves as a point of reference containing an explicit parallel between the post-collapse socialist housing projects and the capitalist Swedish betongförorten. In her discussion of the interconnection of space and sociality, Svensson distinguishes between non-places of modernity (the housing projects) and non-places of supermodernity (the capitalist places of commerce, transportation, and leisure). She borrows the French anthropologist Marc Augé’s definition of a non-place as a space that cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity. What links these two types of non-places, according to Svensson, is their disintegration of earlier (historical) places and the “sense of solitude and similitude” they create. Both the housing projects and the capitalist non-places contrast sharply with the historical city fabric. They embody the principle of environmental determinism asserting that architecture has the capacity to facilitate the adoption of new cultural paradigms and ultimately alter people’s consciousness. They are also marked by what Augé calls the three figures of excess: the overabundance of events, the spatial overabundance, and the excess of the individual. Svensson demonstrates in her analysis of Polish literary and cinematic works that although busy and overcrowded, these non-places do not become sites of communal togetherness and altruism. On the contrary, the environmentally and/or ideologically forced public privacy evokes a strong desire for withdrawal and anonymity and creates the phenomenon of solitary individuality to use Augé’s term. Svensson argues that despite the similarities, the non-places of modernity and supermodernity demonstrate a very pronounced difference in the artistic works under discussion. The capitalist places of commerce and leisure, the mall, the fast-food restaurants, the game arcade, lure the characters with their otherness and possibility for refuge from the entrapment of the bleak housing projects. In her interpretation of the young protagonists’ interactions with the supermodern environments, the author draws on Michael Foucault’s concept of heterotopias and Johan Heuizenga’s classic work Homo ludens. She emphasizes the ambivalence of these transient non-places: on the one hand they have a liberating effect on the young protagonists and evoke in them a desire to experiment with their identity and express themselves creatively; on the other hand, their ephemerality and in some cases inaccessibility brings the sobering realization that the world of capitalist consumerism is unattainable for the fictional inhabitants of the housing projects.
Like Svensson, Adrienne Harris finds no evidence that socialist spatial utopianism succeeded in creating new progressive consciousness and ultimately bettering the world. On the contrary, it had achieved rather an alienating and demoralizing effect. Her article “Something like Happiness” examines the interactions between domestic space and gender in three recent Czech films: Viktor Polesný’s Milenci a vrazi, 2004 (Lovers and Murderers), Martin Šulík’s Sluneční stat aneb hrdinové dělnické třídy, 2004 (City of the Sun or Working Class Heroes), and Bohdan Sláma’s Štěstí, 2005 (Something Like Happiness). All of them are set in post-industrial Czech towns and tell the stories of ordinary men and women dealing with the consequences of the demise of heavy industry and struggling with the redefinition of their gender identities in the new post-communist economic and social reality. Harris poses the question: How do former working-class heroes relate to the private space of the panelák after their exclusion from the public masculine place of the factory? By drawing on examples from the aforementioned cinematic works, she contends that the dissolution of the backbone of socialist economy, heavy industry, had an emasculating effect on Czech men whose maleness in the previous epoch was defined exclusively by their performance in the workforce. Men’s loss of their provider’s role deprived them of purpose and they reluctantly relocated in the feminine domestic realm. The long-term unemployment shifted the power dynamic in the traditional male–female relations that led to intense gender antagonism and in many cases to the disintegration of the family unit. Harris points out that ironically, the panelák which served as a refuge from the ideological pressure during communism, in the transitional period became a symbol of entrapment and despair. In an attempt to alleviate the feeling of inadequacy and worthlessness, the film protagonists adopt a variety of escapist strategies. Some of them escape physically the former industrial cities, thus confirming that they are not a place where alternative masculinities could thrive. Others succumb to substance abuse, mental illness or end their lives tragically. Still others persistently look for productive ways to adapt to the dynamically changing socioeconomic environment and negotiate their new gender identities. Harris concludes that the film characters’ choice between self-destructive and constructive escapist strategies is regionally determined or in other words that some post-industrial Czech cities prove to be more livable than others.
Much more optimistic in her analysis of the fate of the Czech panelák after 1989 is our third contributor, architectural historian Kimberly Zarecor. In contrast to Svensson’s conception of the apartment buildings, via Augé, as ahistorical “non-places,” Zarecor illustrates the ways that the prefabs of the Czech Republic actually do have a history, one that predates the socialist era and one that, for their longtime occupants at least, is often fondly recalled and infused with the rich meaning of everyday life. Further, despite the very real presence of many of the problems depicted in the other two articles, surveys cited in Zarecor’s article suggest that “rehabilitated” or updated prefab neighborhoods continue to satisfy their occupants, though Zarecor is not sure this will prove the case long term, as younger tenants, who tend to be more concerned about safety and poor parking, move in.
As Zarecor shows, prefabricated apartment buildings in Czechoslovakia owe their development as much to the legacy of the capitalist and modernist ethic of the interwar Baťa shoe company as to any overriding Soviet imperative. The same architects who pioneered panel-bearing prefabricated design for Baťa before the war saw it to fruition in the 1950s and 1960s, largely without Communist Party interference. Over time the quality slackened and the buildings acquired a reputation for being shabby, drafty, and poorly constructed, while the sandy parks nearby languished in disrepair. But, as Zarecor points out, the original intention in plotting the neighborhoods has a strange resonance with contemporary urban planning, which stresses dense settlement with good public transportation, schools, and shops in walking distance. The blocks’ lack of architectural style has proved to be less important than the social and spatial ideas of their design. In the 1990s the apartment buildings, with their artificially low rents, provided a sort of stability as other aspects of society were changing at a dizzying pace. In the first decade of the new millennium, meanwhile, government-subsidized refurbishment programs have enabled the installation of vinyl windows, exterior insulation and colorful facades. Artificially low rents have created a new division of privileged and unprivileged tenants, however, and in some areas, Zarecor notes, building owners have had no incentive to update their buildings because of low rents and the old gray, dilapidated blocks have quickly become home to Roma and Vietnamese families. The potential for the apartment buildings to devolve into the slums and ghettos of the West remains, but for now, at least, plenty of inhabitants are satisfied with their homes and neighborhoods.
As Zarecor and Svensson help us see, prefabs are not an exclusively socialist legacy. Zarecor demonstrates their association with industrial modernity in interwar capitalist Czechoslovakia while noting the influence of French companies, for example, in building mass housing in the Soviet Union. Svensson illustrates the way that their post-socialist reality has made the buildings more thoroughly into the non-places of modern industrial society. As a radio producer in Blokersi observes, if at first he thought that Polish hip hop made no sense and could only be a pale imitation of the music of African American youth from the ghetto, as he saw the development of French and German hip hop, he realized that life in the blokowisko was an appropriate backdrop for this genre of music in Poland, too. Meanwhile the world depicted in Cześć Tereska is not that different from the worlds imagined in two recent films about sexually and physically abused teenage girls from the projects in the West, Precious (United States, 2008) and Fish Tank (United Kingdom, 2009). Harris’s investigation of filmic depictions of a particularly hard-hit post-industrial space in northern Bohemia illustrates the emasculating effect of private spaces no longer counterbalanced by the public space of the factory floor. They become traps from which the fictional protagonists try, often in vain, to escape. While there is much that is culturally specific about these films, the stories they depict could rather easily be transported to the rust belts of northern England or northern Italy. In every case, the prefab neighborhoods, formerly grand markers of modernity, have failed to fulfill the dreams of their designers or their inhabitants.
Ugly, uniform, and uninspiring, the prefabs in Eastern Europe have still managed to function as living spaces for a variety of citizens, often well after the collapse of Communism. If anything, capitalism seems to have granted their inhabitants the right to make the buildings more colorful, whether in the form of bright professional paintjobs or the ubiquitous graffiti tags at street level. Insofar as the neighborhoods and buildings can be “rehabilitated” with better insulation, windows, and infrastructure while providing viable employment opportunities for the young and dispossessed, many of their inhabitants may well find “something like happiness.” It seems safe to say that plenty of the neighborhoods have already shifted into the non-places of modernity, increasingly resembling the “projects” of the West, but Zarecor’s research suggests it is still too soon to give up entirely on the modernist experiment. We hope that these excellent papers will encourage further research on this compelling topic.