Cinema Favorit: The Aleph & The Civic Void

CINEMA FAVORIT The Aleph and the Civic Void

Corina Angheloiu

The study unfolds through two voices: an objective account (in blue), based on facts, statistics or existent academic discourse, and a subjective one, (in orange) which depicts personal stories, urban myths or memoirs.

Together, they move between the micro and the macro in order to communicate and make sense of the intricate sociological, economic, political, historical and personal milieu, with the ultimate aim of informing an alternative regeneration model for the disused civic infrastructure from the Communist period.

Corina Angheloiu is an architecture graduate from the University of Sheffield, currently undertaking her final year of MA Architecture at the Royal College of Art. Professionally she has worked in Berlin, London and Bucharest, gaining experience in participation led design, urban research and project management. She has extensive experience in participatory techniques for engaging young people, developed during her work with Die Baupiloten, Berlin. In London, she has worked on research projects commissioned by the London Legacy Development Corporation and the Diocese of London, as part of Urban Research Projects (research office within London Metropolitan University).

She has set up the Bucharest based NGO Poiana lui Iocan in the desire to establish an effective platform to exchange skills, experience and knowledge between her home country and the UK. The present study forms her MA Dissertation submission and seeks to frame the context and methodology for the upcoming intervention at the disused Cinema Favorit.

Special thanks to: Prof. Naomi House, Royal College of Art, London Prof. dr. Ana-Maria Zahariade Favorit Initiative Citizen Group Tudor Giurgiu, Romanian film director Calum Green, Trustee of the East London Community Land Trust Nicoleta Chirita, Romanian community organiser for the Favorit Initiative

2.CINEMA FAVORIT, 1975

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Cinema Favorit Drumul Taberei neighbourhood

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People’s House

Contents INTRODUCTION

Preface.....................................................................................................7 Motif 1 | The Aleph................................................................................9 Motif 2 | The Civic And The Golden Age............................................13 Motif 3 | The Void................................................................................17 Motif 4 | Urban Tactics.........................................................................19 CHAPTER 1: TODAY......................................................................................23

Cinema, Mon Amour...........................................................................23

CHAPTER 2: YESTERDAY...............................................................................33

The Rise And Fall Of The Socialist Ideal..............................................33 Homo Sovieticus And The Golden Ages................................................39 Civic voids in post-socialist Bucharest..................................................46

CHAPTER 3 : TOMORROW.............................................................................53 POSTSCRIPT................................................................................................60

List of Illustrations.....................................................................................62 Bibliography............................................................................................... 63

INTRODUCTION

3. ME (LEFT) ON MY STREET, 1992.

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INTRODUCTION

PREFACE I grew up in a post-war detached house with a little garden full of fruitbearing trees, on a sleepy cul-de-sac in a Bucharest neighbourhood. The nearest bus stop from my house was called Ho Chi Minh1, an exotic portallike name that to the 6 year old me signified the excitement brought by ice cream in the Botanical Gardens (if sunny), trips to Cinema Favorit (if rainy), but also being dragged along to habitual grocery market pilgrimages, occasional Sunday church or cemetery outings, or even worse, the prospect of the repetitive early morning bus journey to the nursery.

Little did I know that Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader, prime minister and later, president, and that the name of the bus stop was one of thousands of tributes paid to other communist countries by the late Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Mind you, it was 1996, and the official bus stop name was changed soon after the 1989 revolution. Still, everyone I knew called it Ho Chi Minh.

Growing up, the landmark of the neighbourhood I lived in was the cinema/ market / bookshop / pharmacy / post office complex, a place buzzing with activity and one of the developments around which the neighbourhood was designed around - a prime example of civic architecture from the 1960s. That overlap of functions triggers even now a flow of involuntary memory, in a Proustian manner. Nevertheless, years passed, I left Bucharest for Sheffield for my undergraduate studies and then worked in Berlin for two years before returning to the UK to begin my studies at the Royal College of Art, and for quite a long period of time the memories surrounding Cinema Favorit represented the hazy rose-tinted view of my childhood and nothing more.

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INTRODUCTION

4. CINEMA FAVORIT, ORIGINAL NEON SIGN, 2014

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INTRODUCTION

THE ALEPH Motif 1

“All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past.”2

- Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

Buildings, streets, neighbourhoods are just part of our habitat, the tip of the iceberg; the visible and tangible part. Behind and within this tangibility and visibility, there is something else which is difficult to represent with concepts and words; maybe because it belongs to a pre-logical field of experience; it has more to do with what the French psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski calls the “spaciousness of experience”.3 Minkowski framed the concept of psychologically experienced space. “Space,” he writes, “cannot be reduced to geometric relations which we establish as if, reduced to the simple role of curious spectators or scientists, we were ourselves outside space. We live and act in space, and our personal lives, as well as the social life of humanity, unfolds in space.”4 In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that one must distinguish between “temporality as a structural form of human existence and time as an objective process, so we must also distinguish between space – whether it is experienced or mathematical space is irrelevant to this question – and spatiality.”5According to him, spatiality is the definition of the essence of human existence. This is also what Minkowski stresses: “Life spreads out into space without having a geometric extension in the proper sense of the word. We have need of expansion, of perspective, in order to live. Space is as indispensable as time to the development of life.”6 Linking the writing of Minkowski with Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture and the City, I will examine how the spaciousness of my experience is informed by Aldo Rossi’s reading of architecture as defined by memory, and not history.

“The individual artifact for the first time is understood within the psychological construct of collective memory ”7, he writes, arguing that the type (in the case of this study, the civic architecture and specifically Cinema Favorit) is no longer a “neutral structure found in history, but rather an analytical and experimental structure which now can be used to operate on the skeleton of history; it becomes an apparatus, an instrument for analysis and measure.”8 9

INTRODUCTION

Hence, the “locus solus”9 as a unique component of an individual artifact (Cinema Favorit) which is determined not just by space, but also time and the events which it witnessed. Presently the cinema is closed and it shows an advanced state of disrepair. One might argue that since the object is no longer in use, its history ceases to exist. However, Rossi argues that, when the form and function are severed, history shifts into the realm of memory.

“When history ends, memory begins”.10 Akin to Calvino’s Marco Polo, I find my own memory to be attached to the place in ways that are unpredictable. In Invisible Cities, Calvino samples different means in which memory can influence the experience of urbanity.11 Similarly to the visit to the second city, everything that is desirable in my aspirations for my old neighbourhood is referred to my memory of having visited before as a young child; so that the desire itself is a memory, similar to opposing two mirrors that generate an infinite regress of reflections. The metaphor of the Aleph comes to mind - the point in space that contains all other points - and under this guise I will explore the infinite reflections that revolve around main civic landmark of the neighbourhood I grew up in, Cinema Favorit, and the socio-cultural heritage of the socialist architecture developed during the 1960s and 1970s.

In particular, I will use Cinema Favorit as the Aleph in order to redefine the place and purpose of civic architecture in the current neoliberal landscape, as I argue that only through a thorough understanding of the intricate milieu of conditions that generated it, we can move into proposing an approach for the cinema’s future. In Borges’ short story, anyone who gazes into the Aleph can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion or confusion.12 Piecing together the multiple angles has been a difficult tasks at times, as critical historical accounts concerning architecture during the five decades of Communism have only started to emerge in the recent years. The lack of a critical theoretical account can be explained through the pervasiveness of the Ceaușescu regime (especially in the 1980s), which can be understood as a web of Foucauldian “micro-powers”.13 The French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that power is not concentrated in one specific location, but “employed and exercised through a netlike organisation”14 spread through the entire societal structures and manifested in everyday activities as “micro powers”. This account can explain the context behind a lack of honest and critical history and theory dating from the Communist decades.

Any resistance to such an omnipresent regime proved difficult, dangerous and fragmented and it is in this attempt to piece together conflicting 10

INTRODUCTION

narratives about the historical truth, where I found the most captivating stories, forming a “plurality of resistances�.15 Under the castle-state approach of Romanian Communism, history-writing was completely monitored and was part of a sustained effort to control representations and assure the legitimacy of the Party. Hence, the search for the objective truth and its critical contextualisation becomes a key element for the maintenance of this memory as an experience to never be repeated.

This is the only way to achieve an objective relationship with the past, with the assurance that historic (as well as personal) memory remains alive serving as a mnemonic device to new generations. The reception of architecture created under totalitarian regimes does not mean a celebration, nor an endorsement of the politics that produced them, but instead an understanding of the buildings themselves as contextual historical artifacts.

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INTRODUCTION

THE FIRST GOLDEN AGE THE INTER-WAR PERIOD 5. Left, my greatgrandmother and her sister, dressed after the latest Parisian fashion.

6. Right: My greatgrandparents’ wedding in 1937.

7. Below, a bustling street in the centre of Bucharest.

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INTRODUCTION

THE CIVIC AND THE GOLDEN AGEs Motif 2

The moments in Time investigated through this study were chosen due to their relevance in portraying the contradictory evolution (or involution) of the meaning of the word “civic”. Triggered by the Russian Revolution and the modern architectural movement from 1917 up to the full deployment of aesthetic Stalinism around 193715, the Soviet architects had the ambition not only to build “architecturally, but to build socialistically as well”.17 This implied a completely new understanding of civility, free from imperialist class divisions and aided by the abolition of land ownership, which were seen as two key restrictions that stood in the way of a new republic’s ideology.

The utopian effervescence of the 1920s infused the thinking behind Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, proposed as a blueprint for social reform.

In accordance with modernist ideals of progress (which encouraged the annihilation of tradition), The Radiant City was to emerge from a tabula rasa: it was to be built on nothing less than the grounds of demolished vernacular European cities.

The post-war paradigmatic shift from a Western oriented society to a USSR driven perspective, from a capitalist colony into a socialist satellite, meant that Romania had to appropriate the social and formal ideals of the Soviet society. The forced Sovietisation imposed heavy censorship on all elements of life and culture, as well as the nationalisation of all means of production, establishing a tabula rasa of the pre-war collective memory. The new cultural identity based on Socialism Realism lent legitimacy to the new order by rejecting traditional values.

The first 15 years post-war did not witness major modifications of the built environment, as the state apparatus was preoccupied with the remodeling of societal structures. Civic infrastructure investments (alongside, or as integral parts of vast housing developments) started to be rolled out towards the second half of the 1960s, and in their early stages unintentionally generated an interlude of liberalism. Much was built for “civic purposes” from the second half of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s: schools, libraries, hospitals, cinemas, theatres, sea-side and mountain resorts; they encompassed a freehand search for the ideal socialist forms and content, that was never witnessed before, and certainly not after.

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INTRODUCTION

THE LAST GOLDEN AGE 8. TOP: By the end of the 1980s the levels of propaganda surrounding the leading couple reached the pinnacle of absurdity.

9. BOTTOM: Meanwhile, drastic public spending cuts affected all aspects of the common people’s lives, from access to basic resources such as bread or sugar, to public services, such as transport.

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INTRODUCTION

The paradox is that the word “civic” ended, in the case of the socialist society, as an empty signifier. The infrastructure had not the purpose of engendering real and meaningful civic participation, but was conceived with the purpose of recreation for the archetypal Soviet Man and Woman. The civic infrastructure in the Socialist era is a synonym for mass entertainment rather than social agonism and civic formation.

The situation swiftly changed towards the end of the 1970s, when the Ceaușescu regime matured into a brutal and repressive leadership, culminating in the People’s House project, which emerged in the spirit of the very same tabula rasa le Corbusier advocated for. The paradox between the megalomanic social claims of the Civic Centre and People’s House and the brutality it took to get the project built, add yet another proof of the superficial use of the word “civic”.

Complementary to the paradox embodied by the word “civic” is the phrase “golden age”. The term is used in relation to three decades of the 20th century and faced a similar devaluation of its meaning throughout history. It is first attributed to the inter-war period of economic and cultural cornucopia. It then resurfaces in accounts of life during the 1960s and 1970s describing the relative liberal outlook of the regime, in sharp contrast to the brutality and repressiveness of the regime during the 1950s and 1980s.

Finally, during the 1980s, it was used on the one hand euphemistically as a synonym for the domestic shortages endured by the population. On the other hand, it was used by the state-controlled media in a delirious propagandistic strategy based on the North Korean cult of personality of the leader, using expressions such as the “golden era of Ceaușescu” and referring to him with terms such as “demiurge”, “celestial body”, “architect of the nation’s future” or “secular god”.18 I find these contradictory, and sometimes absurd, juxtapositions of words to be pivotal references that bounce between the collective memory, the propaganda and the objective reality in order to fully characterise the collision of meanings that Cinema Favorit embodies.

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INTRODUCTION

10. CINEMA FAVORIT, ORIGINAL TICKET BOOTH, 2014 16

INTRODUCTION

THE VOID Motif 3

Post-1989 a new urban society evolved, heavily influenced by attempts to reject the persisting legacies from the socialist period. Similar influences were also manifested through the over-eager adoption of presumed characteristics of capitalist economies and urban systems. The doctrines of neo-liberal economics, tried in the West in the 1980s as a “strategic political response to the profitability of mass production industries and the crisis of Keynesian-welfarism”19, had a rerun a decade later in the East.

Cinema Favorit, closed down since 1997, is one of many victims of the chaotic restructuring process through which Romania eagerly implemented neoliberal policies. The civic void is a deliberate motif throughout the study, searching to understand the present context in order to formulate a methodology for approaching the tactical redevelopment of the Cinema.

When referring to the Heygate estate20, Sebregondi argues that the material presence of the place today is as a “void in the bustling city”.21 He continues by asserting that “where some only see a gap - the temporary interruption of a prefigured process that allows its intensification - others will find a void - the unhistorical locus of unconstrained potentials, a milieu for the new to emerge. To all appearances, the multiplication of urban regenerations has turned the whole city into a speculative landscape that, by its omnipresence, denies the possibility of an alternative transformation of the city.”22 It is in this phrase, where I find the potentiality for the future of Cinema Favorit. Breaching the barrier (in a sense very much similar to the one explored by China Mieville in The City & the City) of the inhibiting landscape and intruding into the voids can also be a way of reflecting on the role of the architect without the imperative of building, but of creating spatial relations and acting a spatial agent (as defined by Awan, Schneider and Till23). As Sebregondi argues, one of the most urgent tasks for architects is “not to design places that are better integrated to the contemporary city, but precisely to discover, invent and invite to its ephemeral voids”.24 This would reactivate the void as an open field of possibilities and not as mere frame of optimised variations.

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INTRODUCTION

“If you really want to change the city, or want a real struggle, a real fight, then it would require re-engaging with things like public planning for example, or reengaging with government, or re-engaging with large-scale institutionalised developers. I think that’s where the real struggles lie, that we re-engage with these structures and these institutions, this horribly complex ‘dark matter.’ That’s where it becomes really interesting.”

- Rory Hyde

11. POIANA LUI IOCAN PROJECT, 2013.

In the summer of 2013, myself and five other friends initiated, developed and led an intervention for the Bucharest Architecture Festival. Poiana lui Iocan operated as an open office, part public gathering space, part research and debate platform, setting out to find out more about the local processes that shape urban development and what people’s perception of their own city was.

In the Romanian novel Morometii, set in the shifting pre-World War II context, Poiana lui Iocan is ‘the true heart of the village’, the place where the villagers wear their best clothing and gather on Sundays in order to discuss political ideas and current affairs. Poiana (n.b. the clearing) is an axis mundi for the small community of the village, the place where the most important debates were being held.

Through our project we have tried to mirror that, and create a setting through which we could test alternative ways of thinking about the city of Bucharest. Through a series of mapping exercises, Poiana lui Iocan became a pretext for conversations regarding urban change, opening up for debating how change should happen, or could happen.

As an outcome of this project we founded the Bucharest based NGO Poiana lui Iocan, which aims to be an umbrella platform for various spatial interventions. Along with two other NGOs we have applied for Nordic funds for increasing public participation and we were awarded a total of 80,000 euros in order to develop in a project in partnership with the Bucharest City Hall - the public consultation for the upcoming General Urbanistic Plan.

During Poiana lui Iocan, we organised a series of round tables, of which, one focused on examples of grassroots projects and community-led regeneration. One of the speakers was the chair of the residents’ group that has been campaigning for the last three years for the reopening of Cinema Favorit. This marked the beginning of my personal involvement with the Cinema Favorit cause and research project.

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INTRODUCTION

URBAN TACTICS Motif 4

Cinema Favorit as the Aleph is used as an attempt to redefine the place and purpose of civic architecture in the current neoliberal landscape. Through the use of tactical urbanism as methodology, I am proposing an alternative way of approaching regeneration through culture and enterprise.

“Tactics” I take to be the understanding given by Awan, Schneider, and Till, as a way of working with techniques that are related to space, but not solely physical; a series of “tactics and actions which, taken together can read as an attempt to relocate the focus of spatial production towards a political discussion of the inhabitation and occupancy of space and the need to talk about the relationship between created / built space and the life that goes on within it”.25 “Urban” I take to be Marcuse’s interpretation for “shorthand for the societal as congealed in cities today, and to denote the point at which the rubber of the personal hits the ground of the societal, the intersection of everyday life with the socially created systemic world about us”.26 Drawing on the experience gained through a previous self-initiated spatial intervention (titled Poiana lui Iocan and developed for the Bucharest Architecture Festival 2013), I will expand on the proposal that is due to be built, run and implemented in summer 2015. The funding application for a temporary programme was granted £24,000 from the European programme for youth capacity building Erasmus+.27 This approach aims to destabilise the traditional formats of the prevailing directions in the built environment, and test the limits of the brief-driven architectural profession. Its methodology takes a social constructionist approach to place making, which, as defined by Creswell, takes interest in the particularities of places and place based narratives, as instances of more general underlying social processes.28 By looking at the social construction of place, I aim to highlight the unique attributes of Cinema Favorit and show how it is an instance of wider processes of the construction of place under the conflicting forces of post-socialism and neoliberalism.

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INTRODUCTION

By staging the temporary intervention under the guise of “urban tactics”, I am proposing a test which, if proved successful, could inform the longer term development of the currently derelict Cinema Favorit as well as a pilot project for the regeneration of the 400-strong state owned cinemas that have pulled the curtain in the 25 years since the Revolution.

FOOTNOTES: 1. After the regime change, the Communist leaders embarked on widespread renaming of the streets as means of both “decommemorating” the pre-socialist regime and proclaiming the agenda and ideology of the Communist state. The impact of the street names was amplified further through practices such as multiple naming and spatial clustering of names of streets, statues, squares, transport stops, parks and landmarks. For more information, see: 1. Duncan Light, Ion Nicolae, and Bogdan Suditu, “Toponymy and the Communist City: Street Names in Bucharest, 1948–;1965,” GeoJournal 56, no. 2 (February 1, 2002): 135–144.

2. Jose Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, http://www.phinnweb.org/links/literature/borges/aleph. html (accessed September 2014).

3. Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires, Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, 1ST edition. (London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, 1994), p. 285.

4. Alexandre Minkowski et al., Le temps vécu : Etudes phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques (S.l.: Presses Universitaires de France - PUF, 2005), p. 367.

5. Otto Bollnow and Joseph Kohlmaier, Human Space, trans. Christine Shuttleworth (London: Hyphen Press, 2011), p. 23.

6. Alexandre Minkowski et al., Le temps vécu : Etudes phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques (S.l.: Presses Universitaires de France - PUF, 2005), p. 400.

7. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, New edition. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p.7.

8. Ibid., p.7.

9. Rossi argues that history is the result of the relationship between a collective memory of events, the singularity of place (locus solus), and the sign of the place as expressed in form. Thus he affirms that the process by which the city is imprinted with form is urban history, but the succession of events constitutes its memory.

10. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, New edition. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p.7.

11. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, New Ed edition. (London: Vintage Classics, 1997), p.8.

12. This recalls of the concept of the monad articulated by the mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, where the monad is a mirror onto every object in the world.

13. Michel Foucault in Colin Gordon, comp., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986), p. 98.

14. Ibid., p.98.

15. Michel Foucault quoted in Michael Waltzer, “The Politics of Michel Foucault,” in David Couzens Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 55.

16. Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917-1935, 1st Uk edition.

(New York: George Braziller, 1970), p.15.

17. Peter Coe, Lubetkin and Tecton: Architecture and Social Commitment : A Critical Study (London : Bristol: Arts Council of Great Britain and the University of Bristol, 1981), p.44.

18. Upon his return from a state visit to the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Mongolia in 1971, Nicolae Ceaușescu issued the July Theses, containing seventeen proposals which marked a return to socialist realism. They reaffirmed an ideological basis for all cultural production, youth participation on construction sites as “patriotic work” and the growth in the leading role of the Party. The liberlisation of 1965 was condemned and an index of banned books and authors was reintroduced, with Ceaușescu asserting that “the man who does not write for his entire people is not a poet.” As a result of these theses, writers eager for exposure could now obtain it by specialising in the production of ideology.

For more detail on the rise of the personality cult of the ruling couple, see Dennis Deletant, Ceaușescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965 - 1989, M.E. Sharpe, London, 1995.

19. Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner, “Neoliberal Urbanism: Models, Moments, Mutations,” SAIS Review of International Affairs 29, no. 1 (2009), p.50.

20. Heygate Estate was a large housing estate located in Walworth, south London and it was home to more than 3,000 people. Its demolition as part of the regeneration of the Elephant and Castle area has been highly criticised due to a crass lack of provision for affordable housing within the planned redevelopments and the relocation of the former tenants to areas as far as the outskirts of Birmingham. For a critical analysis of the ways in which property developers exploit planning authorities, see Oliver Wainwright’s expose article for The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/17/truth-property-developers-builders-exploitplanning-cities (accessed September 2014).

21. Francesco Sebregondi, “Notes on the Potential of Void: The Case of the Evacuated Heygate Estate,” City 16, no. 3 (June 2012), p.337.

22. Ibid., p.342.

23. In the book Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, Awan, Schneider and Till define the agent as “the one who effects change through the empowerment of others, allowing them to engage in their 20

INTRODUCTION spatial environments in ways previously unknown or unavailable to them, opening up new freedoms and potentials as a result of reconfigured social space.”For more information, see: Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, p.30-34.

24. Francesco Sebregondi, “Notes on the Potential of Void: The Case of the Evacuated Heygate Estate,” City 16, no. 3 (June 2012), p.343.

25. Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (Abingdon, Oxon England ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), p.70.

26. Peter Marcuse, “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City,” City 13, no. 2–3 (June 1, 2009), p.186.

27. The Erasmus+ programme will run from 2014-2020 and supports activities in education, training, youth and sport across all sectors of lifelong learning including Higher Education, Further Education, adult education, schools and youth activities. Erasmus+ aims to boost skills and employability as well as modernise education, training, and youth work across Europe. It has a budget of approximately 14.7 billion euros across Europe and will, over the next seven years, provide opportunities for over 4 million Europeans to study, train, gain work experience and volunteer abroad and will also support transnational partnerships between education, training and youth organisations, as well as support grassroots sport projects. For more information, see: www.erasmusplus.org.uk/ (accessed September 2014).

28. Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, 1 edition. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), p.51.

21

TODAY

Once the “pride of the nation, an effective propaganda tool and the most popular form of entertainment during the Communist regime� 1, Romania’s cinemas are now mostly abandoned and forgotten by a fickle public that has meanwhile discovered VHS cassettes, DVDs, pirated films and the ubiquitous shopping mall multiplex.

Cinema, Mon Amour documents the sometimes incredible stories of public functionaries that staff the few remaining open cinemas. From the ticket sellers and the usherettes, to the managers and technicians (roles which in some small town cinemas are performed by the same person), the documentary maps out the individual histories of the people who have been working in the same place for even as long as 30 years.

This phantom-like world of witnesses to the glory days of the cinema starts to piece a narrative about the places as well as a story about a long gone era. Together, they restore a bigger picture of a world that has vanished, a memorial to the days gone by, and a skeptical reflection on its possible futures.

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TODAY

1.

Today

Cinema, mon amour

12-13. FILM STILLS FROM DOCUMENTARY CINEMA, MON AMOUR, 2014.

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TODAY

14. CINEMA FAVORIT, CIRCA 1975.

At the beginning of the 1990s, an approximate number of 450 cinemas were functioning in a freshly democratic Romania.1 Today, less than 30 have survived.

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TODAY

The past 25 years have witnessed over 400 cultural locations being transformed into discotheques, restaurants, bingo venues, striptease clubs, supermarkets, betting shops, or worse, were forgotten by overtly busy local authorities and left into the hands of decay and various acts of vandalism.

The lack of interest of the public authorities towards the maintenance of the buildings and their associated facilities, combined with incongruous legislation (usually altered with each change of government), changes in consumer patterns as well as the emergence of new media led to the presentday situation of the former state cinemas.

Despite the slight increase in the number of tickets sold during 2005 - 2012 (due to the opening of shopping malls with multiplex cinemas throughout the country), Romania has the smallest number of screens per capita in Europe. The screen density measures 0.89 per 100.000 residents, compared to 1.85 in Bulgaria, 2.66 in Croatia and 4.57 in Slovakia.2 In a conversation I had summer with the prolific film-maker Tudor Giurgiu, he has declared: “It’s not only about the loss of the cinemas, it’s about losing a specific way of experiencing cinematography and the daylight robbery of the public real estate. This puts Romanian cinematographers in a situation where their productions can’t be screened nationally due to the high tariffs requested by multiplex cinemas.

The lack of a comprehensive network of cinemas (at least one screen in each big city or town) ultimately means that Romanian productions are sabotaged from the beginning, despite the high number of international awards from the past decade.

I believe that until we restore at least a minimum number of screens around the country, we can’t revive the national market of films, no matter how many talented or award winning cinematographers we might claim to have. ” 3 One of the 400 cinemas that were closed down post-1989 is Cinema Favorit. In its glory times during the 1970s and the 1980s, with few other entertainment options, Favorit saw cinema goers queuing for hours for a ticket in the 944 seat projection hall.

Considered the second most important cinema in the capital due to its high capacity, it is located in one of the biggest “dormitory”4 neighbourhoods Drumul Taberei - which counts around 300,000 residents in a mix of highrise and low-rise Plattenbau5 blocks, as well as pockets of inter-war housing 25

TODAY

SKYLINE OF THE DRUMUL TABEREI NEIGHBOURHOOD.

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TODAY

The cinema, which saw new film rolls being brought the week after they have been screened in the centrally located Cinema Patria, had between 5 to 8 screenings each day, with 20 to 50 last-minute “standing� tickets reserved for people arriving by train from nearby towns. After 1989, the number of tickets sold decreased significantly, and the cinema was eventually closed down in 1997.

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TODAY

16. Top: Entrance of the former Cinema Favorit. The surrounding buildings that served as post-office, pharmacy, vegetable market and bookshop, have been leased or sold and now consist of a photography shop, a betting shop and two restaurants.

17. Middle: Local school children after a performance in the derelict foyer - the local citizen group organises periodical activities that are meant to pressure the local authorities into action.

18. Bottom: A mapping workshop in 2012 after which the residents have formulated the brief for their ideal Cinema Favorit. This would contain a performance and projection hall, a public lending library, spaces for children, spaces for youth, spaces for seniors and a board game library.

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TODAY

Since 2010, a group of 15 residents of the Drumul Taberei neighbourhood have been actively involved in advocating for the refurbishment of Cinema Favorit. Their campaign started off with the collection of over 1,300 signatures, which managed to put Cinema Favorit on the agenda of the local authority. Their petition, titled “Favorit Cultural Centre”, asked for a multifunctional centre for all age categories.

In November 2010, the Mayor declared in a press conference held in front of the cinema that the funds had been allocated for the refurbishment of the venue. Following local elections in 2012 and a change of Mayors, €180,000 was allocated for a feasibility study.

Despite the study being completed and an architectural proposal being selected with a budget of €2m, the project is at a standstill due to the unclear ownership situation. The Cinema belongs to the Ministry of Culture which does not seem interested in negotiating the handover, despite the Law 303/2008 for the Decentralisation of Cultural Assets from the Ministry of Culture to the corresponding Local Authorities being passed in 2008. The text of the Law specifies that the Ministry of Culture should handover local cultural assets to their corresponding local authorities, yet it conveniently fails to stipulate by when.

The administrative barriers, lack of involvement of public authorities and the ineffective laws make it impossible to engage citizens. On the other hand, the limitations of a poorly developed civil society (which can be attributed as a direct consequence of the Communist era) with little or no social capital to build upon, make public engagement a real challenge where efforts have to be made to involve not only public authorities, but also citizens.

The complex unfolding of the situation means that the local residents will not see the cinema being refurbished in the near future. The lack of capacity of the supposedly competent authorities has gridlocked the efforts of the residents’ group, and raises a few questions: 1. How can bottom-up initiatives be fostered in a hostile bureaucratic environment?

2. How can regeneration become less path dependent and make use of bottom up input?

3. And more importantly: How can the wishes and desires of a community be translated into a quicker material outputs that are independent from the public authorities’ whims?

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1

2

3

5

4

19. ADMINISTRATIVE MAP OF MY NEIGHBOURHOOD, 1962 (BEFORE THE MICRO-RAYON WAS BUILT.

1

2

5

3 4

20. PHYSICIAL MODEL OF THE DRUMUL TABEREI MICRO-RAYON, CIRCA 1970.

The maps above, similar in scale and positioning to the previous aerial bird’s eye view photograph, show Western Bucharest as it was in 1962. The inter-war neighbourhood that I grew up in (and which now is considered to be in a fairly central position) was at the time at the edge of the city. The landlord in this side of the city was the Ministry of Defense and my neighbourhood (called Drumul Sarii after the main axis that leads to the city centre) developed as a result of a campaign to pay homage to soldiers, lieutenants, cadets and colonels heroes of the First World War. Hence, the neighbourhood in the right hand side was built, and each war hero received a parcel of land of 300 sqm, which included a single storey house and a garden.

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5

1

2

3

4

21. BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD TODAY

22. FAVORIT COMMERCIAL COMPLEX

The further development of the neighbourhood stalled until the late 1960s.

According to the Technical Institute Bucharest, the development of Drumul Taberei was built in 1968. The total area of was 450 hectares and it included two new neighbourhoods consisting of 10 microrayons. The first four microrayons that were constructed, contained over 17,000 residential units as well as all “the social-cultural facilities needed for recreation.”6 LEGEND 1. Cinema Favorit development 2. The former local market, now under redevelopment

3. Micro-rayon Drumul Taberei, built in 1968 to accommodate 17,000 residents 4. The inter-war neighbourhood where I grew up 5. The local bus stop “Ho Chi Minh” 31

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“Part one July 1987. Romania.

Heavy duty military unit Uranus The building rising in front of us is humongous, breath-taking, unique.

But we’re not impressed anymore. We got used to it like prisoners to their cells their cells, or like sailors to their ship. We are here for eternity.

Not even Time can make us escape this place. A world delimited 300 meters further down by the line of the fence guarded by armed soldiers.

A perimeter of crushing hard work, which cancels time and space, it substitutes them, becoming its own universe.

For us, apart from work, everything ceased to exist.”7 Impressed after the state visit to North Korea and ‘aided’ by the earthquake of 1977 (which saw many of the old, historical buildings permanently damaged), CeauŞescu embarked on the second stage of developments. During 1980 - 1989, the city centre was completely remodeled in order to make space for the ultimate embodiment of CeauŞescu’s escu’s socialist city: the now infamous House of the People and the ‘Civic Centre’. In order to free up the land for this development, 40,000 people were evacuated in one day and a neighbourhood with the surface area of 7km2 was demolished.8

23. TOP: The House of the People under construction.

24. BOTTOM: Photograph of Uranus neighbourhood, a sleepy “mahala” (trans. “slum”) before its complete demolition in order to free up land for the House of the People and Civic Centre development.

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2.

Yesterday

The rise and fall of the Socialist ideal In 1965, when Ceaușescu came to power, Bucharest had only marginally been affected by expressions of Marxist-Leninist ideology in architecture.

Hence, he launched a series of radical transformations that would completely alter the urban grain of the city, operating with the freedom of a surgeon using a dummy.

The first phase, which lasted until 19809, saw the outskirts and surrounding villages modified, the administrative districts changed and thousands of apartment blocks built. The housing project was to accommodate the influx of workers and reflect the emerging socialist egalitarian order.10 The districts were developed according the neighbourhood-unit concept (microrayon) and were initially limited to four stories in height and provided open spaces for vegetable gardens and playgrounds.

Drawing a parallel, we can affirm that Western trends and movements were adapted to the local context behind the Iron Curtain: Clarence Perry’s “neighbourhood theory”11 was turned in Moscow into the scientific theory of the microrayon (which word-for-word means micro-district).12 The microrayon was the basis of the complex urban ensemble, the new urban structural unit.

Resonating with the thoughts behind Clarence Perry’s and Jane Jacobs’ left leaning writings on urban planning, Russian emigré architect Lubetkin also speaks about the concern that architecture should be “more than self-display; a thesis, a declaration, a statement of the social aims of this age”13 and that “Soviet architects feel no animosity towards theories (as to their colleagues in capitalist countries) because their ambition is not simply to build architecturally, but to build socialistically as well.”14 This argument is also picked up by the postmodern geographer Edward Soja, who mentiones in Postmodern Geographies the efforts of the avant-garde movement of USSR city planners, geographers and architects which worked toward achieving a “new Socialist organisation”.15 He argues that without a struggle to form a collective consciousness that does not assume spatial transformation as an automatic byproduct of revolutionary social change, the pre-revolutionary organisation of space would continue to reproduce social inequality and exploitational structures.

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Dozens of blocks Glisten in the sun Dozens of blocks At the crack of dawn They gently rise Against the blue sky Cranes wake up with the sun And work ‘till dusk Look how their steel arms Lift up to the sky Dozens of blocks A neighbourhood.

Zeci de blocuri Râd în soare argintii Zeci de blocuri În zori de zi Suie agale Pe albastrele cărari Macarale suie în zari Neîncetat până-nserat Uite brațul lor de fier Cum ridică pana la cer Zeci de blocuri Un cartier.

ABOVE: The lyrics are from a propagandistic song (titled “Cranes, smiling in the sun”) by the popular 1950s band Trio Grigoriu.

25. BELOW: Image of the said cranes, smiling in the said sun.

Similar to USSR, the Romanian regime also sought to wield architecture as its main means to achieve socio-political objectives. This unprecedented freedom of manipulating the urban fabric was granted in 1948, through Law 119 - the nationalisation of the means of production - adopted by the Great National Assembly. It decreed subject to nationalisation “all the wealth of the soil not in the property of the state at the time of entry into force of the Constitution of the Romanian People’s Republic, as well as individual enterprises, societies of any type and private industrial, bank, insurance, mining, transport and telecommunications associations”.16 Along with assets of public interest, around 400.000 private houses were also nationalised, generally without any form of compensation.

In ideological terms, these actions were intended to “transform social structures; hence the built environment of the city from its former exclusionary use to involvement in the daily life of the proletariat.”17 The changes in the urban fabric, alongside wide efforts to rename streets and administrative districts that would honour revolutionary heroes and events, were stepping stones for 34

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the creation of the socialist society.18 This was aided by the adoption by the Party in 1959 of a new approach to building (at the July Plennum of the Central Committee of the Romanian’s Worker Party) on the “economisation and industrialisation of buildings, comfort and aesthetic expressivity”.19 From then onwards, the way was open to the modernist approach to housing (both in urban and architectural design), although words such as Modernism, Functionalism or International Style were never uttered. The line of reasoning is unclear, but generally speaking, new developments had to avoid “capitalist forms, which were unsuitable for socialist content”.20 The more profound spatial problematic in Socialist transformation was put aside after the 1960s (with the change of leaders at the helm of the Party), as productivism and military strategy came to dominate spatial policy. The State became the sole patron of architecture21, while the status of the architect changed from a free professional to being regimented within institutions controlled by the State as a sole form of recognised practice.

Unlike the case of Britain, where the embedded role of the architect within public authorities led to a an increase in the quality and variety of public architecture, the “hyper-centralised and extremely restrictive command economy-led to the neglect of numerous basic living conditions and fostered an highly controllable environment which gradually increased the dependency of the atomised populace on the communist state”.22 Most decisions regarding urban development were made by the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers Party and the Sisyphean projects from the 1980s (such as the House of the People, or the Danube - Black Sea canal) were pushed by the Leader blinded by power and fueled by the unanimous obedience of his advisers.

In retrospect, the 1960s surface as the calm before the storm within the five decades of Communism, a decade in which the utopian Socialist view had not been crushed yet - hence, the “Golden Age” status associated with the decade.

The architectural merits of the 1960s are based on a number of favourable circumstances. Firstly, the use of the Functionalist concept fundamented by the CIAM congresses and its application by a generation of Romanian architects and urbanists trained before the 1940s, in the spirit of Modernist architecture.23 Secondly, the decisional factors were at the time interested in a perceivable change of image in order to mark the “election” of a new Party Leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and interpreted positively the use of Western examples as a breakaway from the Stalinist formal language that had been used during the 1950s USSR-enforced Socialism Realism.

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* City boundary before 1950 City boundary before 2000 Collective living units built 1950 - 1989 Urban reconfigurations 1980 - 1989 Main parks before 1940 Main parks built 1950 - 1989 Main industrial premises Representative buildings built 1950 - 1980 Cinema Favorit

*

26. MAP OF BUCHAREST SHOWING URBAN CHANGES BETWEEN 1950 - 1990.

Consequently, neighbourhoods such as Drumul Taberei (where Cinema Favorit is located), developed in the 1960s, benefited from a Functionalist approach that ensured holistic planning; clear spatial hierarchies following the circulation flows, careful composition of the apartment blocks in order to surround isolate residential areas from high traffic, as well as the easy reach of public services (schools, nurseries, shops, markets, libraries, parks and Cinema Favorit), which were meant to shelter the “collective life of the community of residents in the area”.24 Katherine Veredey argues in “National Ideology under Socialism”, that if there was an ideology in Ceaușescu’s Romania that had “potentially hegemonic force, it was national ideology”.25 However, Romanians who agreed that something called “the nation” exists, were far from agreed on how to define and protect it under the general umbrella of the Iron Curtain. The manifestation of this ideology became clear when Romania was the only country that signed the Warsaw pact who did not send troops for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The socialist institutional structure, based on the same rhetoric of “the nation”, subverted Marxism to serve its own discourse.

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27. WHERE THERE WAS ONCE A NEIGHBOURHOOD OF 40,000 PEOPLE, A HOVERING LANDMARK IN THE LANDSCAPE EMERGED AS A “CENTRALISING SYMBOL OF NATIONAL SOLIDARITY”.

The socialist satellite was leaving its orbit, a move that prompted Nixon to name Ceaușescu “the anti-Russia communist”.26 Milan Kundera remarks in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that “All man’s life among men is nothing but a battle for the ears of other”.28 The construction of the civic presence (both physical and metaphorical) as “forum for communism”28 follows the part of this battle where the hegemonic power strived to suppress alternative messages and capture “ears”, crucial to gaining the resources that would facilitate a broader audience for their message.29 The importance of the “civic” within the national identity rhetoric is proved through a variety of examples: expert craftsmanship deployed in the construction of public assets, the designation of civic land use of vast sites, politicised cultural production in literature, history, philosophy and sociology, as well as the immense amounts of mandatory voluntary labour (which, as seen in Ioan Robu’s memoir, by the 1980s escalated to nation wide efforts and the army being used in order to finish the megalomaniac House of the People on time).

These contradictions between form, content and application are key to the understanding of the implications of recurrent motifs such as civic and golden age. In order to do so, it is also important to question for whom these radical reinterpretations were meant. In the next sub-chapter, I will seek to explore the molding of the Homo Sovieticus, the archetypal Soviet Man or Woman considered the atoms of a new world, and the sometimes surprising instances that formed the “plurality of resistances”30 Foucault referred to.

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28-29. DRUMUL TABEREI NEIGHBOURHOOD IMMEDIATELY AFTER COMPLETION IN 1968. NOTE THE LACK OF PEOPLE AND INHABITATION FROM THE ORIGINAL PHOTOS.

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Homo Sovieticus and the golden ages “The virtual universality of collective habitation and the brutal systematisation of towns and villages, objectives almost completely achieved in the 1980s, in reality led to the alienation of individual members of society from each other, and above all, from the tradition of their places of origin, making it easier to manipulate and subjugate them.” 31 The day before Ceaușescu denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he inaugurated the new car plant for the national brand Dacia. The car was intended to be the symbol of the entrance of the nation and the people into the new bright future offered by the socialist Romania, “the land of milk and honey, of oil and gas”.32 The car was named after the imagined ancient land where, according to strongly propagandistic historiography, the Romanian nation and its people were born to become the “torch-bearers of civilisation in the surrounding Slavic night”.33 This country of Dacia had become the mythological emblem of the national ideology, validating the Roman and Geto-Dac lineage of the Romanian people who were considered largely superior to the Slavs (the rest of the Soviet countries), the barbaric invaders. This rhetoric was deployed by the Party in order to increase the personal power of its leader against Soviet hegemony; by making direct references to the superior ethno-nationalist foundation at the core of Romania’s national identity, they managed to incite popular imagination.

The Romanian farmers – the workers at the conveyor belt in factories such as Dacia – were thus celebrated as formidable builders of socialism. Children and young people were the obvious targets of party propagandists - through being, literally, the party’s future. But party activists also had a special mission to win over blue-collar workers, the men and women in whose name the initial revolution had been carried out.

Again, ideology filled a very important gap in the economy of the period.

Given that everything was state-owned and better performance did not bring 39

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It is interesting to note the contrast between the inherently organic arrangement of markets and the systematised and organised environment of the “Alimentara” (trans. food shop / supermarket), pictured on the right hand page. By the end of the 1980s the cornucopia presented in these images disappeared as all the national products were designated for export, in an ambitious bid of the Leader to erase all external debt. Images such as these ones were used instead as propaganda in order reassure the population of the state’s wealth. The wide-spread rationing led to a vast number of jokes to be whispered around. For example, regarding the lack of food: Farm worker: ‘Comrade Ceauşescu, we have so many potatoes that, piled one on top of the other, they would reach all the way to God!’ Ceauşescu: ‘But God does not exist.’

Farm worker: ‘And neither do the potatoes.’

Regarding freedom of speech: A judge walks out of the courtroom, laughing loudly. A colleague asks, “What is it you laugh about?” ““Ah, Ah, I just heard an excellent anecdote,” the judge says, sweeping tears of laughter. ““An anecdote? Tell me!” ““Are you crazy? I just sentenced a man to ten years for that anecdote.”

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promotions or pay rises (as wages were set by the central government), there was no incentive to produce more or better. Hence, individual performance was tied to the Five Year Plans, where industries, factories and workers had a daily quota.34 “Socialist competitions” were invented, where the workers not only would fulfill their quotas, but over fulfill them and thus, exceed the national quotas.

Anne Applebaum argues in Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe that a Socialist city was supposed to be one in which the workers would not only eat and sleep, but would enjoy leisure activities of the sort “only the bourgeoisie had enjoyed in the past”.35 The new urban spaces bred a new kind of worker, an “urban human” or “homo sovieticus” (note), which leads a “sober life, visits the cinema and theatre or listens to the radio instead of going to the pub, wears modern and ready-made clothing.

In contrast to the villager he furnishes his flat with urban furniture, preferring factory made over carpenter made. In his flat, there is a bathtub where he regularly takes a bath. He does not use the bathtub for his animals, or to store food. He does not dry clothes on the balcony, but uses the communal laundry in the building.”36 In the omnibus film Tales from the Golden Age37, five short stories from the last of the “Golden Ages” - the 1980s - depict the paradox of the imposed view of the homo sovieticus and the intrinsic character of the average Romanian. In the “legend of the poultry truck driver”, an eponymous character, disillusioned with his marriage, tries to seduce the innkeeper from his regular highway stop. As a gift, he brings her fresh eggs laid overnight by the chickens in his truck, alluding to the infamous food and fuel crisis on the internal market 41

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32. ABOVE: THE DACIA CAR FACTORY IN THE LATE 1960S. 33. BELOW: MY GRANDPARENTS ON HOLIDAY WITH THE FAMILY’S MOST PRIZED POSSESSION.

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at the time.

With Easter coming up and the Orthodox custom of painting eggs red in its Eve, the two quickly realise there’s an entrepreneurial opportunity ahead of them. Despite staging an accident, their plan fails and he is found out and jailed for embezzlement. When he is eventually granted a visit, it proves to be his angry wife and not his secret lover.

Urban myths such as the ones depicted in the film, were commonplace, proving the capacity of people to “make do” despite the tough regulations and austere architectural forms. These forms of inhabitation happened in spite of the imposed austerity.

The side quote refers to a tragic reality of the effect of the last “Golden Age”, where the dichotomy between the propaganda and the lived reality reached its apex. The documentary Condemned to Happiness, as well as Norman Manea’s collection of short stories Compulsory Happiness pose a critical question for the construction of the Homo Sovieticus: if happiness is a choice, then what does it become when compelled? The "Nowadays, Romanians, if asked, almost institutional optimism invariably say that they remember the of the last decade was required by a systemic last years of Gheorghiu-Dej’s rule and the application of communist beginning of the Ceausescu period as an ideology whose results interlude of liberalism, a "golden age", in insist (contrary to physical comparison to both the 50s and the 80s."38 evidence) on the best possible life for everyone. The parades, anniversaries, speeches and prolonged popular ovations were the only ways that the state apparatus allowed “reality” to be depicted.

The matured totalitarian regime had managed by the 1980s to fully deploy a web of Foucauldian “micro-powers”. Neighbours spied on each other and then reported to the Party activist, priests gave away confessional conversations, while the roles one could have in society were limited to informer, collaborator or conspirator. It is in this particular context, I find the following two examples - one from architecture, one from cinematography - to be particularly fascinating as fragments of the wider milieu of resistance and their value in questioning the monolithic regime.

The first example is given by students of the Bucharest School of Architecture (among whom were Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou, later the founding members of Parisian practice atelier d’architecture autogérée and currently Visiting Professors at Harvard University Graduate School of Design) who held series of meetings called “actions”.39 Sometimes restricted to the forests 43

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34. ABOVE, TRIPTICH: When the Civic Centre & House of the People project was announced, architect Andrei Pandele decided to document the neighbourhoods that were about to be erased, as well as the lives of ordinary Romanians. Photographing it was regarded as ‘slandering socialist reality’, and was a criminal offence. For instance, a man who had photographed a long queue waiting at a butcher shop was imprisoned for six years. Ultimately Pandele shot more than 1000 rolls of film. He trained himself to photograph in risky situations without looking through the viewfinder. In this way he created a unique report on the last years of the communist Romania, with which he could only go public after 1993.

35. ABOVE: Chickens were usually weighting under 500g and they were incredibly difficult to find. Photo: Andrei Pandele, 1989.

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surrounding Bucharest, or to areas that were due to be demolished to make space for the new Civic Centre and House of the People, the actions were directed towards “learning architecture in/from the forest, in/from ruins, making ‘performative’ and ‘collaborative’ architecture, fragile and vulnerable architecture, through installations and performances”.40 In one such action, titled ‘Traces’, each person participating took one room in a house intended for demolition and responded through a performance or installation. Petrescu comments this was, “a last and inutil (unavailing) gesture of future architects”. Yet she adds that it was also seen as, “a first gesture of resistance of future architects”.41 The second story of resistance is the one of Irina Margareta Nistor, who worked as a translator for the national television in Communism and is widely known as “the voice of the films”; in the last 4 years of Communism, she secretly dubbed over 3,000 banned movie titles on VHS tapes smuggled from Western countries. The independent documentary Chuck Norris vs.

Communism tells the story about the rise of secret video nights that gave Romanian people a glimpse of the West.42 As one of the people interviewed in the documentary remarks: “She was the most known voice in Romania, after the voice of Nicolae Ceaușescu.”43 Protected by her superior, and by the fact that the Party did not expect her work to turn into a mass phenomenon, her husky and high-pitched voice became the symbol of freedom and Chuck Norris, Van Damme and Bruce Lee became national heroes. As her superior later stated: “In a totalitarian regime where everything was controlled, they escaped one seemingly unimportant medium: the video tape.”44

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“When sites in the urban landscape visibly decay, or fall into disuse, how is their role in the life of the community affected?

What does “ownership” mean? The technical sense of ownership, that is, legal title to bricks and mortar?

Or the more metaphysical ownership of belonging, and in “I belong here, it is my home? home?”45

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CIVIC VOIDS IN POST-SOCIALIST BUCHAREST After the 1989 Revolution Romania has entered a phase of transition between the old and the new, between communism and capitalism.

Romanian journalists widely and mockingly refer to this period as the “eternal transition”, alluding to the fact that after a period of deregulation during the early 1990s, not that many systemic aspects have changed.

Similar to Polish cities46, Romanian cities (and especially Bucharest) have witnessed transformations of space: the urban fabric was diversified through unregulated street trade in the early 1990s (where informal vendors sold anything that could pass as “Western” goods - from Turkish jeans, to Western brands of cigarettes), while the liberal politics of urbanism in the mid until the late 1990s saw a suburban expansion in order to accommodate people’s desires to live in houses and not in the ubiquitous apartment blocks.

Increasingly, the notion of “public space” became an empty signifier, as it was cleaned up and often privatised and reduced to the interstitial spaces in between commercial premises and work and living areas. Many of the public canteens (mockingly nicknamed during the last years of strict communism as “the circles of hunger”) were transformed into shopping malls.

Commercial content within the public sphere is now not only unavoidable, but it has become normalised. As seen in the two photos on the previous spread, neo-liberal policies quickly allowed for almost every surface to be turned into a potential site for advertising.47 Lefebvre argues that the hegemony of capitalism increasingly produces homogenised spaces, generating similarities across the globe rather than specificity and difference.48 This ‘abstract space’, constituted by fluctuating circuits of capital, is defined by hierarchisation and social and spatial fragmentation and ultimately leads to an accelerating erosion of place. Relph asserts this as an “inauthentic attitude” to place “for it involves no awareness of the deep and symbolic significances of places and no appreciation of their identities.”49 The inauthentic attitude weakens the identity of places to the point where they “not only look alike and feel like and offer the same bland possibilities for experience.”50 The sense of ownership is thus negated, and it its absence is made even more 47

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37. ABOVE: 6 years after the Revolution the most dominant element in the landscape is the McDonald’s sign.

38. BELOW: Bucharest, 1995 - the municipality quickly discovered the profitability of branding public services.

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present by the palimpsest that remains behind. If in Western countries the re-purposing from public to private commonly takes place under the debated aegis of “regeneration”51, in Romania this is not even a concept thought of without the heavy subsidisation from the state, the running and upkeep of the buildings makes for a tough sell.

In the case of Bucharest (and Romania), most of the civic infrastructure has either been privatised post-1989 (in which case it has seen a swift change of orientation, from the civic to the consumption-driven) or it was simply shut down. These buildings, taken out of their original use exist now only as a void in the landscape, reminding the people living nearby, or simply passing, that the service no longer exists.

Solà-Morales describes terrain-vague as “vacant, abandoned, marginal urban places, attractive due to their ability to mirror contemporary city-users’ feelings of strangeness and helplessness in their own city.”52 The void, in these places, represents the lack of use and productivity as well as expectation and the promise of freedom.53 Reading the civic voids of Bucharest as fragments of terrain-vague allows for a questioning the traditional design methodology of seek and solve: the architect identifies the spatial problems and resolves them through wellconsidered design moves; this implies a narrow understanding that buildings are the primary locus of architectural production, where spatial problems can only have spatial solutions. This desire to transform disorder into order leads to a catch-22 in the employment of design ‘agency’ within these structures, as Solà-Morales mentiones: “When architecture and urban design project their desire onto a vacant space, a terrain vague, they seem incapable of doing anything other than introducing violent transformations, changing estrangement into citizenship, and striving at all costs to dissolve the uncontaminated margin of the obsolete into the realism of efficacy.[...] How can architecture act in the terrain vague without becoming an aggressive instrument of power and abstract reason? Undoubtedly, through attention to continuity: not the continuity of the planned, efficient, and legitimized city, but of the flows, the energies, the rhythms established by the passing of time and the loss of limits... we should treat the residual city with a contradictory complicity that will not shatter the elements that maintain its continuity in time and space.” 54 Solà-Morales’ approach is echoed by Sebregondi’s interpretation of the Heygate Estate as a void. As cities are increasingly homogenised by world brands and top-down design, there is a growing desire to find or initiate interferences that would help us reconstitute the feeling of a living city - a 49

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39. ABOVE: THE FOYER OF CINEMA FAVORIT, 2014.

40. RIGHT: THE FORMER PROJECTION HALL WITH A CAPACITY OF 1,200 SEATS.

city driven by the “heterogeneous and ever fluctuating affects of its inhabitants”.

As the authors of Critical Cities argue, unplanned, ephemeral, interstitial, residual places or terrain vague are attractive because of the “absence of predetermination and their openness to informal settlement”.55 Cinema Favorit as the Aleph, is the strange overlapping territory between the socio-political context that generated it and the neo-liberal, market 50

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driven policies that were adopted once the totalitarian regime was ousted.

As the photos above depict in its current state, I will seek to explore in the next, and last, chapter what tactics could be deployed and what mechanisms could be put in place, in order for a civic economy to flourish around the former landmark of the neighbourhood I grew up in.

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FOOTNOTES: 1. http://www.salvatimareleecran.ro/, (accessed July 2014).

2. According to statistics released by Media Salles, an initiative of the EU MEDIA Programme that promotes the European cinema and its circulation at theatrical level. See http://www.mediasalles.it/journal/ ecj3_05ing.pdf (accessed July 2014).

3. Interview with Tudor Giurgiu, August 2014 (see Appendices).

4. “Dormitory” is the popular nickname for high-density urban living, built in the mid-to-late 1960s throughout Romania.

5. “Plattenbau” is a prefabrication construction method that is considered to be typical of the Eastern Block. Inexpensive and relatively quick method, it was used to curb the severe post-war housing shortage.

6. Ana-Maria Zaharide, Architecture in the Communist Project. Romania 1944 - 1989, n.d, p. 87.

7. “Robi Pe Uranus. Cum Am Construit Casa Poporului.” accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.elefant. ro/carti/fictiune/literatura-romana/literatura-romana-contemporana/robi-pe-uranus-cum-am-construit-casapoporului-editia-iiiiii-5776.html.

8. Ibid.

9. Darrick Danta, “Ceausescu’s Bucharest,” Geographical Review 83, no. 2 (April 1993), p.171.

10. Ibid., p.175.

11. The concept of the neighbourhood unit was developed by Clarence Perry and corresponds the American wave of school of urban studies and ecology Chicago School. The neighbourhood unit was conceived as a comprehensive planning tool; it advocated design ideal such as centering development around a school (and plan the internal street layout so that the school can be reached by foot), placing main roads and local shopping areas along the perimeter of the unit and dedicating 10% of the area to open and green spaces.

See: Perry, C. 1998 The Neighbourhood Unit (1929) Reprinted Routledge/Thoemmes, London, 1998, p.25-30 12. Ana-Maria Zaharide, Architecture in the Communist Project. Romania 1944 - 1989, n.d, p. 55.

13. Peter Coe, Lubetkin and Tecton: Architecture and Social Commitment : A Critical Study (London : Bristol: Arts Council of Great Britain and the University of Bristol, 1981), p.17.

14. Ibid., p.44.

15. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (Verso, 1989), p.89.

16. http://www.cdep.ro/pls/legis/legis_pck.htp_act_text?idt=8797 (accessed September 2014).

17. Darrick Danta, “Ceausescu’s Bucharest,” Geographical Review 83, no. 2 (April 1993), p.180.

18. Ibid., p.181.

19. Ana-Maria Zaharide, Architecture in the Communist Project. Romania 1944 - 1989, n.d, p. 55.

20. Ibid.

21. Alexandru Panaitescu, De La Casa Scanteii La Casa Poporului. Patru Decenii de Arhitectura in Bucuresti 1945-1989 (Simetria 2012), p.284.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p.130.

24. Ana-Maria Zaharide, Architecture in the Communist Project. Romania 1944 - 1989, n.d, p. 63.

25. Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (University of California Press, 1991), p.12.

26. Ceausescu Behind The Myth, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvlfRKBIGok&feature=youtube_ gdata_player, (accessed September 2014).

27. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1979, quoted in Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (University of California Press, 1991), p.12.

28. Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield, Critical Cities: V. 2: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists (Myrdle Court Press, 2010), p.313.

29. Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (University of California Press, 1991), p.12.

30. Michel Foucault quoted in Michael Waltzer, “The Politics of Michel Foucault,” in David Couzens Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 55.

31. Alexandru Panaitescu, De La Casa Scanteii La Casa Poporului. Patru Decenii de Arhitectura in Bucuresti 1945-1989 (Simetria 2012), p.284.

32. “Dacia 1300 - My Generation,” Issuu, accessed August 31, 2014, http://issuu.com/eroik/docs/dacia_1300.

33. Ibid.

34. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 (London; New York: Allen Lane, 2012), p.337.

35. Ibid., p.394.

36. Ibid., p.399.

37. Hanno Höfer et al., Tales from the Golden Age, Comedy, History, 2011.

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38. Ana-Maria Zaharide, Architecture in the Communist Project. Romania 1944 - 1989, n.d, p. 15.

39. Helen Stratford, “Enclaves of Expression: Resistance by Young Architects to the Physical and Psychological Control of Expression in Romania during the 1980s,” Journal of Architectural Education 54, no. 4 (May 1, 2001), p.222.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., p.223.

42. Ilinca Calugareanu, “‘VHS vs. Communism,’” The New York Times, February 17, 2014, http://www. nytimes.com/2014/02/18/opinion/vhs-vs-communism.html, (accessed September 2014).

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield, Critical Cities: V. 2: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists (Myrdle Court Press, 2010), p. 149.

46. Ibid., p.312.

47. Ibid., p.123.

48. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1st edition. (Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: WileyBlackwell, 1991), p.52.

49. Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction, 1 edition. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), p.44.

50. Ibid.

51. Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield, Critical Cities: V. 2: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists (Myrdle Court Press, 2010), p. 149.

52. various and Dean Almy, CENTER, Volume 14: On Landscape Urbanism, 1st edition. (Austin, TX : Center for American Architecture and Design, University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture: The Center for American Architecture and Design, 2007), p.181.

53. Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield, Critical Cities: V. 2: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists (Myrdle Court Press, 2010), p. 362.

54. Kenneth Frampton, Manuel de Sola-Morales: A Matter of Things (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008), p.112-113.

55. Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield, Critical Cities: V. 2: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists (Myrdle Court Press, 2010), p. 362.

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41. ORIGINAL PLANS OF THE CINEMA.

42. OUR PROPOSAL FOR THE FIRST STEP OF THE REGENERATION PROCESS - A TEMPORARY INTERVENTION. 54

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3.

Tomorrow

Tactical urbanism as an alternative methodology for regeneration The political theorist Chantal Mouffe highlights the radical potential of artistic practices and argues that the confrontation between adversaries (in the case of the cinema, the us / them distinction in the relationship between the local community group and the indifferent local and municipal authorities) should not be seen as the terrain where consensus can emerge.

For the agonistic model, the public space is “the battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final reconciliation.” 1 This does not mean that this form of “agonistic public sphere”2 is something that should be seen as negative. On the contrary, it is the key to keeping democracy alive and a way of mobilising passions; I believe that this approach is the only way in which we can claim back the use and meaning of the trope “civic”. Mouffe argues that today artists (and here I would add urban practitioners such as architects and planners) cannot pretend any more to constitute an avant-garde offering a radical critique of the size and scope of what Europe saw at the beginning of last century, but this not a reason to proclaim that their political role has ended.3 This line of thought is picked up by the German architect Markus Miessen, who advocates for the Uninvited Outsider and Crossbench Practitioner as a way of moving away from the romantic idea of consensual participation as an all-inclusive democratic process.4 I find these two ideas as key starting points in defining my role within the Cinema Favorit project, as the independent and pro-active practitioner who does not belong to the set of stakeholders (such as the local authority or the community group). This allows me to retain the autonomy of thought, proposition and production. The fact that the temporary intervention I am proposing is funded through European financing breaks the mould of the typical architectural project which starts with being handed a brief. The brief gives instructions about what can and cannot be done in a space and is filled with explicit rules, and the “beyond” is not considered to be the concern of the architect, nor the client.

I find this “beyond” and its critical interrogation critical to the my positioning as spatial agent, for it is about the context in social, political and economic 55

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43. AXONOMETRIC VIEW OF OUR TEMPORARY PROPOSAL, WHICH INCLUDES: • Improvement of the public space through place specific urban furniture; the intervention will be designed and built by British students and is covered by the ERASMUS+ funding we obtained.

• Public event series: film screenings, mobile library, music evenings, dance workshops, in partnership with the French Institute - these are meant to attract the wider Bucharest public and re-establish the Cinema as a cultural venue.

• Locally aimed events: co-curated with the residents’ group, this side of the project is to deliver workshops and experience exchanges in order to build the capacity of self-organisation of the local community. Ideally, this would ensure the sustainability of the project meaning that after our departure, they would have the knowledge and the connections to sustain similar projects in the future.

• Exhibition: Civic Architecture in the Communist Era - this documents projects similar in programme to the Cinema Favorit and aims to raise awareness regarding a type of slowly disappearing heritage.

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terms, as well as about the consequences a development might have. As Schneider, Till and Awan argue, “spatial agents understand precisely these boundaries as their territory”.5 I have pursued this critical interrogation through the previous chapters precisely in order to be able to formulate an expanded brief, which is not given, but constructed. Hence, beginning with a question rather than a design concept we6 asked: what minimum resources do we need to turn a ruin into a social space?

The project, titled Civic Studio, develops the idea of the cinema’s functional reenactment through events and spatial interventions and seeks to shape an empowering memory of the landmark Cinema Favorit used to be. Similarly to the project Sans Souci Cinema, we seek to formulate “a spatial idea of the past that would anchor the local community’s shared vision for the future.”7 In an incremental process aimed at addressing both the conceptual and the practical aspects of the project, we approached the project in three related ways. Firstly, the Civic Studio focuses on the cinema’s role as a place of public spectacle. We aim to run a public programme of performances and screenings which would engage local people, bringing the “ruin” to life and at the same time revitalising its role as a venue for social activities.

Secondly, our aim is that the events (open-air screenings, dance workshops, a neighbourhood festival) are linked to a business plan, which can win sponsorships and build up the profile of Cinema Favorit as cultural attraction.

Thirdly, we intend to embed capacity-building processes in the programme, so that the community group can form an active part of the management team for the permanent cultural venue. In this way, a mixed management team with accumulated social capital, would guarantee the sustainability of the project.

In an interview with Calum Green, community organiser for London citizens and trustee of the East London Community Land Trust, we discussed the advantages of the management structure deployed for the community land trust: members pay £1 in order to gain the access to vote and put themselves forward for positions in the Board. The Board is voted at the Annual General Meeting and is formed of three parts: a third local residents, a third non-residents and a third stakeholders, relevant experts and municipal representatives. In this way it can be guaranteed that there is never a majority of people motivated by financial interests.

Arguably, this management structure could be implemented as part of the long term redevelopment of the Cinema - a third of the Board could be composed 57

TOMORROW “Ziua cartierului" este organizată în cadrul proiectului "Lideri pentru comunitate" derulat de Centrul de Resurse pentru participare publică - CeRe și finanțat prin granturile SEE 2009 – 2014, în cadrul Fondului ONG în România.

Conţinutul acestui material nu reprezintă în mod necesar poziţia oficială a granturilor SEE 2009 – 2014.

Pentru informaţii oficiale despre granturile SEE şi norvegiene accesaţi www.eeagrants.org

FAVORIT PENTRU TOŢI, TOŢI PENTRU FAVORIT ZIUA CARTIERULUI 26 septembrie 2014, începând cu ora 17:00

ÎN FAȚA CINEMATOGRAFULUI “FAVORIT”, STRADA DR. TABEREI, NR. 28, SECTOR 6

• concerte • proiecții de filme • clubul seniorilor • • informare si consultare • spectacol de teatru • • activități pentru tineri (educația globală) • • spectacol de teatru • expoziție foto • • laboratorul verde al reciclării •

EVENIMENT ORGANIZAT DE:

CU SPRIJINUL:

PROIECT FINANȚAT DE:

44. CINEMA FAVORIT NEIGHBOURHOOD DAY, 26TH SEPTEMBER 2014.

The poster for this year’s Neighbourhood Day at Cinema Favorit. Due to the fact that the response to the funding application came too late in order for us to organise the intervention this summer, we were forced to postpone for the summer of 2015.

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of employees of the cinema, a third of local residents or representatives of the local businesses and a third of local authority representatives and experts.

This would guarantee that all parts have their say, but that the argument is never monopolised.

The civic economy thus created around Cinema Favorit would create local amenities where conventional state provision no longer exists and could be a prototype for the development of social capital between residents, as well as building the organisational capacity needed for ordinary citizens to reclaim public assets.

FOOTNOTES: 1. Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007), accessed September 22, 2014, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/ pdfs/mouffe.pdf.

2. Chantal Mouffe, “Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension,” Scribd, accessed September 23, 2014, http://www.scribd.com/doc/236077653/Chantal-Mouffe-Every-Form-of-Art-Has-a-Political-Dimension.

3. Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007), accessed September 22, 2014, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/ pdfs/mouffe.pdf.

4. Markus Miessen, “Crossbenching – Interview with Markus Miessen | Common,” n.d., accessed September 23, 2014, http://commonthejournal.com/journal/konjunktur-und-krise-no-2/crossbenchinginterview-with-markus-miessen/.

5. Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (Abingdon, Oxon England ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), p70.

6. The core project team (same as for the previous project, Poiana lui Iocan, is formed of Adam Roberts, Architecture student at the Royal College of Art, Huan Rimington, student of Spatial Planning and Urban Design (SPUD) at the Sir John Cass Faculty of Architecture, and myself.

7. http://www.spatialagency.net/database/sans.souci.cinema,(accessed September 2014).

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FOOTNOTES: 1. Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle. Ruins of Modernity. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010, p.247.

2. The Burra Charter, as well as the Venice Charter are codes of professional standards giving an international framework for the preservation and restoration of ancient buildings. They describe cultural significance as a “site’s aesthetic, historic, scientific, or social value for the past, present and future generations”. See Ibid., p.302.

3. Ibid., p.302.

4. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Reprint edition. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1999, p.4.

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POSTSCRIPT “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting When I set out to investigate the complex context surrounding the landmark of my childhood, I had no idea what an array of contradicting thoughts, feelings and facts it would uncover. A relentless clash of civilisations and a struggle for defining the national identity against powerful neighbours have always been the given conditions in the formation of the Romanian people.

Seen in this light, the architecture generated by the totalitarian regime that ruled for five decades is just one facet of the bigger story, and yet, the facet most likely to survive as decades go by.

Given the extent and pervasiveness of the communist propagandistic apparatus, it is of no surprise that the collective memory is shaped by the politics of the time and that remembrances differ markedly from the objective truth of the events.

Protest, folklore, collective nostalgia are a few of the counter forces that can help us avoid social amnesia; to quote Rahul Mehrotra in the Ruins of Modernity, “there are no static or permanent mechanisms to encode this spectacle.

Here the memory of the city is an “enacted” process - a kinetic moment, as opposed to buildings that contain the public memory as a static or permanent entity. When this double coding of static and kinetic moments takes place in the same space or building, the city and its architecture can no longer be presumed to contain a single meaning. In the kinetic city, meanings are not stable. Like buildings and space, they are consumed, reinterpreted and recycled, even if only momentarily.

The ruinous quality of the city of modernity is recycled to create a new spectacle.”1 Hence, the closing question I aspire to address through next summer’s intervention is: How can we go beyond the canonic notion of cultural significance2, in order to reach a point which is “neither restoration nor erasure”3, but which embodies, as Kundera beautifully put it, as “the struggle of man against forgetting”4?

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List of illustrations 1. Cover: Drawing of Cinema Favorit.

April 2014.

2. http://www.dr-taberei.ro/wpcontent/uploads/2010/11/complexul_ favorit_1977.jpg (accessed May 2014).

3. Me on my street. Author: my mother, 1992.

4. Cinema Favorit. Author: Alexandru Dobre, 2014.

5. Author unknown, 1930s.

6. Ibid.

7. http://www.cooperativag.ro/wpcontent/uploads/2013/05/redactiacuvantul.jpg, (accessed May 2014).

8. http://media.hotnews.ro/ media_server1/image-2008-08-234075634-41-23-august-1989-ultimamare-sarbatoare-comunismului.jpg (accessed September 2014).

9. http://www.noorderlicht.com/ en/archive/andrei-pandele/#behindwalls , Author: Andrei Pandele, 1980s, (accessed September 2014).

10. Cinema Favorit. Author: Alexandru Dobre, 2014.

11. Poiana lui Iocan. Author: Alexandru Dobre, 2013.

12. Film stills from documentary Cinema Mon Amour, http://vimeo. com/89902503, (accessed June 2014).

13. Ibid.

14. www.cinemafavorit.ro, (accessed June 2014).

15. Author: Stefan Tuchila, 2013.

16. Author: Razvan Zamfira, 2013.

17. www.cinemafavorit.ro, (accessed June 2014).

18. Ibid.

19. Alexandru Panaitescu, De La Casa Scanteii La Casa Poporului. Patru Decenii de Arhitectura in Bucuresti 1945-1989 (Simetria 2012), p.170.

20. Ibid., pg. 175.

21. Google Maps, (accessed July 2014).

22. Alexandru Panaitescu, De La Casa Scanteii La Casa Poporului. Patru Decenii de Arhitectura in Bucuresti 1945-1989 (Simetria 2012), p.284.

23. Author: Andrei Pandele, 1987.

24. Author: Andrei Pandele, 1984.

25. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ danvartanian/206482867/in/set72157594166834095, (accessed September 2014).

26. Alexandru Panaitescu, De La Casa Scanteii La Casa Poporului. Patru Decenii de Arhitectura in Bucuresti 1945-1989 (Simetria 2012), p.170.

27. https://estnordest.files.wordpress. com/2009/10/untitled.jpg, (accessed September 2014).

28. www.cinemafavorit.ro, (accessed June 2014).

29. Ibid.

30. http://bukresh.blogspot.co.uk/, (accessed July 2014).

31. Ibid.

32. Dacia Factory - comm book 33. Author unknown, circa 1970.

34. Author: Andrei Pandele, 1984 1989.

35. Ibid.

36. http://bukresh.blogspot.co.uk/, (accessed July 2014).

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Cinema Favorit. Author: Alexandru Dobre, 2014.

40. Ibid.

41. Original plan of the Cinema, www. cinemafavorit.ro (accessed June 2014).

42. Proposal drawing by Adam Roberts, 2014.

43. Ibid.

44. Poster for the day of the neighbourhood by Razvan Zamfira, 2014.

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3. Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56.

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4. Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Abingdon, Oxon England ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2011.

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6. Borden, Iain, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell, and Alicia Pivaro. The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2000.

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10. Carter, Erica, James Donald, and Judith Squires. Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location. 1ST edition. London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, 1994.

11. Coe, Peter. Lubetkin and Tecton: Architecture and Social Commitment : A Critical Study. London : Bristol: Arts Council of Great Britain and the University of Bristol, 1981.

12. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. 1 edition. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2004.

13. Danta, Darrick. “Ceausescu’s Bucharest.” Geographical Review 83, no. 2 (April 1993): 170.

14. Deletant, Dennis. Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989. M.E. Sharpe, 1995.

15. Frampton, Kenneth. Manuel de Sola-Morales: A Matter of Things. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008.

16. Hamilton, F. E. Ian (Frederick Edwin Ian), and R. A French. The Socialist City : Spatial Structure and Urban Policy. Chichester ; New York: Wiley, 1979.

17. Hatherley, Owen. Militant Modernism. Winchester, England ; Washington, D.C: O Books, 2009.

18. Hell, Julia, and Andreas Schonle. Ruins of Modernity. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

19. Hollis, Edward. The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories. London: Portobello Books Ltd, 2010.

20. King, Jason. “Landscape+Urbanism: Source: Terrain Vague - de Sola Morales,” n.d. Accessed August 31, 2014. http://landscapeandurbanism.blogspot. co.uk/2011/07/source-terrain-vague-de-sola-morales.html.

21. Kopp, Anatole. Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917-1935. 1st Uk edition. New York: George Braziller, 1970.

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23. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1 edition. Malden, Mass: WileyBlackwell, 1992.

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25. Marcuse, Peter. “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City.” City 13, no. 2-3 (June 1, 2009): 185–197.

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27. Miessen, Markus. “Crossbenching – Interview with Markus Miessen | Common,” n.d. Accessed September 23, 2014. http://commonthejournal.com/ journal/konjunktur-und-krise-no-2/crossbenching-interview-with-markusmiessen/.

28. Mieville, China. The City & The City. London: Pan, 2011.

29. Minkowski, Alexandre, Jeannine Pilliard-Minkowska, Eugène Minkowski, and Yves Pélicier. Le temps vécu : Etudes phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques.

S.l.: Presses Universitaires de France - PUF, 2005.

30. Mouffe, Chantal. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007). Accessed September 22, 2014. http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/pdfs/mouffe.pdf.

31. Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Mariner Books, 1968.

32. Naik, Deepa, and Trenton Oldfield. Critical Cities: V. 2: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists. Myrdle Court Press, 2010.

33. Orum, Anthony M., and Zachary P. Neal. Common Ground?: Readings and Reflections on Public Space. Routledge, 2010.

34. Panaitescu, Alexandru. De La Casa Scanteii La Casa Poporului. Patru Decenii de Arhitectura in Bucuresti 1945-1989. Bucharest: Simetria, 2011.

35. Peck, Jamie, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner. “Neoliberal Urbanism: Models, Moments, Mutations.” SAIS Review of International Affairs 29, no. 1 (2009): 49–66.

36. Perry, Clarence. The Neighbourhood Unit. London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1998.

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38. Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. New edition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984.

39. Sebregondi, Francesco. “Notes on the Potential of Void: The Case of the Evacuated Heygate Estate.” City 16, no. 3 (June 2012): 337–344.

40. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, 1989.

41. Stratford, Helen. “Enclaves of Expression: Resistance by Young Architects to the Physical and Psychological Control of Expression in Romania during the 1980s.” Journal of Architectural Education 54, no. 4 (May 1, 2001): 218–228.

42. Sxelenyi, Ivan. “Cities under Socialism—and After.” In Cities After Socialism, edited by Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe, and Ivan Szelenyi, 286–317. Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1996. Accessed September 19, 2014. http://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/10.1002/9780470712733.ch10/summary.

43. Tonkiss, Fran. Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form. 1 edition. Polity Press, 2013.

44. various, and Dean Almy. CENTER, Volume 14: On Landscape Urbanism. 1st edition. Austin, TX : Center for American Architecture and Design, University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture: The Center for American Architecture and Design, 2007.

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2014.

47. Zaharide, Ana-Maria. Architecture in the Communist Project. Romania 1944 1989. Bucharest: Simetria, 2011.

48. Zaharide, Ana-Maria. “Dacia 1300 - My Generation.” Issuu. Accessed August 31, 2014. http://issuu.com/eroik/docs/dacia_1300.

WEB ARTICLES: 1. Calugareanu, Ilinca. “‘VHS vs. Communism.’” The New York Times, February 17, 2014. Accessed September 28, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/ opinion/vhs-vs-communism.html.

2. “Chantal Mouffe - Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension.” Scribd.

Accessed September 23, 2014. http://www.scribd.com/doc/236077653/ChantalMouffe-Every-Form-of-Art-Has-a-Political-Dimension.

3. “Lifting the Curtain.” Domusweb.it. Accessed August 31, 2014. http://www. domusweb.it/content/domusweb/en/art/2014/07/14/lifting_the_curtain.html.

4. “Sans Souci Cinema - Project” (n.d.). Accessed September 22, 2014. http:// www.spatialagency.net/database/sans.souci.cinema.

5. Spatial Agency Database. Accessed September 22, 2014. http://www. spatialagency.net/ 6. “The Truth about Property Developers: How They Are Exploiting Planning Authorities and Ruining Our Cities.” The Guardian. Accessed September 28, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/17/truth-property-developersbuilders-exploit-planning-cities.

7. “Urban Report, Volume 1.” Issuu. Accessed August 31, 2014. http://issuu.com/ zeppelin.magazine/docs/ur_volume__1.

FILMS & DOCUMENTARIES: 1. Ceausescu Behind The Myth, 2011. Accessed September 25, 2014. http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=cvlfRKBIGok&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

2. CINEMA MON AMOUR - Trailer, 2014. Accessed September 4, 2014. http:// vimeo.com/89902503.

3. Condamnati La Fericire--Experimentul Comunist in Romania.

Documentary, 2011. Accessed September 26, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6Wpu34ZNcFk&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

4. Höfer, Hanno, Razvan Marculescu, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, and Ioana Uricaru. Tales from the Golden Age. Comedy, History, 2011.

5. Samu Szemerey - Site-Specific Games and Post-Socialist Spaces, 2012.

Accessed September 4, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OWLD1Nwb3lI&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

6. The Lost World of Communism - Part 3 - Romanian Revolution & Life in Communist Romania, 2013. Accessed September 25, 2014. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=HjbYhVDwd6k&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

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