On the Socialist Balcony

While mainstream research on socialism privileged
suprastructural approaches, issues of everyday life
processes remained under-researched. By placing
balconies at the critical juncture of the socialist
state and its citizens, that is, of global phenomena
and micro processes, this book seeks to recapture a
sense of everyday socialism and of various socialist
common places, in an effort to bring forth people and
their diverse surviving strategies. The various
architectural discourses and ideologies attached to
balconies are traced historically from the bourgeois
inception, through Lenin s revolutionary conceptions,
Stalin s distortions and to Ceausescu s regime. The
ethnographic part contrasts and depicts the
intersection and collision of state s official
disposition of balconies with people s agency and
space practices, as it unfolds in a Romanian
neighborhood since the 1980s.

Autorentext

Born in June 1983 in Romania. Between 2004 and 2006 he worked as
election observer for various international organizations in
countries such as Albania, Egypt and Ukraine. Currently he is a
PhD in the Department of Sociology and Social
Anthropology at Central European University, Budapest.

Klappentext

While mainstream research on socialism privileged
suprastructural approaches, issues of everyday life
processes remained under-researched. By placing
balconies at the critical juncture of the socialist
state and its citizens, that is, of global phenomena
and micro processes, this book seeks to recapture a
sense of everyday socialism and of various socialist
common places, in an effort to bring forth people and
their diverse surviving strategies. The various
architectural discourses and ideologies attached to
balconies are traced historically from the bourgeois
inception, through Lenin's revolutionary conceptions,
Stalin's distortions and to Ceausescu's regime. The
ethnographic part contrasts and depicts the
intersection and collision of state's official
disposition of balconies with people's agency and
space practices, as it unfolds in a Romanian
neighborhood since the 1980s.