Abstract

The communist regime was totalitarian also through its so-called revolutionary project of transformation and complete ownership of space. Especially of the urban space, through a gigantic effort of urban development and ‘modernization’ of a country like Romania whose population, economy and lifestyle were to a great extent rural. This modernization that wanted to be original was as equivocal as incomplete. The metaphysical and revolutionary project of communist modernization of urban spaces failed there where the capitalist modernity scored one of its most incontestable victories: in the creation of a public space and in the setting up of a clear theoretical and practical distinction between public and private. I will argue that the communist regime’s scorn both for the public space representing the citizens’ spontaneous creation and practice and for the invention of private spaces as experimental zones of new forms of subjectivity left traces in the social tissue: if the architecture did not know, did not want, or simply could not materialize the demand for public spaces, the people, in their turn, did not know, could not and above all did not want to learn the practices of living together in a city or, in other words, those of urban civility. Among other consequences, this makes the distinction public/private a tool very little useful in helping us understand the communist space, and even less useful in noticing the essence of post-communist transformations, especially since the present dynamics of urban spaces remains less and less loyal to the conceptual tradition of modernity