According to Deleuze and Guattari, the frontier is a place of liberty. Should one open any book on town planning history, this is one of the main striking ideas. The governing body of medieval Braşov allowed for illicit transactions to take place outside the town walls, while at the same time, in Bucharest, those who wanted to make illegal business simply had to move beyond the city entrance barriers! There, on the outskirts of the city, the chances to flee from the control of the administration were high, opportunities built up and freedom reigned.
Built in the proximity of neighbourhoods made of collective buildings, the new suburbs of the post-revolutionary age have been perpetuating this archetype. For quite a long time after 1990, the notion of ‘city perimeter’ ceased to exist. In fact, the instauration within society of a new functioning mechanism based on private property, cumulated with the widespread social phenomenon of property retrocessions blew the principles of town planning into pieces. Why? Because town planning came to be associated with a communist-type social organization. The desecration that occurred after 1990 affected many spheres of social life: its management, forecasting and planning attributes, work discipline, its social control functions. Simultaneously, a disinhibitory phenomenon occurred, which engulfed both public and private sphere (family), ultimately invading the intimate sphere, which penetrated and settled, through the media, into the public space.
On the background of this disinhibition process, for a while, the right of doing just about anything with one’s land didn’t assemble in any way with the principles of urban public policies. The mechanism of creating private property was, initially and inevitably, based on the right of inheritance. Meanwhile, after the opening of borders, a second mechanism came into being, related to the creation of private property. This time, it was a Lockean type of mechanism, based on work. With western money made from working abroad, Romanians had villas erected for themselves or purchased cars to mark their emancipation. This is the first thing that all of my acquaintances did; none of them invested in any business, nor did any of them open their own business. Our intention is not to find further explanations, we are suspecting that behind this behaviour rests the need for safety (a house is indeed the expression of this basic need), but also the need for social acknowledgement and personal pride. Consequently, these people purchased some land and started to have their houses built. Without bothering to look left or right, they just did what they thought best. In fact, they still believed in stability and sustainability, in the quality of the ‘place’ – all attributes of modernity. Through these characteristics, suburbs are a continuation of a solid modernity; they are the expression of a primordial shelter.
The ‘1989’ moment was equivalent to a tuning of the theories. The notion of a ‘public good’ produced and managed by the State was thrown to the garbage can. Proclaimed as absolute truths replacing other ‘absolute truths’ (sic!), the new stances maintained that the public good inevitably originates from the individual good, without us bothering about it. Furthermore, no State or any other authority is needed to impose regulations that would go beyond individual initiative. In other words, if we all build wonderful houses, we shall have wonderful neighbourhoods. Since in the old regime people failed to see where their own individual interest lay within the collective good, the fact that now the only focal point was the individual interest did not surprise anybody. Therefore, individual desires immediately found principles on which to build a justification. This is proof of the fact that the truth does not represent a unifying synthesis, but a balance of power in the relations between a majority and a minority.
Indeed, that was the moment when it was clear that the means of accomplishing public good in communist times, through the State’s coercive methods, engendered a selfish logic and selfish behaviours and that the ideology of this 18th century liberalism glued itself perfectly onto this mentality, whose origin lay in a discourse diametrically opposed to liberalism. In fact, people wanted more freedom; they wanted to escape from a system characterized by visual and auditory constraints and interferences, limitations caused by the collective building reproducing the archetype of a prison. They found a good place for this freedom on the outskirts of neighbourhoods, on the border, somewhat against society and the State. In a way, this was a return to the state of nature described by Hobbes, in which cooperation is refused and the presence of a Leviathan declined. Consequently, these suburbs, which came into being as a result of individual actions, are ultimately an expression of selfishness and, definitely, not of individualism. Because what separates a selfish person from an individualistic one is the inability of the former to cooperate so as to bring forth a common good, inability deriving from a cognitive limitation: either the person cannot identify his own interest within this greater common good, or he deems this action inefficient.
The fact that, after so many years, the suburbs still do not benefit from the much-needed infrastructure emphasizes, on the one hand, the absence of local governance, and on the other, these people’s inability to organize themselves and cover the role that should have been played by the authorities. However, a very big step is needed to move from this to what Tocqueville calls “a well-understood interest”. This can be translated by the coming into being of behaviours that require small costs and can be assumed by everyone (for instance, picking up a piece of paper thrown onto the sidewalk and putting it into the garbage can). A collection of such small actions can engender a significant public good – invisible at first; and this is precisely why this step is so hard to take… because it is invisible. Hence the question: how much can one learn, how much can one change and how can one do that? Or, the key ingredient in creating coherent public policies that can be successfully implemented in the urban public sphere resides precisely in people’s ability to understand that sometimes, however good their intentions are, their individual actions build up and can trigger unexpected, perverted, dysfunctional effects. But can one truly learn otherwise than by current practice, other than from his own mistakes? By seeking more freedom, the owners of these houses found themselves caught in a network of conditionings and privations more powerful and constraining than the one governing the neighbourhood they had just left, which is something that they could not have anticipated, due to their insubstantial cultural capital. Ulrich Beck’s quotation related to the solitary captivity of the ego as a mass punishment seems to describe the situation correctly. In other words, one could say that at the bottom of this stands an insufficient collective intelligence coefficient. How did it come to this?
By seeking autonomy and freedom in relation to the State, the inhabitants of the new suburbs chose an opponent that was different than what it used to be. The ethics of the State’s responsibility in relation to a certain space disappeared from the logic of the State policy. The suburb became a crossroads between individual emancipation and political lack of responsibility. The political elite’s escape from responsibility in what space is concerned was joined by a new definition given to the ‘public sphere’, which ceased to be the area in which major social issues are dealt with, and was reduced, as we have previously shown, to a trivial curiosity regarding the private life of public personalities. As it was no longer subject to social pressure and since it escaped civic control, the administrative incompetence became associated with the State-privatization phenomenon.
What is most unsurprising is the fact that all these houses look alike, as they are all characterised by two common features. The first of them is the fence. While marking the protection of the private, intimate space, the fence also hints at the property owner’s fear. These suburbs are spaces dominated by fear, by the desire to keep oneself unseen by the others, to protect oneself from the others, hence the logic: big building – sign of wealth – fear – protection fence. The notion of ‘neighbourly‘, commonplace in old communities, seems to be unknown in these parts. How can one persuade these people to collaborate, if they are dominated by fear and lack of trust? Their problems are similar, but they do not form a whole since, just as Bauman states, the individual is the citizen’s fiercest enemy.
That brings us to the second element that is common to all the villas: their size. What I found most striking when I visited such a neighbourhood was the impressive size of the houses – a symbol of status and power, as previously mentioned. Any house design project is an attempt at recomposing one’s identity, at rewriting the story of one’s inner self. One’s identity is no longer a starting point, as it used to be in the Modern age, but a finish point. At the end of one’s life, when the process of defining one’s identity comes to an end, the house is an argument. For an imposing house expresses an accomplished personality, doesn’t it? And an accomplished personality is indeed the mark of the final victory! Through this character, by making a future project of one’s identity, the suburb translates itself into a quest beyond modernity and into post-modernity.
I assume the owners had made some calculations on how much the building of the new house would cost, but I doubt that they ever pondered on how much their maintenance expenditures would be. I know a business owner who had a twenty-room house erected, thinking that his children and parents will live there with him, thus embracing the model of the extended Romanian family of the past centuries, or that of the present lifestyle of the Rroma. None of his forecasted predictions came true, as neither his parents, nor his children live with him. He spent about 20,000 Euros on maintenance and when he finally started adding up all the expenses, he freaked out. Now he would gladly sell the house, but he cannot find any buyer. This is the biggest paradox of suburbs: the fact that they belong to two worlds, one ruled by safety, by the community, by the belief that the future is nothing but an improved past and the other dominated by freedom, in which one’s identity is a life project, a breakaway from life’s initial framework.
This example indicates a problem. Should one stroll through our villages, one can find sheds that have a room to the right side. The stable is connected to this room by a door, and on the other side of the stable there is the shed proper. The peasant and his family used to live in that small room. By living next to the stable, they were trying to cut down heating expenses and were also able to intervene quickly, if animals were to give birth. Back then, people had to sell milk or animals to get the money to build a house. Therefore, the building of the house was directly connected to the people’s production capacity. Time was not a problem, and the reward came, as Tocqueville described would happen in a desirable modern world, after long and strenuous efforts.
So what is our point? That it would be worthwhile knowing how the owners managed to find the resources enabling them to raise such villas? How they forecasted the future of their business? This is a much broader phenomenon, as it can be also seen at the level of office buildings and especially at that of buildings meant to be public institutions. Or, this is where things start to get plausible. Our first guess is that the person never thought one bit about the maintenance expenditures of a house, since he had lived in a block of flats previously and that his first concern was his need of space, and definitely not maintenance costs. Thus, the villa is nothing more than an apartment taken out of its natural background – the block of flats – enlarged accordingly and having no connection whatsoever to the neighbouring buildings. Furthermore, we can suspect that the respective person had thought his job was perfectly safe, as he did not have the capitalist experience of people losing their jobs, precisely because he had spent his life under the communist regime, in which all jobs were safe. Finally, it is possible for the owner to have been one of those initiated in the new economic game, for whom building a house involved no sacrifice and the inhabitation issue was not connected to the money-producing machinery. Where the idea of sacrifice is missing, the idea of value is missing, as well, and, therefore, the building and maintenance costs cannot possibly have been important. Accidentally or not, what some of our capitalist fellow countrymen did was to reproduce the Phanariot model of consumption irrespective of costs. They did that because money-awareness had not been inculcated in their previous education – proof of the flawed, imperfect modernity in which they were raised. In both cases, the sense of precaution related to life’s uncertainties is lacking. In other words, the notion of time was neglected and time was actually turned into a variable of desire. Basically, people were no longer willing to postpone receiving their reward.
Should one look at other countries – some of which more prosperous than ours – one can see the same phenomenon, which in Romania can be explained by historical factors, taking place over there, as well, even though these societies have not undergone the same social-political experiences as ours. One might then ask if there cannot be yet another explanation, one related to a strong economic mechanism, which engulfed the present-day world and exacerbated the desire, while group-related references dimmed away. Let us explain. Fifty years ago, when people built houses, their reference systems were usually related to the groups they belonged to. The democratisation of desire, a phenomenon whose beginnings can be traced to the 1990s, leads to an unexpected increase in people’s aspirations – not according to their real possibilities, but based on their wish to live a life that was not theirs, the life not of those who were like them, but of those who were different. Romanian women who worked as social assistants for wealthy families in Italy wanted to have houses like those of their Italian employers. Thus, there occurred a transfer of lifestyles into other spaces, transfer that has at the bottom the notion of ‘desire’ (which eludes the notion of a lifestyle typical for a social class) and which is also a temporal amalgam. To live like a football player, like a model or like a pop singer became a commonplace dream, likely to come to life thanks to the present-day banking system. Life, understood as an identity-granting process, was accomplished through and was the outcome of a certain type of political economy.
However, this reality is now history and the scapegoat carrying the blame is the present-day crisis. All of a sudden, people realized they do not have enough money either to finalize the building of their house, or for the infrastructure. Hence, they requested the support of the local administrations for space planning. Promptly, the administrations discovered that the respective buildings had been erected without an authorization. They did so not out of legal prudishness, but because of the lack of available resources, the idea being to hush dissatisfied voices. Politicians are now facing an ‘unnatural’ situation, as they are held responsible for the deficient management, so they put on an irritated face when approaching their electorate. The ‘blame’ is now searched for at the level of the individual or the governing body, supposedly having nothing to do with management. In short, the crisis revealed a paradox: although we have witnessed the political actors’ lack of responsibility related to the social dimension of a given space, the inactivity proved to be too costly and now, when the political body is being asked to re-assume its integrating function, we find out that the resources needed are lacking.
It is possible that this phenomenon of the political bodies’ refusal to assume responsibility be connected not only to the privatization of the State by various interest groups, but also to the shift in the power model, from one power structure focusing on dominating a space, to one relying on dominating through time. Therefore, we might witness a control transfer from classical coercive means making use of physical force or money to more subtle control means, such as values. The consequence? Those operating with values, namely the media, became increasingly powerful in the public sphere. This change in the domination type by controlling time is related to the economic logic of capitalism, of the added value law, as it was defined by Marx in Capital, as being related to the decrease in the work time socially necessary to produce a good. The place of a ‘social integrator’ once held by the political was now taken by cultural integrators, such as the media, for reasons pertaining to a control logic derived from that of the market and audience. These new integrators are legitimised by clear-cut financial measurements, by their audience and advertising. We are thus witnessing a re-positioning of power relations between those who control the space, on the basis of financial means, and those who control time and rely on signs and values. The crisis repositioned the relationship between the public, private and intimate sphere and pushed social issues into the public sphere, while the press revealed the inadequacy of the political system facing a new reality. The issues that used to be solved within specialised institutions, following long public negotiations, are now dealt with late at night, on television. Moreover, it seems that nowadays, no one is willing to live in a world like the one described by Ulrich Beck, in which life’s major problems are given a biographical solution and in which risks and threats are assumed by the individual. How far are we going to push this refusal? Shall we answer to extremism through extremism, thus heading towards a world in which any private matter will get the scope of a public affair, requesting the government’s intervention? Are we going to sacrifice our freedom now for a bit of extra security and comfort?
In an analysis of the 1789 French Revolution, Tocqueville remarked the presence of a syndrome: that of finding a radical, disproportionate solution to a small problem, as, said the thinker, when a wild rabbit ran from one property to another, those involved gathered together to discuss the need to reform the State. Are we re-living that story now? Will time bring back from the dead the social class notion described by Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in which he stated that the proletariat cannot survive in times of crisis? Is it now obsolete to define one’s belonging to a certain social class through a way of life determined, among others, by owning a real estate property? Are we going to live to see villas getting sold so as the owners can survive? Or are we going for a synthetic solution, of the type ‘neither, nor’, in which one is neither allowed to live, nor to die? This is in line with a Foucauldian interpretation describing the sovereign (medieval) type of power, as having life and death power over his subjects, but letting them live, whereas in the disciplinary (modern) type of power, the sovereign has no right over his subjects’ life, but lets them die. In this case, the suburbs would be an illustration of this ‘neither, nor’ approach, situated halfway between life and death, between the long-gone modernity and dying post-modernity, between security and freedom. In the worst case, they would be more than the expression of a simple need, and in the best of cases, something a bit more than the long-wished for desire.
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