Строежът на социалистическия град: егалитаризъм или монументализъм?
Building the Socialist City: Egalitarianism versus Monumentalism?

Summary/Abstract: Addressing the question of what was essentially socialist about the socialist city, this paper looks for its specifi city beyond the sheer urbanist artifact – the urban layout and the architectural form – into the political economy that enacted its construction. Despite focusing on the city center of Sofi a and particularly on its political core designed in the early 1950s, the analysis highlights processes of space production transcending the case study. On the one hand, it exemplifi es the interactions between the various institutions in the expanded and party-dominated bureaucracy: competition over resources and administrative privileges; clashes between technocratic and party rationales; forced and failed cooperation among state agencies; discrepancies between chains of command and coordination of expertise. On the other hand, it elucidates the political compromise with the professed egalitarian model of development and the party’s commitment to improving living conditions for society at large resulting from the exorbitant investment into the monumental embellishment of the city center as a power seat. Finally, the paper emphasizes that, far from being monolithic and straightforward, the implemented model of the socialist city was shaped as much by deliberate policy-making as it was infl uenced by systemic defi ciencies and structural impediments in the institutional landscape of state socialism.

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