THE GARDEN CITY AND THE SOCIALIST VICTORY CITY: FROM COLONIAL TO DICTATORIAL CITY SCHEMES
THE GARDEN CITY AND THE SOCIALIST VICTORY CITY: FROM COLONIAL TO DICTATORIAL CITY SCHEMES

Summary/Abstract: The comparison of modernization schemes in twentieth century urbanism allowsbringing together the West and the Rest, since the garden city project, first encountered inGeorge Bernard Shaw’s play John Bull’s Other Island (1904) is replicated in an accountpublished in 2014 about the Fascist transformation of Sofia into a garden city according to amaster plan of German inspiration and in keeping with the totalitarian city ideology in theearly 1930s . This case is discussed in the CEU book by Jan C. Behrends and Martin Kolrausch(eds.) Races to Modernity: Metropolitan Aspirations in Eastern Europe. 1890-1940, chapter8 and it calls to mind Nicolae Ceauşescu’s East European Socialist Victory urbanizationproject as another version of totalitarian architecture and ideology that declared city-razingas the first stage in achieving a utopian kind of victory and modernization. Romania’stotalitarian predicament is typified and followed in the description of the capital city razedand redesigned that a novel published in Britain in 2011 presents: Patrick McGuinness, TheLast Hundred Days, translated into Romanian after being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prizein 2012, possibly because it reads in many respects like a spy novel, presenting the face andreverse of communism on the eve of its fall. The passage from colonial to dictatorial cityschemes is effected by a comparison between, on the one hand, some excerpts from the fictionalmemoir about Bucharest, at the same time a roman à clé, and, on the other hand, the FirstWorld War roman à clé whose action begins in Letchworth Garden City, fictionally presentedas Biggleswick. John Buchan’s spy novel Mr Standfast (1919) poses as a mere spy novel, whilecontaining, as revealed by Pamela Shields’s bestseller Hereford Secrets and Spies (2009), agreat number of real/historical clues which enable the comparison proposed.

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