During the last ten years
Chisinau strongly restated his function of administrative, political, economic
and cultural centre of Moldova. After the so called „urbanization in a low key
profile” [1], promoted by Soviet party and the consequent flows of workers
moving to the city, the nineties were marked by a moderately negative
demographic trend. The lowest population growth rate in the last twenty years
was observed in 2006, but seven years later the population of the Chisinau’s
municipality almost amounts to the one registered in the 1991 [2].
The current economic
circumstance shows a country in a good grow of GDE in years 2010 and 2011 and
polarized along the urban/rural cleavage, while the capital reflects a deep
socio-economic inequality in steady progress [3]. This country, which has been
identified for a long time as the poorest of Europe, struggles with its
unstable economic balance counting on remittances - that still play a more
relevant role in relation to the whole GDE production - and on the wave of FDI
which reached Moldova in the last years. FDI inflows, in fact, steadily
increased starting from 2004. According to the National Bank of Moldova (NBM),
they amounted to a record high of US$ 873.38 million in 20084 5. EU investments
currently represent the 80% of FDT, with USA and Russia main investors outside
the European Union area.
Among urban studies in
the post-socialist world, has been paid very little attention to Chisinau, even
if this city has some distinctive traits which lead urban changes toward
unexpected directions. The double sway by east & west gives to this city an
own geopolitical role: for instance, the subaltern economic situation with
Russia balances Moldova’s aspirations to strengthen relationships inside the EU
sphere of influence. Moreover, the capital represents a migratory hub for the
Moldovans’ diaspora, and, for this reason, it shows a peculiar country-city
cleavage.
On the other hand, the
post-communist financial colonization of the city entails strong
transformations of urban landscape in the downtown as well as in the suburbs.
For what concerns the role of FDI. Ian Hamilton reminds us that foreign
investors ha\e a central role in shaping the new post-socialist city:
„The main impact of FDI,
however, has been the growth, modernization, and diversification of consumer
and producer services. These are transforming the city centres and, to a lesser
(yet increasing) extent, the socialist residential neighborhoods and urban
fringes.” [6]
In this sense, one could
say that Chisinau is on the same path of the others eastern European capitals.
Anyway, these changes have to be read as transformations and not as simply
predictable transitions, as these shifts involve „regressive and progressive
dynamics simultaneously” [7].
The new offices, banks,
shops, malls, real estate -and hotels risen from the second half of the past
decade draw a new, globalized contour of the city. Therefore questions about
identity, generally referred to the national ground, come to involve the
context of the capital as well: latest scandals on destruction 1 of the
architectural heritage of Chisinau, as well the ones about irregular
construction sites on public and green areas, demand some reflections about the
so called „transition” to the current democratic, post-communist era.
It would be naive to
construe the protests organized by civil society and the new forums set up bv
experts and scholars as attempts to reject these forms of modern change: the
matter is rather to what extent the ongoing post-1991 „stratification” represents
a serious threat for the old ones. This layer built up during the recent
commercial and residential development is the outcome of liberal measures,
growing (both foreign and local) means of investment and – for what concerns
the conflict cases – a weak and crooked administrative structure, as on the
municipality ground as on the national one.
While criticizes the „transition”
paradigm, Kathrine Verdery describes perfectly this tangled context of
interaction between economic, cultural, political and social aspects.
„ We cannot separate the
economic from the politic and the cultural. In the imagination of policymakers,
the economic is a series of purely economic interventions like privatization,
price liberalization [...] When these interventions meet everyday life,
however, the resistance they encounter is not just economic but cultural and
political as well. The economy is always thoroughly embedded in a variety of
non-economic practices.” [8]
In order to grasp new
post-soviet contours of the city, this paper tries to highlight some features
of the „Western oriented” and the „Country oriented” Chisinau [9]. In fact, the
aspirations toward European capital standards are often intertwined with
recurring references to the Moldovan popular culture: such a conflation is
visible among political discourses and representations interested in
strengthening national belonging, as well as in several advertising strategies
and in municipal policies.
Seeking for current
post-soviet transformations we will follow three directions: the substitution
of the old XIX and early XX century city with the brand new one in the
downtown, the new housing commodification process settled in the suburbs and in
the green areas and the more general process of negotiation of the urban public
space.
The
on-going substitution in the downtown
This new era shaping the
recent history of Chisinau seems to develop not merely standing alongside the
past ones, but replacing them with its new symbols and its new buildings. Such
a phenomenon has been often tackled by referring to a local identity in danger,
which is important to safeguard especially when the „renovation” of the city
means the elimination of local peculiarities in favour of global style
standards.
This is the case of the Sbarro franchise attempt to build a
pizza restaurant in Europe square, just on the main entrance of Stefan cel Mare
Park. This project represented a threat to a meaningful place for the
population, since just there started the civil rights movement for liberation
from Soviet domination at the end of the 1980’s. Others forms of „ substitution”
go from shady privatizations on architectural heritage, which lead those assets
to a ruined or abandoned state, to straight demolition of historical buildings.
Conacul Rișcanu-Derojinschi, sold to a private in 2009, was one of the most
important urban villas of Chisinau, owned in the past times by a boyar family.
It’s still in wrecked
conditions and things will hardly change in the next future, as the current
owner is waiting to get permissions to destroy it, once it will be judged no
more possible to restore.
What happened in the case
of the old administrative building on Pircalab no. 71, which was tore down in
order to build a brand new hotel in the heart of the downtown, is a perfect
example describing this process: the land is worth more than the building which
is over it, even if the last one is an historical monument of national
significance.
From new hotels to
offices, shops and banks, a common specific idea of “Europe” is promoted: it
becomes a synonym of “business”, “richness”, “improvement” and generally of
economic progress. Unfortunately the hostile relationship it maintains with the
medieval and tsarist city doesn’t even take account of the historical heritage
as a factor of development, but only as a bother over a more precious lot of
land.
In his book Cartea neagră
a patrimoniului cultural al municipiului Chisinau,
Ion Ștefăniță expounds the amount of this process: 77 buildings of cultural
interest have been demolished in the period 1993-2010, 33 of these in the last
four years. On 155 assets have been done illegal modifies while 17 are now in a
state of progressive ruin [10]. These data show that massive replacement
processes increased in the last years: the blame of such a worrisome situation
lies in the absence or the collusion of the local authorities, independently
from party labels.
It can be said that Soviet
communists regime was an example, on the contrary, of state “over presence”:
the transformations produced by soviet rulers followed a precise urban
development planning which was inspired to a modernist conception of the city
fabric: in the name of a city exclusively devoted to the means of transport,
the old medieval grid of streets was partially erased by the construction of
the current Avenue Renaşterii. At the same time, ideological reasons played a
significant role in the destruction of several churches.
Anyway, it would be
simplistic to consider these macro-level changes as the only ones influencing
the current renovation Chişinău. For instance, the grassroots organizations
„Let’s rebuild Chişinău” and „Arcul de Triunf” (Triumphal Arch), formed mostly
by Russian-speaker citizens, started in February 2013 a project of
requalification of the Rotonda, in Valea Morilor park.
Firstly with some „subbotnik”
and cleaning up interventions, then by means of a whitewash of the walls and
the whole roundabout structure and finally through a gathering of funds to buy
new benches, the Rotunda has been given back to the people by two concerts in
August and October. According to Dmitrii Kavruk, vice-president of the
association, it was important to renovate this place after twenty years of
abandon and ruin, not only to revitalize an historical part of the city, but
also to show that civic participation is still alive in Chisinau.
In the past times, during
the ’70 and the ’80 of 20tr c., it has been a meeting point for youngsters but
also a dance floor with live music endowed of a wonderful view on the lake. It
is not so hard to imagine how this location could represent a bonne a penser
past: sometimes memories of childhood and adolescence melt with a sense of
nostalgia for the life under communism. Despite this, the ones directly
involved in the Rotunda case are mainly students and workers under 35, who
lived that place only by the tales of the older generations. Through their
commitment they represent an example of a bottom-up stimulated urban change,
enlivened by narratives and memories from one side and by a strong sense of
responsible citizenship from the other.
Rising
gated communities in a post-soviet capital
The suburbanization
process and the spatial withdrawal from the public dimension are widely
considered classical features of the post-modernist city. A few years after the
demise of the socialist regimes, this kind of urban development started to
affect several Eurasian cities. Chisinau, of course, makes no exception (but
it’s considerable late, if compared to other post-communist capitals). This
section will focus on those symbols and meanings entailed by some new housing
forms recently raised in Chisinau which reflects both the abovementioned post-modernist
tendencies.
In her study on
post-socialist era culture of „private” in Sofia, Sonia Hirt defines the
expression „spatial secession” and singles out six different forms of this
process:
All cities have lines of
disjuncture; only the types and causes of disjuncture vary. Like other,
socialist cities had their own partitions - areas of relative wealth and
relative poverty, which were separated by [...] borders (the gated and guarded
government compounds being the most notorious example of rigid borders). The
socialist partition was, thought, arguably fewer. Post-socialist cities have
different and starker partition than their predecessors: what are they? [...] I
will stick to a particular form of partitioning that I term spatial secession.
Spatial secession is the
wilful act of disjoining, disassociating, or carving space for oneself from the
urban commons.
• Spatial seizure: This
is the act of appropriating public space for private uses as a result of
post-socialist re-commoditization of space. It can entail activities such as
building permanent structures in formerly public spaces (green fields, parks,
forests, gardens, playgrounds).
• Spatial seclusion: Is
the act of separating from the city through distance. The classic example is
urban decentralization or suburbanization. The process has a rich history in
the Western world [...] but seems to have found exceptionally fertile ground in
contemporary Eastern Europe.
• Spatial exclusion:
Spatial seclusion and exclusion are deeply intertwined. Residential suburbs,
which are beyond the reach of large segments of the population [...] are spaces
of both seclusion and exclusion [...] Exclusion can also be enforced in
non-residential spaces, both urban and suburban. For example, office complexes,
private clubs, entertainment facilities and malls.
• Spatial enclosure: This
is perhaps the most brutal way of seceding - by erecting formidable physical
barriers and reinforcing them with multiple methods of restricting outsiders’
access [...] The paradigmatic examples of enclosure are gated community.
• Statutory secession:
This is the widespread process of violating public planning and building
statutes following from the post-1989 „legitimacy crisis” of urban planning and
regulation. It is part of the paradigmatic shift toward informality in eastern
European city-building.
• Stylistic secession:
[...] Even though there is of course plenty of good architecture throughout
Eastern Europe today, to say that post-socialist aesthetics has moved toward
the bizarre [...] is not an overstatement. [...] Aesthetic judgment aside,
however, the goal of much new architecture seems to be precisely disjuncture,
secession and partition, temporal (from the socialist-era discipline) and
spatial (from the public street). [11]
The concept of „spatial
enclosure” is the one used for who chooses to live in a gated community.
According to the Collins dictionary the gated community is „an area of houses
and sometimes shops that is surrounded by a wall or fence and has an entrance
that is guarded.” [12] This gated residential complex is then formed by several
semi-detached houses or by one or more apartment complex, it usually
comprehends a small grid of streets and it is supplied by various shared
amenities like security service, stores, gyms and spa, pools, banks,
playgrounds, kindergartens, cafés.
Gated communities firstly
arose in the sixties in the USA, in order to fulfil the requirements of the
upper-middle class retired people, but at a later stage they widened their
market to families with children [13], reaching the number of two millions and
a half of households (living only in American gated communities at the end of
the past century) [14].
Yet, in a rather
surprising way, the gated community pattern is not an out-and-out novelty in the
Chisinau urban history. During the soviet period, for example, the akademgorod
arisen especially in the outskirts of the main cities worked in a similar way
to GC. In fact, these akademgorod were little neighbourhoods formed by
apartment houses, whose borders were gated by walls and fences, and whose flats
were destined to the most important personalities of the academia. According to
a similar logic, in Chisinau some gated blocks of buildings on 31 August 1989
Street are dwelled still now by well-known figures of the current political
overview: the access to these places is obviously restricted and controlled by
police all day long.
Defined as one of the
modern „architecture of fear” [15], the gated community pattern acquires
different meanings and features according to the place in which it arises.
Therefore, in the post-communist context this process have been interpreted as
a perfect example of post-modern spatial and civic disjuncture [16], producing
social exclusion through new enclaves [17] and as a cause of polarization and
conflict, in which the state withdrawal and the dismantling of previous
planning control played an important role in the emergence of gated communities
[18].
This type of residential
solution is still experiencing an embryonic phase here in Chisinau, as there
are only few complexes already open to the customers, while other three are on
construction.
Trying to understand the
sense of such western oriented urban transformations we need to focus on this
drift toward an American residential solution with European stylistic choices.
During my stay in
install in the audience a
top-class atmosphere. Indeed the architecture reminds the round shape of the
roman monument, and even the halls and the interior of the corporation office
constantly refer to the ancient Rome style.
This second case could be
considered as both oriented toward western style architecture and atmospheres
and oriented from western entrepreneurs and capitals, as the investment group
is the American holding ENCH. What deserves to be stressed here is rather the
fascination toward this western pastiche: Moldovan architects and managers and
American entrepreneurs who try to convey (to Chisinau upper-middle class
inhabitants, could they be locals or foreigners) Roman splendour by means of a
shiny, colourful, glass-covered palace
Now it becomes clearer
the use of the “western oriented” label to highlight both the aptitude to use
western Europe aesthetic codes in an American housing type and the presence of
foreign entrepreneurs in the corporations’ investments. This kind of rhetoric
is quite common in other post-soviet areas, as Zotova illustrates for what
concerns the Russian case, where these housing complexes quickly spread in the
Moscow and St. Petersburg areas:
„Gated communities in
Russia play a symbolic role. They extend the Western lifestyle – a high
standard of living. This explains the widespread use of Western names in
Russian closed communities: „Chamonix,” „Italian quarter,” „ Cote d’azur,” „Sherwood,”
„Benelux,” „Barcelona,” “Hyde Park,” etc. Their residents want to be isolated
from the rest of the background; they aspire not to be social but to property
homogeneity.” [19]
Unfortunately, in both
the cases I expounded the hardest task turned out to be interviewing the
(actually still few) inhabitants, as the security service pledges protection
from bothers like a chat with a nosey student of anthropology. Another
interesting instance - mainly for its location - which is worth to mention is „Colina
City”, a gated townhouse complex located in the old downtown: it is still on
construction, but its 27 houses are already surrounded by the green hills of
Colina Pushkin Street. As already pointed out, green area location represents
the core of the spatial secession process: all the gated communities in
Chisinau, in fact, offer a short distance nature, whether outside the city,
along a park or even in the old medieval downtown.
Anyway, this process
can’t be explained simply resorting to the post-modernist logic, which refers to
this new rising middle class in search for security and privacy. Rather it
seems that the „gold ghetto” logic contained in advertising tends to arouse a
sort of mystic wish to live in a perfect harmony with nature and in the
fairy-tale dream [20] to spend one’s life a perfect, homogenous, delimited area
could be read as a perfect modernist imperative: the border between the escape
from the city and the occidentals fascination (as the winks to Roman
aristocrats or Austrian villas testify) produced by the community housing
rhetoric is much more blurred than the post-modern discourse noticed.
The
negotiation of the urban public space
As discussed in the
previous sections, the architectural and symbolic transformation on-going in
the downtown and the suburban residential turn share some western oriented
features, being both part of the „Europe standard capital” mantra declaimed in
several political discourse. On the other side Chisinau has to deal with
growing FDI flows, international and internal migration and with the
EU/NATO-Russia geopolitical polarization. What makes Chisinau such an
interesting case is maybe how these questions come alive, taking the
appearances of new shiny hotels in the city centre as well as of a popular
culture celebration in the main square in occasion of the Independence Day.
Therefore, the last part
of this article enquires how rural-urban and centre-suburbs borders actually
blur in the Moldovan capital. Using the term „negotiation” I firstly mean
different ways, from simple use to out-and-out exploitation, of thinking and
using public space. As I will show soon, sometimes these spaces are used – and
then perceived – in conflict with the established common urban rules. The
voices “spatial seizure” and “statutory secession” [21], which appear in the
list cited from Hirt [22] a few pages above, encompass all those post-communist
era (often illegally) built extensions like loggias, mansards and balconies;
unauthorized kiosks and little shops; parking replacing sidewalks and
backyards. Anyway, the aim of this article is not to delve further into this
already profusely discussed topic, but rather to revalue this negotiation
including different forms of „agency” [23] as forces able to mould the city
fabric.
I started working on this
theme one afternoon in July, a few days after my ethnographic fieldwork
started, while I was on my way back home from the marketplace. On Alexandra cel
bun Street, in the downtown, I saw some youngsters whistling and singing (a cbiui),
with aloud Moldovan popular music and preparing a sort of a barbecue (gratar)
on the sidewalk, few meters away from the street and not so far away from the
backyard of two Stalin era housings. I already knew about the rooted gratar
culture, but what struck me was the place in which they were preparing it. Of
course barbecues in Chisinau usually take place in the many parks of the city
and, after then, only other few times it happened to see people having a gratar
on the sidewalk [24]. This links us to two questions: one is methodological,
the other reflects a peculiar relationship between citizens, their cultural
practices, their neighbours and the urban public space. Let’s begin from the
former.
Insofar underrated in the
social sciences, the urban ethnography tradition started by Walter Benjamin
and, some years later, by Guy Debord taught us to explore the city at a slow
pace. The perfect “city animal” of the last century, the flaneur [25], was the first consumer (exclusively by foot) of
the modern urban landscape and inspired situationist détournment concept. Later contributions by Ulf Hannerz and Robert
Merton shared common view of a city which becomes the place of epiphanies,
offering a thousand possibilities. Cities are places where one can find that
which he is not looking for [26].
In the same way, epiphany
can’t be assessed as a proper research method because it simply happens without
any chance to resort to it: in fact, an epiphany is by definition unexpected.
It can’t claim to have scientific value, but it can suggest to the researcher
to deepen some aspects otherwise neglected.
Even if modern urban
ethnography must not be necessarily tied to the “stroll” dimension, moving on
foot through the urban grid allows chancing upon episodes like the gratar one I
described before. The particular epiphany of the gratar I witnessed represents
the connection between the methodological digression and the current Chişinău
reconfigured public space.
What drives then some
people to have a barbecue on a sidewalk (or in the backyard), just a few
hundred meters away from the main boulevard of the capital ? Which kind of
ideas on public and urban space does this fact conveys? Of course the most
interesting aspect concerns the place in which this ritual happened - more than
the gratar itself – because it shows a different relationship with the city
environment. The urbanization of people coming from rural areas of Moldova
entails a process of re-negotiation of the urban landscape: urbanization leads
to city ruralisation as well, in a certain way. Moreover, this migration is
historically intertwined with the ethnic cleavage:
To be urban was the
practical equivalent of being Russian. It’s only in the soviet period that
native Moldavians have been reclaiming the urban areas by their massive influx
into old towns, and by putting new towns on the map through reclassification.
Yet the question remains: Are Moldavians reclaiming the urban areas in
linguistic and cultural terms as well, or is urbanization causing them to
assimilate to Russian language and culture [...]? [27]
Twenty-five years later,
a new strong actor (the West) burst into the scene, modifying the economic and
political balances, heavily transforming the urban environment and re-shaping
socio-cultural dynamics by means of new globalized consumerist logic. Getting
back to the public space negotiation process, here I try to list some
particular nature-city connections I observed in Chişinău according to
different uses and concepts of the urban fabric:
1.
Gratar in the backyards between the
compounds or on the sidewalks.
2.
Small pastures in La Izvor park.
3.
Baths in Valea Morilor and La Izvor parks.
4.
Chestnut gathering among green areas in Albişoara
Street.
5.
Lunch break made by some workers on the
lawn of the Ministry of Agriculture, Avenue Ştefan Cel Mare şi Sfînt.
Some of these cases are
explained by their „liminal” position between the urban and the suburban area,
like for the pastures in the public park “La Izvor”. Sometimes the elderly with
a little yard out of the city take their courtyard animals in the park and make
a grazing land out of it, but none “cultural” tension could be advised here:
it’s just another case of private use of a public space due to practical
reasons. For what concerns, instead, the lunch break case or the gratar
performed in the city centre it is possible to discern a particular
city-inhabitant relationship mediated by nature, or, in other words, a way to
enjoy open-air rituals notwithstanding the city structure. Walking on Serghei
Lazo Street, at the intersection with Avenue Ştefan Cel Mare, sometimes a group
of workers used to spend their lunch break near their workplace, on the lawn of
the Ministry of Agriculture, just eating, drinking and playing cards. Even if
few meters away they could have found repair from the sunny day in a bar or in
the little square on the main street, they preferred the shadow of the threes.
On one hand, it seems that there is no difference between a park and a trimmed
lawn of a national institution, and this case could be interpreted as a lack of
urban culture and sense of citizenship; otherwise, it conveys the meaning of
taking a break on a meadow of the ministry palace right in the city centre: the
urban imperative to have a lunch only in some places (indoor in bars or restaurants,
outdoor in big parks) has been ignored.
It comes now useful to
resort to Clifford Geertz description of the failed religious ritual contained
in Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example: „[... an
incongruity between the cultural framework of meaning and the patterning of
social interaction, an incongruity due to the persistence in an urban
environment of a religious symbol system adjusted to peasant social structure.”
[28] Of course our cases refer to a food culture ritual and not to a religious
one, but the “incongruity” expression is useful to grasp what happens between
the specific cultural framework and its location in the new urban environment.
When is not possible to have a barbecue or a lunch break in a park, these are
prepared by the way in somewhere else place: for this reason rural, urban and
suburban categories acquire rather fuzzy contours. If barbecue or lunch breaks
couldn’t be considered particular expressions of rural areas of Moldova, „Focurelul”
is a tradition belonging to the Moldovan immaterial heritage and transposed to
Chişinău more than a decade ago.
This „custom of ancient
origins that marks the beginning of Lent” [29] has been celebrated in Rișcani
and attracted people especially from the southern part of the Republic. Corina
Rezneac, ethnographer at the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural
Sciences, describes with precision how it occurs: The bearers of this custom
that was marked some time ago in many villages, lit a big fire, as it says the
celebration - a fire at the intersection of the roads, because „there is the
place where they meet the bad spirits, which are burned.” [...] They [the
bearers] brought with them fire wood, this is the duty of old men, but also
traditional food, that represent more often the specialty of each house, and
good wine. [...] how people greet each other when they get together - they kiss
three times and ask forgiveness for the bad things they have done. After the
fire was lit up and the folk music band came (the band is obligatory) people
jump over the fire usually, they say witty couplets, wish to the present be
healthy, and sing, and dance until the dawn. An important part of the
celebration is the table on which the participant put the food brought for this
day and they eat together. [...] In the end each family takes fire home and
people give something for the remembering of the death. [30]
Organized by both Chișinăuieni
and bearers of the southern Moldova, „Focurelul” is the right example to speak
of the country oriented city, together with country oriented advertising21 and
the feasts cantered on popular culture like the Independence Day and the
birthday of the city.
The risk of an „incongruity”
revealed by Geertz - as long as we deal with a rural custom, the „Focurel”,
transferred in the social interaction context of the city – is related to the
three parts play (Moldovan, Russian, European) which represents these cultural
expressions as countryside negligible details. The interaction between European
standard capital political discourses, the Russian-speaking rooted urban
community and the growing Moldovan presence coming from rural areas makes the
current context of Chisinau a vivid model of post-soviet globalization process.
Coming to the conclusion
of this article, it seems reasonable to elucidate some key features regarding
the western oriented secession and its related process of space negotiation.
First of all, if the „spatial
enclosure” process generally looks for the nature out of the city, gating the
space around it, the public space negotiation frame strives to find it inside
the urban environment, even overcoming the barriers of which the city is
endowed (like the gratar and lunch break cases have shown). The spatial drift
represented by the spread of gated community residential choice leads to a
withdrawal on different grounds. The current residential solutions inspired by
the „privatist” [32] culture erects walls and gates producing a golden ghetto
of fancy town-houses and condominiums. At the base of this housing development
lies a mixture of post-socialist disillusionment, a hypochondriac rejection of
the urban chaos and the pull factor of new, globalized yearnings of
consumption. Insofar they are so much different, this pattern and the
negotiation [33] framework share a problematic relationship with the city, but
find two different answer to solve it: while the former lives in the city
pretending to live in another one (even another country, fascinated by foreign
and „occidentals” lures), the latter lives through urban boundaries and
disjuncture as il these simply do not exist, overcoming then city-life
imperatives by an unusual rapport with the urban fabric.
REference
1 Irina Livezeanu,
„Urbanization in a low key and linguistic change in Soviet Moldova”, Soviet
Studies 33 (4), 1981, 573-592.
2 http://statbank.statistica.md/pxweb/Dialog/Saveshow.asp
3 Alessio Piras, La Moldova postsovietica, Roma: Aracne, 2012.
4http://www.state.gOv/e/eb/rls/othr/ics/2013/204695.htm
6 F. E. Ian Hamilton,
Kaliopa Dimitrovska Andrews and Natasha Pichler-Milanovič, edited by,
Transformations of cities in central and eastern Europe, United Nations
Universal Press, 2005: 133.
7 Micheal Burawoy and
Katherine Verdery, edited by, Uncertain
Transitions: Ethnographies of Changes in the Postsocialist World, Lanham,
Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999: 15.
8 Ibidem, 14.
9 In these two
expressions we use on purpose the participle “oriented” to convey two different
senses: oriented „by” and oriented “toward”. Of course these two senses could
coexist, as we’re going to see after.
10 Ion Ștefăniță, Cartea neagră a
patrimoniului cultural al municipiului Chișinău, Chișinău: Ministerul
Culturii al Republicii Moldova, 2010
11 Sonia Hirt, Iron
Curtains. Gates, Suburbs and Privatization in the Post-socialist City,
Chicester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2012: 49-51.
12 Collins English
Dictionary, headword: Gated community, Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2011.
13 Setha Low, „The Edge
and the Center: Gated Community and the Discourse of the Urban Fear”, American
Anthropologist 103 (1), 2001:45-58.
14 Blakely/Snyder 1998,
cit. in Leone 2011: 1.
15 Nan Ellin,
Architecture of fear, New York: Princeton architectural press, 1997.
16 Hirt, Iron Curtains.
17 Choon-Piew Pow,
„Securing the ‘Civilised’ Enclaves: Gated Community and the Moral Geographies
of Exclusion in (Post-)socialist Shanghai”, Urban Studies 44 (8), 2007: 15-39.
18 Zoltan Kovacs and
Gabor Hegedus, „Gated Community as new forms of segregation in post-socialist
Budapest”, Cities, forthcoming.
19 Maria Zotova,
„Emergence of GATED COMMUNITY in Russia: causes and consequences”, L’Espace
Politique, 2012-2, accessed on 29 November 2013. Moreover, the author suggests
that the term “community” better fits to the American context because “they
usually have a much higher degree of teamwork, share responsibilities and
resources, and may offer exclusive amenities to residents as a means of
creating a community feeling”; while the Russian gated communities doesn’t
present this sense of homogeneity, as it “do not create a community feeling and
are not independent from the surrounding system”
20 The Elita 5 catalog
ends in this way: „Reinassance City offers you a happy and shiny life”.
21 See p. 187.
22 Hirt, Iron Curtains.
23 With the term „agency”
we mean the capacity of people to act independently and to make their own free
choices, whe reas structure refers to those factors (such as social class, but
also religion, gender, ethnicity, culture, etc.) that limit or influence the
opportunities that they have.
24 In any case, preparing
a gratar in the backyard of a compound is fairly normal, as some further
interviews confirmed.
25 Firstly described by
Baudelaire, this character took great relevance after Benjamin’s work „Paris,
capital of the Nineteenth century”. Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben,
(italian ed.) edited by, Parigi capitale
del XIX secolo, Torino: Einaudi, 1989.
26 Ulf Hannerz, Esplorare la citta, Bologna: II Mulino,
1992.
27 Irina Livezeanu,
„Urbanization in a low key and linguistic change in Soviet Moldova”, Soviet Studies 33 (4), 1981, 573.
28 Clifford Geertz,
„Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example”, American Anthropologist 59 (1),
1957: 32-54.
29 http:
//www.patrimoniulmaterial.md/en/pagini/focurelul%E2%93-revitalization-ancient-custom-Chișinău-city.
30 Ibidem
31. I refer to summer
2013 Gura Căinarului campaign and to the choices of several food brands, which
convey the message: „good like at home, in the countryside”.
32 Hirt, Iron Curtains, 4
33 Excluded from the „statutory
secession” and „spatial seizure” exemples.
The article was written by Giuseppe Tateo and published in the book Identitățile Chișinăului, ediția a doua. (Chișinău, ed. Arc, 2015).
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