Communist urbanization and conditional citizenship

Abstract

In this essay, Ivaylo Ditchev plays with the theory and reality of the Eastern European utopian project of the communist period, tracing their effort to create an urban form that erased the spatial contradictions of human settlements, and promote a way of living in line with socialistic values. From the theory, Ditchev uncovers two competing visions for the ideal socialist territoriality, based on either an ameliorated form of concentration or a decentralization of population to erase the division between core and periphery. Yet as Ditchev illustrates, the daily reality of living under communist spatial organization of population was far from the utopia envisioned by their theoreticians: ‘mobility and urbanization did not become a tool of liberation, but one of tightening control over the population’. We are shown how stringent internal restrictions on travel and settlement shaped complex geometries of citizenship, where the privilege of mobility contributed to definitions of status, appropriate individual behaviour and quality of life. Ditchev concludes that the communist countries of Eastern Europe achieved an internal level of conditional citizenship based on legitimacy of mobility that presaged such trends on the world stage.