Good and bad concrete

Abstract

The article examines the devaluation of concrete in Central and Eastern Europe and local residents’ and architectural professionals’ commitment to ‘modernize’ socialist-period concrete housing estates due to the perceived ‘poor’ quality of materials and their ‘unaesthetic’ appeal. Using the case of the estate Wrocław Manhattan built in 1972–1978 in the Polish city of Wrocław and renovated in 2015–2016, I argue that, although modernist estates in the region and in western European contexts share seemingly identical aesthetic stigma and devaluation, different forces drive their regeneration. Drawing on archival research, interviews, go-alongs, and photo-elicitations with architectural professionals and inhabitants, this article demonstrates that ‘modernization’ of socialist-period housing estates in Central and Eastern Europe is motivated not by classist stigmatization of their inhabitants, but by a social imaginary that socialism ‘deviated’ from western European modernity and it therefore requires aesthetic ‘improvement’ and ‘fixing’. To address this insight, the article uses a sociology of valuation lens to follow people’s practices of valuing, devaluing, and transforming various properties of the estate’s concrete so as to ‘modernize’ it. I propose the concept of fugitive modern that connotes people’s quest to update the built environments associated with an ‘unfinished’ socialist modernity and calls attention to the catch-up labor poured into adding value to built environments commonly perceived as devoid of quality and beauty.