The Creation of Consensus through Spatial Appropriation: Normalization of Western Hegemony in the Built Environment

Abstract

The Creation of Consensus through Spatial Appropriation:Normalization of Western Hegemony in the Built Environment Mary Dellenbaugh (bio) Urban space and symbolically-imbued cultural landscapes are prime backdrops for the establishment of symbolic power structures, including nationalism, hegemony, and consensus. The incorporation of an ideology and its symbols into the built space, be it architecture, urban planning, street names, or monuments, normalizes political strategies, power structures, and dominant worldviews. As I will seek to show in this article, the reforming of the cultural landscape of East Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall represented not the much-heralded depoliticization and removal of ideology from space, but rather a deeper embedding of the new dominant power and its attendant physical structures using strategies similar to its predecessor, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Built landscapes constructed under state socialist rule share inherent physical characteristics—monumental architecture, large plazas, wide thoroughfares, and, in the case of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), slab building construction. These landscapes were additionally imbued with the symbolism of the state socialist regime in the form of statues, monuments, public art, and street and place names. These physical and symbolic characteristics form the backdrop of residents’ daily life and tourists’ [End Page 395] visits, as well as the foundation upon which the changes attendant to the political shift of 1990 must be built. The combination of these physical and symbolic characteristics create landscapes that not only differentiate themselves strongly from their Western counterparts, whose postmodern influences became deeply entrenched over the course of division (Dellenbaugh, “Stigmatisierung” 230), but also, through the permanence of their constant use and built characteristics, are not easily “remediated” or assimilated into Western spatial discourses. The high ideological position of cities and built space in general for the fostering of socialist forms of life, including collectivity, marches, and demonstrations (Häußermann and Kapphan 59–67), provides additional fodder for the creation of an “Other” in new pro-Western discourses. Indeed, the binary nature of othering practices in the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War division persists today, and contributes to the complex nature of post-socialist identity construction, historiography, symbolism, and national narratives (Young and Light 946). Landscapes and the physical environment contribute significantly to the construction and reconstruction of identity. The identification of architectural forms such as the slab building style typical of CEE socialist-era urban development with their socialist heritage creates an “Other” characterized by backwardness and inferiority, reinforced both by a West-dominated architectural discourse and a unilateral West-dominated media representation. I have examined these topics in depth in my recent research on Berlin, which scrutinized changes to the symbolic landscape of post-reunification East Berlin through semiotic and discourse analysis. As I was able to establish, in Germany, the identification of East German architecture, similar to the creation of the East German as a “symbolic foreigner” (Pates and Schochow 7–20), removes the spatial anchoring of the phenomenon, instead embodying it in the case of architecture in the building or building form, and in the case of the symbolic foreigner, in the person. This upholds othering practices initiated in Germany in the Wall-era, or, according to Brian Ladd, “the East-West division provided by the Wall permitted Germany themselves to project ‘otherness’ onto their fellows. … Germans could interpret official propaganda as implying that the people on the other side of the Wall monopolized the prejudiced, predatory, or authoritarian traits of the bad old days” (31). The visual representation and framing of the built space of the cities of [End Page 396] the CEE1 concentrates on the postmodernism-influenced revival of vernacular architecture and city centers “left to rot” by socialist regimes, whose inherent value in postmodern discourses, and attendant highlighting of the inferiority of the socialist regime’s planning, can now be brought to the forefront. This discursive realignment also extends to reframings of prominent buildings such as the House of the People in Bucharest (Light, “‘Facing the Future’”) or the Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw (Omilanowska).2 These changes to the physical and symbolic landscape support other mechanisms of nationalism in post-socialist space, which, as Craig Young and Duncan...