Public space of Central and

East-European cities: Between

consumerism and spectacle

Svetlana Hristova

Abstract : On the basis of visual exploration of various public

places of memory and informal social exchange in Budapest and
Sofia, an argument is raised that the present public spaces in
Eastern and Central Europe have been generated with
malformations and remain vulnerable to processes of privatization
and commercialization during the last two decades, on the one
hand, and on the other, they still suffer from remnant
manifestations of the previously statified society (Habermas).
The aestheticization of cities thus unfolds as contradictory
process: as planned beutification, themeing and taming of the
urban space, where people, degraded to mere subjects of the
socialist state before, now readily evolve into consumers and
spectators; and as alternative, sometimes subversive actions,
making claims on the city from below. Ultimately, new counter-
publics (Nancy Frazer) proliferate, new bottom-up manifestations
and transformations of the urban spaces are made and new youth
subcultures of participation and social sharing emerge: all these are
signs of normalization of the East-European public spaces which
genuinely create their creators.

Key-words : public space, commoditization of culture, publics and counter-

publics, Central and Eastern Europe

Rsum : Sur la base de l'exploration visuelle de diffrents lieux

publics de la mmoire et de l'change sociale informelle
Budapest et Sofia, un argument est prsent que les espaces
publics dans Europe centrale et orientale ont t gnres avec
des malformations et restent vulnrables aux processus de
privatisation et de commercialisation au cours des deux dernires
dcennies, d'une part, et d'autre part, que les mmes espaces
souffrent encore de manifestations reliques de la socit
prcdemment tatise (Habermas). L'aesthtisation de la ville se
droule donc comme un processus contradictoire: comme la
beautisation prvue, et les thmatisassion et
apprivoisement (themeing and taming) de l'espace urbain, o
les gens, dgrads de simples sujets de l'tat socialiste davant,
maintenant facilement voluent vers les consommateurs et les
spectateurs, et, comme une alternative cela, des actions
subversives, qui rinventent la ville d'en bas. En fin de compte, de
nouveaux contre-publics prolifrent (Nancy Frazer), de nouvelles
manifestations et des transformations des espaces urbains sont
produites bottom-up et de sous-cultures jeunes de participation et
le partage sociale se dgagent: tout cela sont les signes de la
normalisation des espaces publics d'Europe orientale qui crent
authentiquement leurs crateurs.

Mots-cls
Public space and its enemies1

According to the classical understanding, stemming from

Habermasian theory about public sphere, public space can fulfil its
functions as a node of communication and societal integration
only when a balance of mutual control between state, private
sphere and society is established without the superdomination of
any of these three. So far as public space is not equal to public
sphere (Bodnr, 2001), it nevertheless is a component part of it
(Madinapour, 2000). Being its physical representation it is
therefore critically dependent on all its main prerequisites: the
anonymous power of bureaucratic state machine, guaranteeing
equal access to rules, on the one hand, and the independent
individual private sphere, enabling actions of autonomous citizens,
not mere subjects to the state, as revealed by Habermas in his
seminal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This
also guarantees the balance between enlightened self-interest and
orientation to common good, between the roles of clients and
citizens (Habermas, 1992, p. 449).
Therefore there are two dangers which could impede public
sphere and hence, the functioning of the public space: state-
ification of society and privatization of public resources. Cities in
postsocailist Europe are a good example of what happens with
public spaces in societies which used to be entirely state-ified.
Within half a century of authoritarian regimes, the
strongholds of belated Eastern nationalisms turned out to be also
centers of belated modernization of communist type. Ironically,
behind the Iron Curtain socialist mittel Europa became but a
counterpart of the Eastern peripheries.
Interpretations of communism as a kind of modernization
and sometimes even as climax of Western modernity are not
novelty (Hirt, 2008, p. 791). Nevertheless modernization of
communist type is certainly an oxymoron: it includes elements of
modernization such as industrialization, urbanization and
democratic education but all these encamped in close society.

1. The research of Budapest has been carried out during my stay at the CEU,
December 2007 and April-May 2008 as a senior researcher of Extension
Research Programs. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the CEU
position.
 After the fall of the iron curtain, these countries with
unfinished modernization had to jump directly into neoliberal
economy. The political change involved a tremendous economic,
social and cultural restructuring. As Edward Soja suggested in his
classic formulation, Restructuring is meant to convey a break in
secular trends and a shift towards a significantly different order [] It thus
evokes a sequence of breaking down and building up again,
deconstruction and attempted reconstitution, arising from certain
incapacities or weaknesses in the established order [] Restructuring implies
flux and transition, offensive and defensive postures, a complex mix of
continuity and change (Soja, 1996, p. 78).
Important aspect of this restructuring was described
broadly in scientific literature as transition to market economy and
inevitable reallocation of property rights from public to private
sector happening on massive scale in the post-socialist countries at
the beginning of 1990s. On the other hand, whereas Eastern and
Central Europe was literally void market space in the beginning of
1990s, in Western Europe there was already saturation of
hypermarkets accounting for between 22 percent (Norway) and 70
percent of market share (in France and the UK). Thus, a highly
developed and also highly capitalized hypermarket system moved
into the virgin territory in Central and East Europe; and the
results were explosive. Only a decade after the fall of communism,
a spectacular construction of shopping malls, shopping centres
and hypermarkets began, first in the big Central and East
European cities, later spreading to the countryside (Stanilov,
2007).
Even today despite of the economic difficulties Central and
East European countries and Turkey are forecast to enjoy the
strongest average growth rates over a five-year horizon, with
Turkey (6%) and Romania (4.5%). As RegioData Research
announced at the beginning of 2012, Bratislava, Prague, Budapest
and Zagreb have overtaken Vienna and Berlin: the shopping
centre density of these cities is in part even considerably higher
than that of either of the German-speaking capitals.
In this process of urban transformation, the public spaces
that are essential to urban local experience, become an economic
tool of development and acquire the characteristics of regional, if
not global, commodity (Tsenkova, Nedovi-Budi & Marcuse,
2006, p. 5).
Greyness Transformed into Sameness

How does the transformation impact the layout of public

space in CEE cities? On the one hand, pandemic of common
urbanscapes spread around. As a matter of fact, this
homogenization of urban spaces started intensively yet in the
1950s. Under the veil of communism central and east European
cities began to develop strangely similar outlook: monotonous
industrial zones, sleeping quarters for the working people, neat
parks and gardens inhabited by communist monuments. To put it
in Vaclav Havels words, that was the legacy of grayness, uniformity,
anonymity, and ugliness inherited from the totalitarian era (Havel, in Hirt,
2008, p. 104). Only after the fall of the iron curtain it became
obvious that there are differences between central and east
European cities which need to be approached and analysed taking
into account their cultural contexts and longue-dure historical
developments.

Picture 1: Sofia, the sleeping quarter Mladost awakened by McDonalds2

However, the urban uniformity and the pandemic of
common urbanscapes increased further with their marketization
during the transition period. Nowadays central and east European

2. All photographs are from the author.

cities have similar peripheries as a legacy of their common
communist industrial past, and commoditized image-dominated
centers as an outcome of their neoliberal presence. Indisputably,
malls, hypermarkets and global chains play leading part in this
process of urban McDonaldization, to use Ritzers term, and
gaudy image-formation (Picture 1).
Jean Baudrillard explains this modern production of
sameness not so much as a direct result of the market but as the
impact of one of its derivatives - the advertisement domination,
the process of universal visibility which conquers everything,
while the public space (the street, the monument, the market, the stage, the
language) disappears. [] This is the only architecture today: huge screens on
which moving atoms, particles, molecules split up. Not a public stage, not a
public space, but gigantic spaces of circulation, ventilation, ephemeral
inclusion (1987, pp. 12-13).

Picture 2: Budapest, Arkadia mall before Easter, 2007

Simultaneously, in countries of transition the cathedrals of

consumption evoke a real admiration and authentic attraction, even a
celestial joy, as a worker involved in the opening of McDonalds
in Moscow spoke of it: as if it were the Cathedral in Chartres a
place to experience a celestial joy (Ritzer, 2010, p. 7). Other
authors recognize them as special public spaces, which involve
much more than just consumption patterns, as they sustain and
support novel ways of asserting social identities in a new political
situation (Houssay-Holzschuch & Teppo, 2009). These could be
different statuses of race, ethnicity, class, religion which are
staged there, thus turning the private spaces of consumption into
semi-public spaces of discrete self-representation.
However, this could be also claimed as an imitative attempt
of urban designers to produce a quazi public sole for the
merely consummative spaces, to substitute the authentic public
relations with a society of spectacle (Guy de Bord). These
seemingly open and socially inviting spaces of commerce are very
often disclaimed as quazi or semi mostly for their
consummative erosion, reducing culture to market. On the other
hand, some researchers admit, that they look like islands of order
and homely tranquillity; shared joy and common festivities
(Pictures 2, 3).

Picture 3: Sofia mall, Waiting for Christmas, 2009

Still, there is an important question which remains: if the

principle of functioning of these cathedrals of consumption (i.e.
public services to private persons, delivered by private owners) is
the same as the one, governing the well-known 18th century
English coffee houses, one of the favourite Habermas examples
of genuine bourgeois public sphere then what makes the
difference? Why coffee houses are presented as genuine public
space in 18th century England, but are apprehended as trivial
consumption places now?
If something has changed in the meantime, this is (a) the
large scale on which this process of mallification of culture takes
place, the overriding spirit of consumerism, subverting the
authentic public domain; and (b) the changed individual interests
which obviously do not coincide with the problems of the day of
the 18th century man. Concerning the first argument about the
commoditization of culture and the global triumph of spaces of
consumption, we can add to this that there are simultaneous
counter-processes based on alternative choices and deliberate
public policies3.

Picture 4: Budapest, the underground in front of the entrance to West End

Mall: Food and Songs for the poor

So far as the public4 and its interests, we can accept

rather the Nancy Frazers idea of the subaltern counterpublics with
oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and
needs, formulated and circulated in different counterdiscourses taking
place in parallel discursive arenas. Insofar as these arenas are publics,
they are by definition not enclaves, which is not to deny that they
are often involuntarily enclaved (1992, pp.122-124). Furthermore,
the topics of common interest which are considered as public good
are continuously renegotiated as for example the gender issue and

3. See for example the story of Seattle Central Library, Creating the perfect public
space.
4. In short, the use of the word public evolved historically from common
good in society to domain open to observation and scrutiny of anyone as
opposite to the private, and finally, to its present meaning as audience, where
the behaviour of anonymous social actors is codified and reduced to observable
presentation. (Sennett, 1993, pp. 16-44). Finally, public has been conceptualised as
a specific type of solidarity by choice, which is constituted through various
discursive practices widely accessible as an open relation among strangers
(Calhoun, 2002).
domestic violence, considered to be a private problem for a long
time. Thus the spaces around the malls often turn into ground of
a special kind of social economy, existing on the border between
legal and illegal; informal communication and marginal sociability
(Pictures 4, 5).

Picture 5: Budapest, 2008, the underground infront of the entrance to West

End Mall: The chess players, 2008

To sum up: public space is not equal to open space, or

rather not every open urban space is necessarily public. If there
are two main functions of the open places common to all places
to pass through and places to stay in then it is also important
why, for what reason we stay in certain place of open or semi-
open access and what we are doing there? If the genuine public
space is a place of communication understood as informal and
symmetrical symbolic exchange, and not domination, it is more
plausible that this process can take place within various subpublics
than in the framework of a large mono-public which will be
turned into an audience.
On the other hand, the diversion and multiplication of
the public into many publics does not mean the decline of public
culture, neither the complete erosion of public space, rather the
change of its profile. Obviously, a new equilibrium is to be
attained which, to put it in Habermas words, is not one between
state powers but between different resources for societal integration. A public
sphere that functions politically requires more than the institutional guarantees
of the constitutional state; it also needs the supportive spirit of cultural
traditions and patterns of socialization, of the political culture, of a populace
accustomed to freedom (1992, p. 453).
Ultimately, spaces of open access can be turned into places
of discursive practices of common concern, when there is a
common mobilizing project. For the citizens of new Europe the
transformation of public space is not one-way process:
paradoxically, it happens simultaneously from above (as a result of
the new more democratic rules per se), from below as sub-
alternative bottom-up actions of the local communities, and from
outside as an effect of the new funding opportunities for the third
sector activities. When fuelled with mass discontents because of
the economic destabilization of society, the squares and streets of
post-socialist cities regain (even temporarily) the power of the
powerless: they turn into arenas of authentic social protests.

References & complementary bibliography

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Howe, trans., London, New York, Verso.
Baudrillard, J., 1987, Lautre par lui-mme, Paris, Galile.
Bodnr, J., 2001, Fin de Millnaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of Urban Life,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Fraser, N., 1992, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, in Calhoun, C., (ed.),
Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MIT Press, pp. 122-
124.
Habermas, J., 1989 [1962], The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Habermas, J., 1992, Further Reflections on the Public Sphere, in
Calhoun, C., (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MIT
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Havel, V., 1992, Summer Meditations, P. Wilson, trans., New York, A.
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Hirt, S., 2008, Landscapes of postmodernity: changes in the built fabric
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Houssay-Holzschuch, M., & Teppo, A., 2009, A Mall for All? Race and
public space in post-apartheid Cape Town, Cultural Geographies,
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Ritzer, R., 2010, Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Continuity and Change in
the Cathedrals of Consumption. Pine Forge, Thousand Oaks.
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<http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/08/02/seattle.library/>
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Soja, E. W., 1996, Third Space. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-
Imagined Places, Oxford, Basil Blackwell Publishers.
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Svetlana Hristova is an associate professor in sociology of culture and

cultural anthropology at the South-West University in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria.
Her research interests lay in the cross-field of sociology, anthropology and
urban studies, more specifically in public spaces as sites of collective identities
and cultural memory, exemplified in her projects Culture of the small town
(1999-2000) and Public Spaces of the Bulgarian City Heritage and
Development (2005-2007), supported by the Bulgarian Ministry of
Education and Science; Re-imaging of Public Space in European Cities and
its Role in Social and Ethnocultural Integration (2006-2008) with the
participation of UK, Russia and Ukraine and supported by INTAS at the
EU; the individual project Places and Non-Places in Central and East-
European Cities (A comparison between Sofia and Budapest), supported by
the Central European University, Budapest (2006-2007). In 2009 she
became an initiator and chair of the Working Group Urban Management
and Cultural Policies of the City at ENCATC. Editor and author of two
books on urban cultures: The City: Images, Symbols, Identities. (2002)
Sofia: LIK Publishing House; Border Identity of the Small Town. Cultural-
anthropological Research of the town of Melnik (2001) Blagoevgrad:
University Publishing House Neofit Rilsky (in Bulgarian), and co-editor of
the photo-album: Hristova, S., C. Young, O. Pachenkov and O.
Rybchinsky (eds.) Public Places of European Cities. (2008) Kiev: Surma
Svyatoslav. She is also an author and producer of a historical documentary
film The Squares Life (2010).