On the Socialist Balcony

While mainstream research on socialism privileged suprastructural approaches issues of everyday life processes remained under-researched. By placing balconies at the critical juncture of the socialist state and its citizens that is of global phenomena and micro processes this book seeks to recapture a sense of everyday socialism and of various socialist common places in an effort to bring forth people and their diverse surviving strategies. The various architectural discourses and ideologies attached to balconies are traced historically from the bourgeois inception through Lenin's revolutionary conceptions Stalin's distortions and to Ceausescu's regime. The ethnographic part contrasts and depicts the intersection and collision of state's official disposition of balconies with people's agency and space practices as it unfolds in a Romanian neighborhood since the 1980s.