CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Voicu, Stefan Valentin |
|---|---|
| Title | The Petrochemical Fortress. Second Tier Urbanization in Eastern Europe |
| Summary | Since the 1990s Eastern Europe went through major systemic reforms that led to considerable industrial restructuring. These had a major impact on second tier industrial cities developed during the 1945-1990 socialist period, which started to decline demographically and economically. Various perspective have been developed on these processes of decline. Some authors argued that is not a decline, but a sustainable shrinkage or a nested urbanism. The consensus in this literature is that the decline, or shrinkage, or nestedness is the result of a combination of global market forces and the inadequate development of these cities during socialism. This thesis engages with these cities’ socialist development in order to understand these processes. The case of the city of Oneşti, Romania, will be taken into consideration in order to outline the development of a second tier city in Eastern Europe and go beyond the shortcomings of current literature. First, it tries to overcome the lack of attention given to secondary cities in the urban scholarship, who's focus has been mostly on what Sassen ([1994] 2012) calls global cities. Second it criticizes the distinction made between capitalism and socialism in the literature on socialist urban development by arguing that socialism is not a different mode of production and thus cannot be compared with capitalism. Instead socialism is a different form of managing the production of capital, a different governmentality (Foucault 2003) and thus can be at most compared with liberalism, or other governmentalities. The aim of the thesis is not to compare them but to pinpoint how socialist second tier cities were linked with non-socialist cities in global socio-technical systems. It is shown that Oneşti was already part of the global economy during socialism and played a considerable role in the regime's accumulation of capital. Using Foucault's notion of governmentality to describe Oneşti as part of a set of institutions and practices forming the state and making its population, the thesis shows how during socialism the latter was transformed into a labour force employed in the global production of capital. The thesis also point out that transformations in the global economy, but also the population's subjectification (Ranciére 1999) of this socialist governmentality led to its redefinition into a neoliberal one. The decline of Onesti, and similar secondary cities in Eastern Europe, can be understood by looking at the role played by these cities in the neoliberal state formation and population making. |
| Supervisor | Kalb, Don; Zentai, Violetta |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/voicu_stefan.pdf |
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