BERTA, ERZSÉBET ÁGOTA: Is there a Future for the Past? (The Architectural Dilemmas of the Post-Socialist City – The Case of Debrecen)
Abstract
postsocialist city, urban public space, the sozial production and sozial construction of public space, local sentiment of space, imagining of the city, public art, cultural memory, lieux de mémoire, European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), rehabilitation of the city center Debrecen’, using and losing of history
In urban studies it is a widely accepted notion that the production and construction of public spaces shape social processes. That is why the city has become a central concept for the researches of post-socialism in political and historical studies in recent years. There are two post-states to describe the post-socialist city: on one hand it follows the post-modern trends of Western European cities, on the other hand it represents the social and cultural anomalies of the post-socialist transformations in the East and Middle European region. The phenomenon of the post-socialist city now functions as a paradigmatic object of cultural anthropology and cultural memory studies. For the city – where historical time unfolds tectonicaly, as a synchronic experience in the layers of space and architecture – is a real ”memory machine”, which transforms the asynchronities of past times into the simultaneity of space. Post-socialism, in terms of memory, is a half-past that condenses times, and this is what manifests itself in the heterogeneous yet fascinating architectural image of the post-socialist city.
My paper describes the architectural processes of present day Debrecen in terms of this post-socialist paradigm, focusing on the contradictions in the social production and interpretation of public spaces.
From the 1980s, Debrecen’s architecture is largely preoccupied with the past. The past, which has risen to a guarantee for identity and genius loci in the city’s architectural concept. However, Debrecen has looked upon itself as a city without architecture as its builddings were destroyed from time to time, its coherent array of structures was built in the second half of the 19th century. Although this lack of constructedness was a positive force and the main topic in the narratives of the city’s legendarium, it could not provide an adequate impulse for the architectural morphology. The illustrious process of reconstruction and rehabilitation, which was started in the 1980s and still persists, and which contributed with new functions and new architectural image to the city’s historical downtown, represents the architecture that, without traditions, battles with the tradition of lack. The most obvious factor is in the characteristics of the three stages (1980s, 2000s and nowadays) of the city centre’s reconstruction, and it is perceived in the dramatic differences between the architectural constructions of public places (including Kossuth square, the Protestant Great Church and its Ruins Garden).
While in the 1960 and 1970s the city made radical efforts to re-write the past in terms of its architectural texture, present day Debrecen tries to reconstruct it. Debrecen as a festival and event city is the result of the city centre’s still running rehabilitation, and receives its ideological patterns from the collection of local identity. The result, in fact, is not a restoration of cultural memory, but an architectural patchwork that was put together from the decontextualised fragments of Debrecen’s narratives, the architectural relics of the city’s past and the imagined objects of an imagined past, to form a photogenic world whose standards are popularity and marketability. Today it is the contradictory relation of the festival and event city function and the concept of local identity (not lacking political lobbying) that defines the city’s image and explains the new ways for the application of the ”past”. Today this ”past” is a part of the turistically attractive city’s inventory, which is effective, because it spares the task of remembrance and gives way to culinary consumption. By means of the exhibited scene of this local ”past”, the city of Debrecen turns into the non-place of globalisation.