On the Socialist Balcony: State

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 Lenins revolutionary conceptions, Stalins distortions and to Ceausescus regime. The ethnographic part contrasts and depicts the intersection and collision of states official disposition of balconies with peoples agency and space practices, as it unfolds in a Romanian neighborhood since the 1980s.