The panel proposed by “Viziunea Socialistă” (Socialist Vision), an informal group of public intellectuals from Romania. In our understanding, the “housing question” (Engels, 1872) encompasses the political economy of housing (including housing politics and market relations), and it also refers to the role of housing in the broader political economy regime. When one embarks into the critical analysis of capitalism, going beyond the mere critique of neoliberal policies, addressing the “housing question” offers a solid basis for this endeavor. Addressing the “housing question” as a key element of Marxist analysis, we express our conviction that the exploitation of the labor force does not only happen in the processes of economic production where the surplus value labor creates is appropriated by capital. Exploitation and dispossession of labor also occur in housing (a site of capital accumulation and space where the labor force is reproduced) and urban infrastructure development. Once privatized, commodified, and financialized, homes become investment assets subordinated to the interests of capital and disconnected from people’s socio-economic needs. In light of this understanding of the “housing question,” public intellectuals can contribute to revealing the unavoidability of the capitalist (poly)crises due to capital accumulation and the profit maximization logic, including the solutions delivered to save the capital. At the same time, the critical standpoints toward the systemic roots of housing crises enable us to envision a socialist alternative to capitalism by putting the “housing question” at its core.
Papers presented at the panel:
The role of finance in housing functions through different mechanisms in various political economy regimes. The Romanian state-socialist financial system enabled the creation of a mixed housing regime, and the later capitalist financial system led to market-dominated housing financialization. Moreover, to think about socialist alternatives to contemporary capitalism via restructuring the housing system, I propose critically revisiting the legacy of Romanian state socialism. Between 1951 and 1989, the Romanian state constructed 2,984,083 homes. This could happen within a centrally planned economy with a non-profit financial system at its core that developed housing both as investment and collective consumption good. The socialist distributive and redistributive system relied on the surplus value produced by the workers-owners. It returned the unpaid part of the value created by labor through universally accessible public goods. The socialist economic ideology conceived (housing) consumption as a crucial condition not only for the reproduction of the individual labor force but also for economic production and social reproduction at large.
In contrast, between 1990 and 2021, only around 190,000 flats were built with public money, creating an opportunity for the profit-oriented capitalist housing system to exploit people’s housing needs. From the point of view of profit-oriented housing production, those who cannot afford the market value of homes are considered redundant or surplus. In capitalism, housing is transformed into a commodity appreciated according to its exchange value and into an asset class; therefore, the speculative use of land, buildings, or built environment generates profit decoupled from the surplus value created by the labor force in the productive economic sectors, including construction.
Revisiting the state-socialist housing regime suggests the possibility of (re)creating a large public housing sector and its democratization.
Ioana Florea & Enikő Vincze: Paths of creative destruction: Private real estate on de-industrialized spaces and prospects for public expropriations
According to Schumpeter (1942), who coined the concept of “creative destruction,” this is about the constant destruction of existing (social, spatial, technical) arrangements via innovation for profit. More recently, Harvey (2007) defined it as a restoration of class dominance in sectors reshaped after WWII according to the principles of social democratic welfare states. We use the term to address how the socialist economy and state were destructed/restructured, starting with the 1990s when Romania was re-created as an emergent market of global capitalism.
One of the means of “creative destruction” used for the radical transformation of the country was state-led privatization and de-industrialization. Our paper reveals the multiple roles they played in the emergence and advancement of real estate development as a site of capital accumulation. They facilitated the primitive accumulation of capital as the ownership over the means of production was transposed to the hands of the emerging property-owner class. The factory assets distributed in 1992 among the five private property funds (in addition to the public property fund) created by the state could be capitalized when these funds were later transformed into private equity funds, some with investments in real estate. Furthermore, deindustrialization enabled the new private owners of bankrupt factories to extract long-term rental income from their lands and buildings. Deindustrialization emptied significant urban spaces where capital could be invested into “regenerating” them via residential, commercial, or mixed-use real estate developments. Lastly, lands drained from industrial production were used as collateral for different bank loans.
Analyzing these processes, we propose an opposite direction and call for considering how “creative destruction” could be performed to transform and expropriate private real estate developments for public interests and people’s housing needs.
George Iulian Zamfir: On the legal aspects of the socialist Romanian housing framework: property regimes, construction companies, and eviction practices
This paper clarifies the recent literature on housing production and distribution in Romania’s socialist system. Although published research on the topic exists, it focuses more on the political and conceptual aspects of planning and architecture and less on socialist policies in their own terms.
To this aim, it presents three policy elements: first, a description of the legal evolution of housing law; second, the institutional apparatus assembled for the production and distribution of housing; and third, some unexpected aspects unfolding in the 1970s and 1980s, in relation to internal and external inputs, with empirical data from Baia Mare and Cluj-Napoca.
The socialist housing production design peaked in 1973 when the last significant pieces of legislation were passed. Thus, it took 25 years to steer economic production, in tandem with housing policies and national territorial planning, towards a comprehensive model that delivered around 3 million apartments until 1989. Housing as personal property represented an essential facet of the system, either as self-built houses or as apartment acquisition.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the housing situation reached an unexpected evolution because of a series of internal and geopolitical factors – rural/urban migration to large cities, legal and illegal emigration, and harsh austerity measures to achieve national sovereignty from external credit institutions. Data from the cities of Cluj-Napoca and Baia Mare suggest that the tight control on population management was loosened, leading to increased numbers of abusive occupations and eviction decisions. Nevertheless, housing was produced at a faster pace to cover population needs, with the last socialist large-scale housing projects finalized in the 1990s.
Laura Sandu-Dumitriu & Mihail Sandu-Dumitriu: Urban Planning and Socialising Reproductive Work in the Early Decades of Romanian State-Socialism (1950-1970)
In the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, socialist feminists and working women organized and implemented measures that radically changed women’s lives. These included creating an infrastructure to socialize part of reproductive work, such as cooking, washing, supervising and educating young children, and leisure activities.
After the establishment of the socialist regime in Romania, the need for such measures was (at least to some point) taken into account in the process of urbanization, planning, and construction of new neighborhoods. We aim to draw some directions for understanding the concretization of the relationship between urban planning and socializing reproductive work in the first decades of the Romanian socialist era.
To this end, we will first review the classical socialist theories and feminist socialist theories and practices of the early years of revolutionary Russia. We will then look at the plans for the new residential neighborhoods in Bucharest: How were childcare and educational institutions, canteens, laundries, and leisure spaces (libraries, public pools, cinemas, parks) designed and integrated? How were the routes and distances between homes, nurseries, kindergartens, and schools planned? Our analysis will be complemented by commenting on material published in the magazines Arhitectura (proposals and discussions on neighborhood and housing plans) and Femeia (articles pointing out that not enough has been done to free women from the burden of domestic work or criticizing the design of flats the tenants received).
Our endeavor’s broader aim is to support further analyses, which follow how, in the post-socialist decades in Romania, capitalist neoliberal policies have modified the socialist relationship between urban planning, housing, and reproductive work.
Sorin Gog & Enikő Vincze: Public perception of socialist housing among the present-day working class: from a critique of neo-liberalism to a critique of capitalism
This paper focuses on how Romanian society remembers socialism and how different social classes evaluate the impact of the transition to capitalism on their everyday life. Our main argument centers on the issue of housing and analysis of how the socialist policies of housing planning, building, and distribution are perceived today by the general public. We draw on (a) extensive fieldwork conducted in Northern Romania among precarious workers who, during the post-socialist period, were disposed of their homes; (b) research run in the Central and Western part of the country about real-estate development that seeks to transform former industrial platforms and their workers into spaces of consumption and their middle-class customers; (c) a national representative survey focusing on social and political values in Romania.
Moreover, we interrogate the biased knowledge production among various epistemic communities regarding the representation and evaluation of real-existing-socialism in general and its housing regime in particular. We will show that social memory is overwhelmingly structured by class. Despite the growing dissatisfaction in Romanian society with how the transition from socialism to capitalism took place, the public discourse of politicians, journalists, and academics continues to be informed by (an explicit or latent) anti-communism. Against the latter, based on our empirical findings about housing matters, we propose a critical revisiting of state socialism while showing how, far from bringing the desired positive change, after destroying the socialist housing regime, capitalism resulted in a major housing affordability crisis.
Finally, our paper aims to initiate a discussion among housing activists, leftist public intellectuals, and policymakers about the need to recalibrate the critique of neoliberalism to one that focuses on capitalism’s intrinsic dysfunctionalities.
Maria-Luiza Apostolescu & Andrei Gudu: Socialist urban planning vs capitalist urban sprawl – from work- to car-centric cities and their material implications
Socialist urban planning implied that housing was built near workplaces (factories, research institutes, etc.), which meant commute times were short and doable by foot or public transport. This is the case in most Eastern European cities that developed until 1989, but a new model of urban development started to be implemented in the post-1989 era. The car-centric suburban model, championed by the US and Western European countries, has also been implemented in Romania in the past years, and the trend is accelerated nowadays, despite the rhetorical assumptions of the new political green deals and due to the difficulties of changing existing spatial arrangements.
The implications of the capitalist suburban model include elongated commute times, usually done by car, which leads to increased pollution; lack of public transport and public utilities in the new suburbs (e.g., schools, hospitals, parks, etc.); economic segregation (e.g., in the case of Bucharest, the (upper) middle-class workers can still afford to live within the city’s “original boundaries.” In contrast, working-class and lower-middle-class people can now only afford to live in far-away suburbs, and the proletariat that earns the minimum wage can not even afford to live in the suburbs, so they commute from rural areas surrounding Bucharest (up to 80km around).
Our paper proposes to analyze the two urban development models and their material implications on workers’ lives, the environment, and society in general.
