Urban Planning in Communist Countries - Planning of Rural Localities

Planning of Rural Localities

The standardization of living (i.e. hot and cold running water, electricity, access to medicine and education, etc.) between the workers in the urban-cityscape and those in the rural-farming lands was an important piece of foundational Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union. But by the early 1970s it became clear that the gradual evolution towards equal standards of living between urban and rural workers, as proscribed by Marxism-Leninism, was lagging. Even more disparaging, significant developments in the quality of life for the villages of the European west greatly surpassed those in the communist east (the majority of which only had electricity). Consequently, the USSR found it necessary to enact policy to improve the lives of villagers and advance its' own villages to be more comparable to those it the west.

In the Soviet Union, this policy came about through the systematic construction of urban types of residences, mainly multi-story "modern" apartment blocks, built on the idea that these buildings could provide a degree of comfort that which the older peasant houses could not (unsurprisingly, most peasants were displeased with this policy). As part of this plan, smaller villages (typically those with populations under 1000) were deemed "irrational" or "inefficient" and a variety of remedies could befall them. The mildest consequence was the village could be slated for reduction of services, given a timely notice of demolition, or the workers were asked voluntarily to leave. But the harshest solution was workers could face forced removal with or without sufficient notice or be subjugated to violence. In time, large scale demolitions and enormous reconstruction projects of villages, towns, and cities, in whole or in part, began to take shape. One of the largest and most ambitious of these developments began in 1974 with the goal of turning Romania into a "multilaterally developed socialist society". Urban planning, in Romania, began early on as displaced rural Romanians started flocking to the cities. With a "blank canvas" of land, the USSR hoped to create hundreds of urban industrial centers via investment in schools, medical clinics, housing, and industry.

Although the systematization plan extended, in theory, to the entire country, initial work centered in Moldavia. It also affected such locales as Ceauşescu's own native village of Scorniceşti in Olt County: there, the Ceauşescu family home was the only older building left standing. The initial phase of systematization largely petered out by 1980, at which point only about 10 percent of new housing was being built in historically rural areas.

Given the lack of budget, in many regions systematization did not constitute an effective plan, good or bad, for development. Instead, it constituted a barrier against organic regional growth. New buildings had to be at least two stories high, so peasants could not build small houses. Yards were restricted to 250 square meters and private agricultural plots were banned from within the villages. Despite the obvious negative impact of such a scheme on subsistence agriculture, after 1981 villages were mandated to be agriculturally self-sufficient.

In the mid-1980s the concept of systematization found new life, applied primarily to the area of the nation's capital, Bucharest. Nearby villages were demolished, often in service of large scale projects such as a canal from Bucharest to the Danube - projects which were later abandoned by Romania's post-communist government. Most dramatically, eight square kilometers in the historic center of Bucharest were leveled. The demolition campaign erased many monuments including 3 monasteries, 20 churches, 3 synagogues, 3 hospitals, 2 theaters and a noted Art Deco sports stadium. This also involved evicting 40,000 people with only a single day's notice and relocating them to new homes, in order to make way for the grandiose Centrul Civic and the immense Palace of the People, a building second in size only to the Pentagon.

Urban planning, especially the destruction of historic churches and monasteries, was protested by several nations, especially Hungary and West Germany, each concerned for their national minorities in Transylvania. Despite these protests, Ceauşescu remained in the relatively good graces of the United States and other Western powers almost to the last, largely because his relatively independent political line rendered him a useful counter to the Soviet Union in Cold War politics.