Weaving and Unraveling the Factory Town: Social Alterations and European Belonging in the Aftermath of Romanian Industrial Collapse.

Abstract

This dissertation explores contemporary social, historical, and ideological transformations by focusing on the material realities of Piatra Neamt, a socialist-planned industrial city in north-east Romania. It navigates, through instances of spatial alterations, the lives and histories of the poorest of Piatra-Neamț residents, self-identified members of the middle and upper classes, and various activists, bureaucrats, and scholars who negotiate, on a daily basis, their local realities with European Union expectations. This dissertation argues that, by looking at spatial transformations, and their failures to function as expected, not only are new temporalities carved out of history, but also new persons, at times accidentally, emerge out of the malfunctions of change. By looking at socialist built places as frameworks for conceptualizing personhood, social change can be understood in a new light as “making space” for, or “fitting in” a new reality. Part one traces space as catalyst for sociality as Piatra-Neamt transformed from a small timber town to a rapidly industrialized city in the 1950s. The social bonds residents fostered during this time became crucial in coping with both the socialist shortage economy in the 1980s, and the drastic transformations since the 1989 revolution. Part two is an exploration into movement and spatial shifts as local politicians engage in a process of urban alteration meant to transform the city from socialist factory town to European tourist attraction. In this process, non-governmental activists fail to translate change while certain city residents get stuck, are relocated, or rendered unfit in seemingly familiar spaces. Part three explores instances when local space seems to transcend regional and national borders. As museum actors carefully select material historical evidence for European belonging, local sociality is extended to Europe through the lives of labor migrants who support the majority of local economy. For the people of this former factory town, urban and industrial space is tied to a particular form of sociality which is linked to ideas about selves and others, one’s ability to move, to climb, to work, and to measure time.