“It's My City and I'm Not Going to Move Away!”
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ISSN 1653-2244 INSTITUTIONEN FÖR KULTURANTROPOLOGI OCH ETNOLOGI DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY “It’s my city and I’m not going to move away!” Shaping a sense of being-at-home-in-the-world and seeking balance between acting and being acted upon in developing Bratislava. By Robert Repka Supervisor: Ulrika Trovalla 2019 MASTERUPPSATSER I KULTURANTROPOLOGI Nr 94 Abstract Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, is undergoing a significant change of its built environment due to a massive process of development since the mid-2000s. This series of construction, destruction, transformation and modernising processes has radically transformed a central industrial locality of the city into a wholly new business-administrative district. My ethnography is dedicated to unravelling the development's impact on people's living conditions, experiences, and everyday making-sense practices and actions. I am drawing on Michael Jackson, who claims that humans desire to act in the social world which is acting upon them in order to shape a sense being-at-home-in-the-world. Hence, the central focus of this ethnography is to find out how my informants make sense of the city’s transformation, shape their sense of at-home-ness and how they seek a balance between acting and being acted upon in changing social world. In order to do so, I analysed data gathered from more than twenty semi-structured qualitative interviews and two walk-alongs. Based on that, I claim that informants share a common condition of uncertainty which is experienced as insecurity or hope. In order to shape a sense of home-ness, certainty, belonging and recognition, they create and employ two specific practices. They either retreat to the notion of the city of past and detach themselves from the new developing Bratislava, or they reach to the city of future and feel belonging with the development narratives of future utopias. Hence, I conclude that the sense and experience of home are not being lost but rather dislocated and disintegrated within collective engagements with the transforming city and at the same time in the process of re-shaping in new temporalities and spatialities. Key words place and space, urban, home, past, future, development, Slovakia, modernisation, uncertainty, insecurity, hope, acting 3 Acknowledgments I want to thank all of my informants whom accounts, perspectives, stories, imaginations, fears and hopes this thesis draws upon. I am enormously grateful for their time and openness in sharing their lives with me. I dedicate my gratitude to my supervisor Ulrika Trovalla not only for the guiding recommendations, contributions, assistance, and feedback but most importantly for her understanding, time, energy and patience with me. I would not have found enough motivation and passion for finishing this thesis, had it not been for her endless support, encouragement, and cheerful comments. I thank all my friends who have been of great support in time of conducting my fieldwork. 4 Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................... 4 Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 6 Research Aim, Question, and the Guiding Argument of the Thesis .................................... 11 Theoretical Framework ......................................................................................................... 14 Outline of the Thesis ............................................................................................................. 18 Bratislava, a City of Transformations ...................................................................................... 20 Winners and Losers of the Post-socialist Transition ............................................................ 20 Recent Manifestations of Capitalist Urbanism ..................................................................... 24 Methodological and Ethical Considerations ............................................................................ 27 Defining the Field-site .......................................................................................................... 27 Approaching the Field .......................................................................................................... 28 1. Retreat from the Uncertain and Fearsome Future ............................................................. 35 Uncertainty as Contingency and Insecurity .......................................................................... 38 From the Sense of Alienation to Anchoring in the Romantic City of Past .......................... 44 An Attack on the Past City is an Attack on Past Identities ................................................... 54 2. Many Visions of Modern Futures ..................................................................................... 60 Backward Pasts and Modern Utopias of the Future ............................................................. 65 We Belong to the Future ....................................................................................................... 73 Internalising the Development’s Narrative and Expectations .............................................. 80 3. The Shifting Experience and Sense of Being-At-Home-In-The-World ........................... 84 Vis-à-vis the Power of Development, One Has to Adapt ..................................................... 85 Embracing the Development of the City and the Self .......................................................... 90 Concluding Remarks: Reshaping the Sense of Being-At-Home-In-The-World .................. 93 List of Figures .......................................................................................................................... 97 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 98 5 Introduction Picture 1. View on the developing locality. Photo: Author We are sitting at a terrace of a former pumping station, now a house for four families, drinking coffee, and observing the sun setting down beyond the horizon of the slowly flowing Danube in front of us. The late March afternoon breeze does not make us uncomfortable as much as the pervading noise and turmoil of the urban infrastructure from less than ten meters distanced Apollo Bridge over the river which has been constructed as a part of a new development of a locality. At the same time, I feel safe, enclosed, almost as in a different spatiality where the surrounding modern landscape of Bratislava cannot reach. The house of the pumping station was built at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, subsequently, the surrounding Winter Harbour was constructed around it. Two-floor house of a secession architecture creates an interesting tension with the brute industrial architecture of the harbour’s warehouses, garages, or several tall cargo cranes which resemble horses. The evening is calm, the entire space is tranquil, dark- yellow, and blurred, intervened by passing ships in front of us. us. I and Miroslav, one of the 6 houses’ residents, are sharing an evening in one of the most serene places in Bratislava. It feels almost untouched, pristine, and easy to romanticise. Miroslav, whom I am sitting with, tells me about his teenage years, about his beginnings in canoeing and how he has developed a strong affection not only to sport but also for the locality of the Danube and its riverbank. He identifies himself as a true Bratislavan, somebody who was born and raised in the city. During the conversation, we proceed from the locality of the harbour further into the city, specifically, into the area which forms the site of my fieldwork. It is located north from the Danube River, almost in the verycentre of Bratislava. Until the early 1990s, for about one hundred years, it had constituted a former industrial centre of Bratislava. Now, the entire locality is under massive, radical, and continuous development to a new and modern administrative and business city district. When I ask Miroslav on this locality, the entire feeling from the conversation changes. I seldom go to that area but when I’m there, I only see a huge hole in the ground. Then I always remember what used to be there before. Nevertheless, my relationship with that place hasn’t changed. It's still positive. It's my city! And I'm not going to move away. The city Miroslav appropriates, is undergoing a significant process of transformation of its built environment. This transformation is primarily caused by the process of development which results not only in enlargement of Bratislava’s peripheral areas but also in changes of its central parts. As Slovak human geographer Pavol Šuška states, it is particularly one district which accumulates most of the construction projects in the city (2012: 170), and that is the one which Miroslav refers to as “that area”. This district is a representative case of a development in Bratislava. It has completely changed in form, shape, content and function and redefined the urban landscape and urban life. Formerly the centre of industrial production of