Fulbright Grant Research
An Ethnography of Soviet Housing
The design and appropriation of a panelblock neighborhood Trakiya, Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Fulbright Grant Recipient
advisors_
Dobrinka Parusheva
Meglena Zlatkova
z.k. Trakiya, a holistically designed Soviet panel block neighborhood, served as the site of my ethnographic research. Designed in 1970s Soviet Bulgaria, Trakiya was avantgarde – and excruciatingly necessary as it provided 30,000 apartments for the city of Plovdiv which was rapidly urbanizing and industrializing as a satellite of the USSR. The new inhabitants hailing from rural villages and carrying with them deeply engrained ideas of self-sufficiency and pride, moved into their new homes with a kitchen box and indoor plumbing. Contrary to other Soviet countries, Bulgarians owned their apartments from the beginning; it was the only way the state could get the workforce they needed to buy into this mass modernization. These facts combined with construction falling short and elements of the neighborhood never being realized created a unique opportunity for the appropriation of the housing.
My research aimed to analyze the process of design by the architects of the neighborhood, as well as the process of appropriation by the inhabitants over the 50 tumultuous years since its ideation. I developed a methodology of collecting and untangling the stories of creation from these two protagonists. I organized them by the architectural scale of their manifestation and categorized them by type of confrontation. The collection of stories provided multiple insights into a shared striving for individuality within mass standardization.
Later exhibitions, publications, and academic conference pieces were based on this work.