Introduction:
People around the world build houses and settlements in order to protect themselves from hardships, advancing their sociality and reciprocal dependency from one another. But are these settlements, which gradually progressed to our modern cities, just one piece of equipment in the toolbox of humanity that assists our needs? What does a city come to mean for its inhabitants? How does a city form its own character and what is its relation between its history and the locals’ narratives? Questions such as these were in the back of my mind when I was in the field researching for the current paper. Interested in people’s relationship with their hometown, I focused on a city-case study in order to get a better understanding on how inhabitants experience their presence in their own place and how they present the identity of their city entangling past and present.
The city in question is Nova Gorica, a regional center in Eastern Slovenia next to the Italian borders. For the needs of a practical master’s course, a group of students from the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Ljubljana, went in Nova Gorica to conduct our individual or collective fieldwork between the 16th and 18th of October 2020. My topic centered around the present negotiation of the city’s identity given its particular history and somewhat ambiguous current economic and cultural development. For the purposes of my participant observation, I conducted five informal interviews with locals of different ages and occupations, raging from early 20s to late 40s. I was interested in the narratives of people born in close proximity to the fall of Yugoslavia and the Slovenian independence, born either before or after these events. One of my concerns was to understand if and why people born before and after the Independence have different or similar narratives about the city.
Apart from these interviews I walked around the city by doing two self-guided tours based on different maps provided by the local tourist office and one museum dealing with the socialist past of Nova Gorica. Furthermore, I visited two local museums, while having a conversation with a young employee in one of them about tourism and people’s attitudes towards their exhibition. My attempt, despite the limited time in the field, was to experience the city by walking, taking photos and paying attention to its urban setting. In other words, I was interested in conducting a phenomenological research, addressing how the city is felt and experienced by the individuals who either inhabit it or simply visit it, such as myself.
In the first part of this paper, I give a brief account on Nova Gorica’s particular historical development as a Yugoslav socialist city beginning in 1947. Throughout this section I will consider the similarities and differences of Nova Gorica in comparison with other socialist cities found all around Eastern Europe, together with the special relation it has with the neighboring Italian city of Gorizia, trying to highlight their contradictory and complimentary development.
In the following, intermediate, section I will discuss a series of phenomenological theories, focusing on the work of the scholar Tim Ingold and notions such as “wayfaring”, “environment without Objects (EwO)”, the “dwelling perspective” and “meshwork”. Phenomenology will allow me to connect and intertwin theories in an interdisciplinary manner, from philosophy, to ecological psychology and urban sociology in order to discuss people’s engagement with their surroundings.
The last section of my paper will be the assimilation of the previous two sections, in which I will discuss the narratives and sentiments local inhabitants have about their own city in modern day based on its past history and their current living conditions in the post-capitalist era. My goal is not to provide an ultimatum, defining Nova Gorica’s place identity, nor to impose theories upon my participants and their understanding of their spatial surrounding. What I aim is to provide an adequate case study of how a city is an ever-shifting, ever-present urban development project which influences people’s everyday life through their mental and bodily involvement with it, while addressing how local practices and inhabitants’ narrations construct together what one can argue to be “the city’s identity”.
The Socialist City:
It has often been argued that Nova Gorica is just another socialist city in transition. Is this, however, the case? The wider area where the city now rests used to be one region under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the aftermath of the Second World War the clash between Yugoslav partisans and Italian fascist resulted in a Peace Treaty that was signed by both sides on the 10th February 1947 in Paris and got in effect on 15th September 1947. The same document established the border line between the two states of Italy and Yugoslavia, giving to the former the area of “Slovenian Venice” (Beneška Slovenija) and the city of Trieste (Trst), while Yugoslavia received the Istria peninsula (Istra) together with a great part of the Croatian coast. The “Primorska” area was divided in half, however, with out any consideration of its cultural, linguistic, or ethnical complexity.
The Italian side got hold of the old city of Gorica (it. Gorizia) that historically belonged to the Slovenian side, leaving a vast area without a regional center affecting culturally and economically the lives of the people in the surrounding settlements. The same year signalized, also, the construction of a new socialist city next to the borderline commissioned by the authorities of the Central Committee in Belgrade, a city which would be named “Nova Gorica” (New Gorica). The lack of a regional point of reference, where the majority of administration services would reside, was not, however, the only reason why this project was initiated. As one participant told me “They built Nova Gorica there because Italy has already a city in the border. They (Yugoslavia) aimed to build a better, greater, “shinier” city.”
The geostrategic importance of the city has to be considered when one aspires to understand its formation and initial character or “Geist”. The close proximity to “the lost city”, as locals often call it, demanded the creation of a new city to compensate for their loss, while at the same time presenting the glory of the new regime in its material manifestation. Put simply, what Yugoslav authorities attempted was to construct a great utopian socialist city that would project to their neighbors the socialist values and way of life showcasing their superiority compared to the capitalist Italian regime. The loss of their city affected the local population on an emotional level, creating what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls “Wounds of Memory”. These wounds are not simply or purely symbolical but appear to have a constant presence in the collective memory of the population (2004 :78). Where one side celebrates the integration of the city inside the Italian state, the Slovene side mourns the loss of its ancestral lands.
According to one participant “The idea was to build a city as a mirror of what socialism should be”. One indicative example of socialist provocation was the red star with a scythe and hammer that were raised in the roof of the central railway station, only few meters away from the borderline together with two big inscriptions writing “We are consolidating fraternity and unity among peoples” and “We are building socialism”. Another example would be the stone insignia of Tito’s name in the picks of the surrounding hills overlooking both sides of the valley. During a lengthy discussion with a local architect, it became clear to be that Nova Gorica’s location had mostly a symbolic significance, since otherwise it was not an optimal geographic location, with strong winds and poor ground properties. The central square of the new city, however, was to be placed above the ancient cemetery of “Stara Gorica” (Old Gorica) signalizing thus a metaphor of rebirth and progress of the Slovene presence in the area. The initial urban plan of the city was designed by socialist architects influenced by French modernism, creating an “urban garden”, or as my interlocutor noted “Blocks inserted in the park”. A green, open, youthful city was to be created in the place of an old cemetery only 300 meters away from the borders. The initial idea was to create a city surrounded by open green communal spaces where people would experience their everyday life inside a “park”, while at the same time they would work to promote the ideas of socialism in the local factories. Hence, the city was designed to be both beautiful, but also functional dividing it in few different sections, such as residential buildings, factories, and recreational areas where people would be able to enjoy nature and get involved in a series of cultural activities. It is also worth mentioning that a clear attempt was made for Nova Gorica to be an inverted image of Gorizia since the medieval city blocs had inner small courtyards, but few green places and parks, whereas the former was developed by the idea that each individual bloc would be surrounded by a secular garden with tall trees reaching the roofs of the buildings, creating the desired illusion mentioned above.
So far, I have noted the relationship of the city’s development in comparison to Gorizia, but it is also important to shift our attention to the idea of what a socialist city should be on its own regard. Newly planned socialist cities sprung up all around Central and Eastern Europe as “flagship towns” (Pozniak 2015) materializing the socialist values and aspiration of how proletarians should live and work, leading to the realization of the utopian Communist state. There has been extensive ethnographic research about socialist cities by anthropologists interested in socialism and post-socialism of the so-called Eastern bloc. Few of these case studies are the cities of Nowa Huta, Tychy or Lodz in Poland, Visaginas in Lithuania, Dimitrovgrad in Bulgaria, Sturovo in Slovakia.
Nova Gorica even though was created to represent the same values, has many significant differences with these given examples. More specifically, whereas most of these socialist towns have previous little to no significant history as settlements, Nova Gorica is the immediate progression of the nearby old settlement of Solkan and a conceptual socialist successor of “Stara Gorica”. Furthermore, while more socialist cities are named after important national heroes or politicians, Nova Gorica is a name chosen as an immediate reference to its history and whereas are in the majority of cases monuments and socialist statues have been removed from the public sphere, all the previous communist public art and reminders of the previous regime have been intact. Lastly, Nova Gorica, unlike other new cities as Velenje in central Slovenia, is situated in the border area. This special location means that in terms of public rhetorics it has to negotiate at the same time the significance of socialism, while at the same time project its superiority over its Italian neighbors’ ideological and political regime.
What was the most important difference, however, between the lifestyle of the Slovene local population with there Central European counterpart was the cultural proximity that was gradually formed throughout the years with their capitalist neighbors. It has often been argued, mostly by the Italian media, that when Slovenia joined the European Union (2004) and the Schengen area (2007) the wall of “little Berlin”, referring to the town of Gorizia and Nova Gorica, has finally been destroyed. This perspective, however, implies that for the majority of the 20th century the two cities where completely cut off from each other. This proposal, even though it may seem an interesting commentary, is not a sound one since both cities and their population were in constant contact and parallel development. More specifically, even though the first years after 1947 the border crossing was essentially allowed only for people that had property and fields near the border line on the other side, soon, after the Udine Agreement of 1955, all inhabitants of the border zone were issued special passports enabling them their passage. This Agreement allowed the passage of people and goods only four times per month, while with the Treaty of Osimo (1975) the border control was loosen even further.
Apart from people’s crossing, the importation of western goods and the Italian channels accessible in the television of the local Slovene households enabled even further the cultural similarity of the two sides. For example, many things were smuggled from the Italian side, such as movies, music records, clothes, and magazines, that allowed Slovenes to experience a different kind of culture than the one offered by the rest of Yugoslavia and its republics. One distinct example was given by one participant who argued that “When I was a kid, I was watching Japanese anime dubbed in Italian… I saw Japanese morality through Italian language.” Furthermore, nowadays when he meets with his Italian friends from Gorizia, they often talk about these anime that they both used to watch as children.
In this section, I attempted to point out that Nova Gorica was indeed as socialist city like the hundreds built in Central and South-East Europe by the communist regimes, but it has a special history and development being closely connected with the Italian side and city of Gorizia and its population developed a sense of cultural particularity since they were in a sense a hybrid between the socialist ethics with the capitalist culture. This allowed them to view themselves as an exception to the rest of Slovenia assisting the formation of the collective identity of the city and its inhabitants, playing a very important role in the post-socialist identity formation that I will discuss in the third section of this paper.
Experiencing the City:
Cities could be seen as an extension of ourselves in the spatial environment. We construct cities to live in them, but at the same time these very cities are able to shape and transform our sense of individual and collective identity. This is done so by people’s everyday engagement and experience they gain inside any given city. Phenomenology is the most prominent scholar approach interested in the human experience and the entangled relation between people and location through the philosophical stance of embodied experience, which started with the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and his notions of “phenomenological reduction” as the form of identification of experience in its purest form (referenced in Thomas 2006:44-5). Even though the list of contributors of this approach is vast, I will briefly mention three important contributions provided by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson in their attempt to connect experience and perception with our everyday understanding of the physical world. All three figures paved the way for the phenomenological theories of Tim Ingold, the theories of whom I will mainly use on my analysis.
For Heidegger, natural sciences were relatively powerless to understand the fundamental character of human existence since experiencing the world is often a pre-cognital, bodily sensualized event. Thus, to experience and perceive the world is not a method of inquiry, but a mode of being-in-the-world. Furthermore, Heidegger claimed that things do not stand alone in the world, but they are always in a sense “embedded in a complex network of relations between people and things and that they are only comprehended as such” (ibid. 45-7). The French philosopher Merleau-Ponty advances this argumentation by placing in the center of attention the notion of perception, claiming that individual perceptions are culturally formed, based on our everyday stimuli. At the same time “perception is experience that takes place before reflection and theorizing” (1962: 13) arguing once again the importance of the pre-cognital effect people’s engagement with their environment. According to the philosopher, moreover, “Perception is not simply a cognitive activity, for the subject who engages in experience is always embodied” (ibid. :131), placing particular importance in the bodily sensations as means of experiencing the world. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be involved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them” (ibid. :82). Finally, Merleau-Ponty considers that sensing and experiencing the world are not isolated events, but instead are part of the general immersion of the person in the world.
Advancing the phenomenological approach in connecting people with their environment while attempting to overcome the Cartesian ontological duality of mind and body is the approach of the American psychologist James Gibson, one of the most prominent contributors in the visual perception of ecological psychology. According to the scholar, the perceiver is placed inside a phenomenal world with which he is in constant interaction through his bodily senses and not simply put or banished in the exterior surface of the world. Therefore, people do not exist or live inside their environment, but they inhabit it, meaning that they are immersed in it and part of it, shaping it while at the same time are being shaped by it. But environment is not simply the ground since this would necessarily make it uninhabitable. Instead, Gibson suggests that the environment is known to us by what it can offer us, in the ways we can interact with it and use it to advance or shape our living conditions. The ground provides us “affordance” through an array of objects, things and available materials which constitute “the furniture of earth, like the furnishing of a room” making the environment “livable” (2014:78).
What all three scholars above argue is that people’s experiences and perceptions related to their position inside the material and phenomenal world they inhabit is based on their deep and continuous everyday involvement with their environment, which is not merely a mental construction but a material manifestation of innumerable variables and objects that surround their lives. This environment, however, is not a never-shifting construction, constantly imposing itself on people leaving them little room to act on their own.
Instead, I suggest, to pay close attention to the definition of our surroundings given by anthropologist Eric Hirsch with the term “landscape”. According to him, the landscape refers to a duality regarding the people’s relation with their environment. On the one hand, the landscape seems to be what we can observe through our vision, but on the other hand there exists a parallel landscape which one has to immerse into it in order to understand how the latter is in constant formation through the local practices, belief systems and aspirations. In his own words, “There is thus the landscape we initially see and a second landscape which is produced through local practice and which we come to recognize and understand through fieldwork and through ethnographic description and interpretation.” (1995:2). Developing further his argumentation he claims that the first kind of landscape is represented as a “foreground” depicting the actuality of the lived everyday life, “What we are now”. The second notion, which overlaps the former, represents a “background” of the collective perceived potentiality in shaping even further the foreground of the present social landscape, “The way we may be” (1995: 3). Hirsch’s theory suggests that landscapes are neither passive nor absolute, but instead are the product of the relationship between the foreground, the actual conditions and locations, and the background, the everyday practices aiming to attain the ever-shifting idealized landscape.
The concept of landscape as the place within people inhabit is also extensively developed by the anthropologist Tim Ingold following the phenomenological tradition presented above. It should be noted here that the scholar puts particular emphasis on the things and surroundings of this landscape following the Gibsonian analysis of affordance, claiming that the landscape cannot be hospitable as an “Environment without Objects”. Therefore, the material constructions, natural or man-made, assist our immergence to the place we inhabit and through them we come to understand and experience life. Each single thing is in a sense “alive”, meaning that it exists in the world and affects the people who interact with it, without having a social agent of their own as many other scholars have suggested. Inside landscapes, things, such as the partisan statues found all over Nova Gorica, should not be viewed as monolithic entities, but instead we should explore how things “leak” into the environment creating a series of complex networks, or meshworks to use the terminology proposed by Ingold, forming peculiar knots along the way upon which significant meaning is to be placed. What is of outmost importance in this meshworks, a terminology that was first developed by Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), is that lives of things can flow into different directions while we have to keep in mind that all the potentiality that stems from the meshwork is essentially part of the thing’s identity. Where Latour (2005) proposes the Actor Network Theory, ANT, calling us to understand the hybrid models of humans and non-humans as social actors inside a network of interconnected points, Ingold proposes to view things as a SPIDER, where the web it produces is essentially part of its body and identity and is the complex interconnected points that create the meaning and life of the thing. While Ingold emphasizes on things, such as the beforementioned statues, we can generalize to include many features of the urban setting in this category such as squares, roads, parks, and important buildings in order to examine how their presence in the city is able to affect people’s perceptions.
Ingold makes an important distinction between the building and the dwelling perspective in his analysis about people’s relation with their lived environment. The former suggests that the world we inhabit has previously been mentally constructed and then lived upon it, giving importance to the mental image of the world instead of the actual interaction of people and environment. The dwelling perspective contrariwise suggests “the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence. From this perspective, the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity” (2011a :153).
Following the Heideggerian argumentation that “to build is in itself already to dwell . . . Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build” (presented in Ingold 2011a: 182) Ingold considers the perceiver as a dweller who bodily experiences the surroundings through the various phases of his life through his very involvement as a part of his own landscape. Put simply, “…through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it” (ibid.: 191). It is this totality of human actions in a given landscape, referred as “tasks”, that constitute the “taskscape” which enables us to observe the intersubjectivity that takes place inside the landscape through individual and collective labor and practices. The landscape, therefore, should not be regarded as equivalent to nature, but instead it should be viewed as the totality and interconnectedness of all the natural and man-made components of a loosely bounded area together with the human activities and notions embedded in any given location. Since human activities and goals are unending, landscapes seem to never be complete, never fully built, but they are instead in a state of constant construction. This is done so because, as Ingold suggests, people experience their live kinesthetically through movement inside the landscape and the ground. The latter notion is from Ingold an infinitely variegated, composite surface which seems to be undergoing continuous generation.
The connection between people and environment is in their similarities as the former are seen as what he calls “wayfarers”, meaning that they move about and experience life in an irregular, non-linear manner making pauses, backtracking, usually deviating their initial paths in order to get hold of a series of different experiences and sensations. “The wayfarer is a being who, in following a path of life, negotiates or improvises a passage as he goes along. In his movement as in life, his concern is to seek a way through not to reach a specific destination or terminus but to keep on going…” (2010 :126). Wayfaring, thus, could be seen as a tactic, rather than a strategy (De Certeau 1984) because the wayfarer acquires knowledge as he moves along the ground of the landscape, accumulating experiences.
In an attempt to summarize what has been presented in this section, we come to understand the relationships between people and landscape not as a given mental concept created in the minds of the former, but as an active everchanging relationship based on the deep interaction and engagement by people as sensualized embodied inhabitants across their life span with the affective and ever-present surroundings. To better understand the relationship between people and their environment we should have in mind Ingold’s example on weaving a basket (2000 :339-48). The surface of the basket does not exist before the act of weaving. The basket emerges through the very act of making caused by a series of skills and bodily know-how in part of the maker. Its structure develops through the weaving giving it its shape. The weaver has a general concept of what he wants to be his end-result, but the materialization of this product can only come to exist through the very involvement of the artisan.
Narrating the Memories:
Having addressed a series of phenomenological theories we can return to our case study observing that Nova Gorica could be seen as a historical, spatially concrete landscape within which the local population dwells. The inhabitants of the city are experiencing at the same time the dual process of the actual and symbolic construction of Nova Gorica as an ever-shifting urban project by the historical practices and decisions of the local authorities and population, together with the affect that the city has upon their own lives, individual and collective identities. During the transition of a socialist city into a capitalist one, each pass through three conceptual, interconnected linear levels of transformation (Neducin & Krkljes 2017). In the beginning, democratization, multiparty system, and privatization bring forth a political and institutional transformation promoting the competitive open market economy, bringing substantial economic changes. Inflation and unemployment are typically the most important results of the economic transformations that the countries undergo, forced to accept foreign investments, and open up quickly to the international markets. The third step, following the development of the other two is the urban reconstruction. Previously socialist oriented cities are asked to reconfigure themselves into market cities, where profit and entrepreneurial activities are set in the forefront of the local interests. Thus, it has been observed that the modern urban planning and development focuses more on gentrifying and commodifying the city-center.
During my interviews, the local narratives and opinions regarding Nova Gorica’s “Geist” were focusing on different aspects on the city’s socialist and post socialist history and geostrategic importance, looking at times both to East and West, in an attempt to find “the Other” with which they would be able to compare themselves. One important example was the importance that is placed on the creation of strong relationship with the Italian side since both countries are part of the European Union. Summarizing the main concern of the participants in my research, Nova Gorica nowadays seems to suffer from an identity crisis. The transition to the post socialist era caused an initial economic, political, and cultural upheaval in the city that had to deal with the increasingly intrusive capitalist morals, ethics, and ideology. Even though, as it was presented in the first section, the city was in constant, albeit somewhat limited, contact with their capitalist neighbors, the new system imported by the West implemented a new approach regarding the urban development of the city and people’s relation with it. The majority of the participants noted that nowadays Nova Gorica does not have a distinct character since it is “just a town by the border”. Indicative, however, was the negative connotations given to the casinos, which sprung up since the 1990s in the area. Despite the fact that many locals found a well-paying job in this industry, with the casinos accounting for many generous sponsorships and a great amount of the annual City Hall budget, people see these establishments as a moral corruption to the generally leftist feelings of the locals, giving a bad reputation to the city in the rest of Slovenia.
The city authorities, on the other hand, have tried to promote the manifold identities of Nova Gorica arguing that it is a green, youth oriented, European city where people have opportunities to excel. Indicative is the approach Nova Gorica has implemented to connect the new city with Gorizia, by lifting a portion of the border fences in the square outside the main railways station, signifying the unity of the two places. Furthermore, both cities submitted a common application for European capital of culture for the year 2025 aspiring to have a series of cultural and educational event regarding this peculiar European border area. Moreover, the socialist origin of the city could easily be spotted if one wanders around, due to the remaining street names, buildings, and statues in the squares. The tourist office together with a series of small border museums aspire to promote this origin story discoloring in a way the political connotations of the past.
We should therefore conclude that, as Bender suggests, “The same place at the same moment will be experienced differently by different people; the same place, at different moments, will be experienced differently by the same person; the same person may even, at a given moment, hold conflicting feelings about a place” (2006 :303). In anthropology it is common knowledge that during our stay in the field we may come across a series of different narratives and opinions, each formed in regard to a certain viewpoint and strategic interests. This is exactly what Rodman argues in her understanding of “Multivocality” and “Multilocality” (1992). Each individual has its own horizon upon which it stands and views its social reality. It is in a sense somewhat limited to its aspirations and position, not being able to view the totality of the social arena from above. Hence, the social sphere appears to be the fragmentation of the totality of the differentiated and sometimes conflicting local voices. One could argue that this subjective approach could be benefitted even further if it is expanded by the notion of intersubjectivity attempting to connect these individual viewpoints, shaping a negotiable social reality based on the collection of narratives by both the people and the establishments.
As it has been noted by many anthropologists studying the transformation of socialist cities there are many different and usually contradictory approaches that both inhabitants and institutions utilize to promote a desired narrative. Nanci Adler suggests that analyses of post socialist societies’ relationships to their pasts should consider “what is privileged to be remembered, what is officially disregarded, and what, in spite of official efforts at suppression, resists forgetting” as the result of “a struggle between contending constituencies for a past which may support their vision for the future” (2005: 1094). Generally, the socialist past seems to become a part of an official collective forgetting giving emphases in the pre socialist “Golden Age” and its different set of values. A second approach would be the stigmatization of the socialist period as a decaying time needed in order for the city’s rebirth in the capitalist era. A third, somewhat popular approach was the one of commodification of the past exerting all the political and ideological connotation from the landscape, making the past a touristic commodity, ready to be consumed by the voyeur culture.
If we take as a comparative case study the example of Nowa Huta in Poland, we can better understand the formation of the post socialist identity of Nova Gorica. Nowa Huta, was established in 1950, only three years after Nova Gorica, to host the new steelworks outside of Krakow, the second biggest polish city. Its urban planning aimed to promote the socialist ideology through the means of a spatial governmentality. From this reason the processes of industrialization and urbanization were central, achieving a monocultural partisan aesthetic all over the new built area. During the period of transition, however, a series of revitalization projects were initiated based on the pre-existing cultural heritage, while promoting the idea of a West oriented “green garden” city. This was done so, according to Pozniak, because after the Fall the city lost its privileged position as strategic socialist location in the map, while the urban infrastructure was neglected, and unemployment rates skyrocketed. What was needed was the promotion of the socialist past as a means of local pride and a product of commodification in order to revitalize the struggling area. Hence, a “communist tourism” (2015 :78) was developed for Western enthusiasts about the socialist past of Eastern Europe. At the same time, however, Nowa Huta reinvented its identity not as an important Steelworks town, but as a place of resistance to the socialist oppression, focusing on the pre-socialist past, the “true” “forgotten heritage”. Its socialist past did not disappear from the public sphere, like in many other cases, but the city endured a process of “decommunization”, as Balockaite suggests “by a narrative of reframing the socialist heritage” (2012 :58).
Nova Gorica, similarly, on an official level attempted to deal with its past not by forgetting it, but by reframing it, by projecting the 45 years of socialism as the origin story of the city, its privileged position and uniqueness. Slovenia was the most prosperous Republic in the Federation and its Independence was not scarred by a devastating war, apart from a ten-day conflict, unlike the Yugoslav Wars. Hence, I claim, a drastic change in the urban landscape was not urgent. It is true that many names around the country were changed and the socialist past was set aside, but overall, it was not purged. In the case of Nova Gorica one can still feel and experience the spatial presence of the socialist aesthetic as if the city, despite its 30 years post socialist development, is still a setting where socialism is allowed to reside in its “retirement”. It is this ambiguous sense the city radiates that I propose to be the source of confusion regarding the true identity of the Nova Gorica in the modern era.
Throughout the second section of this paper, I attempted to show my understanding of people as inhabitants of their own local landscape who experience life as they move in space becoming knowledgeable accumulating experiences. It is equally important, however, to place this landscape inside its historical particularities and examine the influence of ideology in the creation of the spatial surface of experience. In the case of Nova Gorica, the period of transition was not stigmatized by radical urban shifts, apart from the establishment of a series of casinos, which as it was mentioned above, were heavily criticized despite the economic security they offer. Therefore, it becomes apparent that regarding its spatial orientation Nova Gorica remains, in the eyes of the local population, this old socialist city upon which three or four generations grew up.
Having addressed my case study, showing the multiple ways one should approach the identity of a city based on the local perception, I should add two important interconnected theoretical concepts that will allow me to construct my final argumentation, these being affectivity and atmospheres. Jonas Frykman (2016) attempts to decipher the meaning of the word “affect” by tracing its etymology to the Latin afficere, connecting it with the notions of passivity and embodiment. He argues that affect is an innate, embodied sense that is cause by social stimuli, while it differs from emotion since the latter could be seen as the cultural expression of the initial affect. For that reason, the explanation what affect is challenges scholars, because every attempt of categorization is seen as a cultural appropriation of the emotions which result of it. Put simply, researchers can trace what affect does to people and not clearly determine what it is by giving a universal definition to it as an analytical category. This notion, however, is closely related with Ingold’s ideas of meshwork and leakage since the environment we interact with seems to affect our perception in a pre-cognital level in many different entangled ways.
It is worth mentioning the research of Nevena Škrbić Alempijevič and Sanja Potkonjak (2016), concerning Tito’s memorabilia in two open flea markets in Zagreb. The scholars chatted with many locals, who shared their views and stories about these objects and Tito in general. The discussions that arose concerning the past had as a starting point the relationship people had with the particular objects. Their findings revealed that socialism was not “dead” just because the regime fell, but that these objects embody exactly a form of cultural “Afterlife of Socialism” in post socialist, independent Croatia, creating a “Titoaffect”, as they argue, around these items. Collective memory is heavily influenced by the state, which often decides what should be remembered and what should be forgotten, but also by the people and their memories that are enhanced by the material presence of objects as silent indexes of the past events. As they put it, objects “serve as a stimulus to express something that would otherwise have remained concealed.” (2016 :120). Just discussing about the objects people get attached to them because of their shared history during Yugoslavia. As a result, affectivity according to them, can be manifested without even the presence of the objects themselves, just by their mental image and recollection.
While it is hard to decipher what affect is, it is easier to locate where it resides. Without making any metaphysical ontological claim, I argue that affectivity is to be found all around the spatial arrangements of the landscape. Atmospheres are a philosophical and phenomenological concept that tries to connect our relationship with the world and its influence on us by exploring the in between phenomenon of affectivity. According to the German philosopher Gernot Bohme “Atmosphere is the shared reality of the perceiver and the perceived. It is the reality of the perceived as the sphere of its presence and the reality of the perceiver insofar as he or she, in sensing the atmosphere, is bodily present in a particular way” (2017 :23-4). Atmospheres, therefore, are what we could call “the feeling in the air”, a very important instrument that affects our perception and our position as being-in-the-world. Through the atmosphere of a place, we can understand our own position inside a particular environment, our disposition (Befindlichkeit). In other words, the atmosphere of a city has to be sensed in order to experience its presence, not simply be described. This is done so because, as phenomenology suggests, experiencing the world one person needs its own bodily presence through the movement of which one can explore and be affective during the wayfaring course of his life. According to the geographer Ben Anderson “Affective atmospheres are a class of experience that occur before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-human materialities, and in between subject-object distinctions” (2009 :78).
The urban atmosphere radiates mainly from the city’s architecture and urban planning. In the case of Nova Gorica the initial idea was to create a socialist utopia, a “park with blocks”. This magnificent plan was quickly scrapped, however, few years after the fall between Tito and Stalin in 1948. Moreover, its urban planning during the 1950’s and the introduction of regional self-management in the following decades stopped being funded by the Central Committee forcing the local authorities to solve the problem of urban development with their own means. This resulted in what a participant argued “Mish-mash. It’s ( the city) a collage of something that it could be, but it did not become what it should be.” Another participant noted that a “Big plan with no money dissolves into thousand few plans, so the city becomes a patchwork.”
We come across, therefore, a meshwork of different small urban plans in a city that was never fully formed into what it was supposed to be, but nevertheless affects inhabitants’ opinions and narratives. What does ultimately constitute Nova Gorica’s place identity? According to Balockaite, a place identity concerns a wide range of symbols, monuments, landmarks, but also narratives. In addition, “place identity is created by processing a historical memory, active remembrance, and active forgetting” (2012 :47). Furthermore, she argues that socialism in many cases was seen as a “dissonant heritage”, one that had to be recontextualized if not obliterated from the public scene.
Nova Gorica having numerous partisan busts spread around the city, public art, a series of socialist statues, the remaining stone engraves with the name of Tito and a museum dedicated in the socialist origin of the city and the relationship it developed with the Italian side of the border has failed, as I argue, to have a successful, clean cut decommunization. Instead, what the atmosphere of the city radiates to its inhabitants is a sense of spatial ambiguity, combining the socialist collage with the post socialist, capital oriented establishments. Referring to the importance of statues as public art of remembrance, Bozidar Jezernik connects the Slovene word of “spomenik” (monument) with the word “spomin” (memory) arguing that “A monument to a specific person or event, placed in a public space, serves as a materialisation of the social memory of a particular social community; this is, indeed, a fundamental element of the identity of individuals and society” (2011 :182). Each regime establishes its own “national statues” in the public sphere in an attempt to materialize its ideology, struggles, successes, and important personalities, while at the same time hides or decontextualized the previous one.
Nova Gorica as a planned socialist city was designed to project the partisan ideology through the worker blocks, the green open spaces, the surrounding factories and the omnipresent of Tito’s “Geist” looking upon them from the pick of the surrounding hills. Following the logic of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, “war monuments don’t just care if the memory of the dead is preserved… Not only do they commemorate memory to the dead, they offer future generations an identity to which they must respond…The erected monuments thus carry messages of identity” (2002 :286-289). Therefore, any kind of public art may be constructed as an instrument of remembrance, serving the official ideology, but at the same time sets the mood or atmosphere of the given landscape by its very materiality as it can be seen as a central knot inside the meshwork.
Conclusion:
Throughout this paper I tried to depict the multiple approaches one should have in mind while he or she is researching the identity of a city and how local’s perceptions are formed about its character. Initially I was interested in addressing the phenomenological understanding of people as inhabitants, positioned inside a lived landscape, consisted by both the actual material environment, together with the potential further spatial development. People live their lives as wayfarers moving around the spatial landscape gaining knowledge and experience by accumulating the sum of their bodily experiences. At the same time, it is equally important to emphasis the historic processes that overcome the sphere of everyday intersubjectivity, such as wars, border divisions and state ideologies.
Nova Gorica was developed as a “flagship” socialist city next to the border with capitalist Italy, few kilometers away from the center on an old settlement with the same name that was lost during the Second World War. Its urban planning intended the creation of a brand new modern socialist green city for its residence. Nevertheless, this endeavor was quickly underfunded since the interest of the Central Committee shifted in the meantime, letting the local authorities and residents to develop the city in any way they saw fit, creating a mosaic of different aesthetic additions. Furthermore, after the Slovene independence from the Yugoslav Federation, Nova Gorica became the “city of casinos”, or “Slovenian Las Vegas”, as some participants commented the development of the city in the post-socialist era. At the same time, the socialist past was not forgotten, but instead it was commemorated through the remaining public art, the partisans’ busts spread around the parks, but most importantly by the establishment of a border museum in 2005 in order to trace and exhibit the socialist development of the city along its Italian counterpart.
To conclude, Nova Gorica is a new settlement of just 74 years history. Nevertheless, the landscape upon which it was constructed was not a tabula rasa, a clean slate. The Austrohungarian past, the two World Wars, the border divisions, the ideological antagonism, the modernist urban planning, the natural landscape, the international interactions and connection, the Independence that brought a shift in memory practices, the post socialist urban and economic transformation, the new European orientation, are all embedded and engraved upon the ground of surface of the dwelling landscape of the city. Having all these in mind we come to understand what truly constitutes the atmosphere of the city of Nova Gorica and how its inhabitants, experiencing in their everyday life and movement this collage of opposing, conflicting or even lost potentialities shape their narratives regarding the identity of their city and in a second level their own identity as locals.
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