At Home in the Eastern Bloc | Five Perspectives on Collective Housing During the Socialist Era

Across Europe, there are more than 200 ‘new towns’ and numerous ‘satellite neighbourhoods’. They were built from scratch in the post-war period through standardisation and prefabrication, primarily to accommodate the industrial workforce. Although developed in different contexts, they share similar origins, functional organisation, design principles and age. In Eastern Europe, during the period of state socialism, large housing estates embodied a vision of housing as a right rather than an economic privilege, providing equitable infrastructure for collective life.

“At Home in the Eastern Bloc” presents a series of documentary films made in different Central and Eastern European countries – Czechoslovakia, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Romania – between 1959 and 1987, depicting various newly built collective housing estates. These productions capture different moments in the lives of these developments, from partially inhabited construction sites and the stories of their first pioneering residents to everyday life in established neighbourhoods, the formation of neighbourly relationships and the development of distinctive ways of living.

Presenting documentary productions from several socialist countries reveals surprising similarities, but also nuances that distinguish each place. Spanning various forms, from essays and investigative reports to monographs and sociological research, these representations of housing reflect both official discourse and the filmmakers’ scope for action, as well as the social realities and everyday lives of residents. In the current regional context, where these neighbourhoods are perceived as places without history or identity, where people simply live, we hope that the films brought together in this programme will reopen the discussion about these neighbourhoods with their complex social histories, a shared legacy of the public housing project.

Ana Szel

Researcher, curator, PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the “I.L. Caragiale” National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest, where her doctoral research focuses on useful cinema in socialist Romania. She is among the founders of the new master’s programme dedicated to the preservation and curation of audiovisual archives, and has an academic background in music and cinema. She has worked with film archives since 2016, and her research interests include marginal filmmaking practices, silent cinema and cinema as a field of interdisciplinary research. In 2022, together with Christian Ferencz-Flatz, she organised the first international conference dedicated to useful cinema under state socialism in Bucharest and is co-editor (alongside Lucie Cesalkova and Christian Ferencz-Flatz) of the volume “Useful Cinema in State Socialist Europe”, published by Routledge. She is a doctoral researcher within the project “Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis” at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, and the PCE project “The Emerging Aesthetics of the Commodity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Advertising Film in Postsocialist Romania” at UNATC.

Alex Axinte

Architect, researcher, lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture, Faculty of Horticulture, University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest (USAMV), and New Europe College Fellow (2025–2026). He obtained a Master of Social Sciences (2018) and a PhD in Architecture (2024) from the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on informal practices of managing shared spaces in the context of collective housing in the post-socialist city. He initiated and coordinated the Garaj DESCHIS project space (2020–2025) in Drumul Taberei, which led to the research project Map of Neighbourhood Libraries (2022), and co-edited the publication “Telling the Story. New Towns | New Narratives”, published by INTI, Rotterdam (2025).

Irina Tulbure

Architect. She documents, researches, teaches and writes about architecture from the recent past and how this heritage can be understood, reassessed and embraced today. She has been involved in various cultural projects, exhibitions and summer schools related to this subject. Associate Professor in the Department of Architectural History and Theory and Heritage Conservation at UAUIM, Bucharest; New Europe College Fellow, Getty-NEC Fellowship, 2011–2012; collaborator with the Union of Architects of Romania on its photographic archive (2014–2017); PhD in Architecture from UAUIM (2011); author of the book “Architecture and Urban Planning in Romania, 1944–1960: Constraint and Experiment” (2016).

Gruia Bădescu

Gruia Bădescu is a researcher in architectural history, urban studies and memory studies, as well as an urban designer. Both his research and practice focus on post-socialist cities, mobility and public space, as well as post-conflict cities, with an emphasis on the former Yugoslavia and Beirut, examining the relationship between urban transformations, memory and dealing with a difficult past. He has also studied how societies in Latin America engage with the legacy of dictatorships and political violence through architectural, forensic and memorial approaches. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge, with a thesis on reconstruction in the former Yugoslavia, and a master’s degree in Urban Design and Social Science from LSE. He is a researcher at the University of Konstanz and a visiting lecturer at SNSPA. As a New Europe College Fellow (2026–2027), he is working on a book about urban imaginaries of modernity, destruction and reconstruction.

Mihai Burcea

Graduate and PhD holder from the Faculty of History at the University of Bucharest, with a dissertation titled Fighting for an Illusion: Romanian Volunteers in the International Brigades in Spain (2017). He was a Research Fellow at the National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism (2018–2023) and is currently an Associate Researcher at the “Florin Constantiniu” Centre for Russian and Soviet Studies in Bucharest. Founding member of the civic association “Miliția Spirituală” (2002). Recent publications: “Defending the State Order”: The Siguranța’s Pursuit of Gheorghe Crosneff in Interwar Romania, Bucharest, University of Bucharest Publishing House, 2016. The Spectres of Dej (co-editor), in collaboration with Ștefan Bosomitu, Iași, Polirom Publishing House, 2012. Mihail Roller (1908–1958): A Short Biography, in collaboration with Ștefan Bosomitu, in “IICCMER Yearbook”, Vol. VII – 2012, Iași, Polirom Publishing House, 2013. “The Party’s Inquisitors”, I. Elvira Gaisinschi, in “Arhivele Totalitarismului”, Year XXVIII, Nos. 106–107, 1–2/2020.