Microdynamics of Transition
or How Six Pairs of Dancing Children Activate Urban Change

Doina Petrescu
lecture in the series Looking Forward: The Future of the Future
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation,
Columbia University February 25, 2000











"Transition" is the keyword in talking about the radical transformation of the socio-political and economic structures in the former socialists countries of Eastern Europe during the last ten years.This period of post-communist transition is an experience which is neither yet completely defined theoretically or politically, nor indeed predictable from a sociological point of view, one which is not only both a "trangressive" and a"transversal" process, but also a "mysterious" and a "painful" undertaking. Transition involves contradictions, deformations, condensations and non-linear elaborations within both existing and the newly adopted models. Phenomena such as "migrations", "mobilities", "disappearances", "regressions", "contaminations", "dystopias" are the new socio-spatial practices which connect heterogeneous economies, politics and cultures. The spatial and social material is processed through discontinuous variations in scale where "the local", the "micro-political" and the "economies of proximity" may have a great effect on global variations.
Transition throws up new forms of project and challenges the current practices. New ways of practising and thinking in architecture including curatorial practices, hybrid forms of education and productive activity, communication and networking agencies, civic engagement and professional assistance in the autopoïetic transformations of communities and institutions, new "inclusions" as well as new "exclusions"are emerging within the European spatial reconfiguration.

The range of professional skills required of the architect also changes: the architect of transition is asked to act as interpreter, initiator and project curator. This practice is no longer directive and prescriptive, but prospective and performative, in trying to invent new methods and forms of spatial intervention.
    Somewhere between the "dream work" and the "topology of desire", between the ideology of "laisser faire" and the practice of "faire avec", new interpretative models of transitional phenomena are emerging.
I have chosen to present a few projects within different locations in Romania, emerging out of different conditions, involving different kind of actors and collaborative networks.
Location is important in defining the space/time framework of a process.
It should not only be understood as a" place" but more as a node in a dynamic network. In this sense, I have strategically chosen a range of heterogeneous examples in order to provide more conclusive "approximations" of the transitional phenomena, each time from another point of view.
    These projects are initiated by local or national NGO, by local institutions or individuals sometimes in collaboration, sometimes in opposition with European Programs, international institutions and transnational companies. They are not conceived anymore by masters- architects but by individual or collective project managers and curators. Some of the projects are contextualised with the implementation of the European programs, others are just local or individual projects confronting transitional phenomena at different scales. All these projects are performative: they are taking place through a continual process of reiteration, adaptation and evolution within their practices.
The context of the transitional practices is one which is by definition "in movement". A close and careful analysis should not proceed by cutting the content of the experience from the context in which its meaning originated but by an interdisciplinary, continually shifting and remixing analysis of the interwoven complexity of the social, historical and spatial conditions within their inseparability and interdependence.
    Most of the visual material which accompanies this text has been originally provided by the project managers and consist in partly working material, partly images they have chosen by themselves to represent their processes and realisations. In a way, all these practices are promoting aesthetics which are not separated of their ethics.


    I’m grateful to all those who helped me with material, comments and fabrication for this lecture and specially to: Alain Chiaradia, Adrian Ciobanu, Dana Diminescu, Mihaela Efrim, Maria Ionescu, Vincze Istvàn, Heidrun König, Neil Leach, Constantin Petcou, Dorin Stefan, Olivia Strachina.

    Doina Petrescu is a Franco-Romanian architect and a research fellow at the Centre of Women's Studies, University of Paris VIII. She is also the co-founder of ReDesign studio in Paris, an interdisciplinary practice which consists in networking, generating and curating events and designs. She currently teaches in France, Romania and USA. Organizer of the international conference Alterities: Interdisciplinarity& "Feminine" Practices of Space, Author of articles in Architecture and Revolution (Routledge), La Danse et la Pensée (Germs), Hieroglyphics of Space (Routledge), Revue des Anales Urbaines, etc. Editor of the book "Alterities: 'Feminine' Practices, Technology and Poetical Politics of Space" (forthcoming).