Prototypes for modern living: planning, sociology and the model village in inter-war Romania (MUȘAT 2015)

Raluca Mușat (St Mary's University Twickenham, London), Prototypes for modern living: planning, sociology and the model village in inter-war Romania, „Social History”, Routledge, vol. 40, no. 2, 157-184, 23 Apr 2015, DOI:10.1080/03071022.2015.1014177

 

(159-60) After the First World War, many model villages were built in south-eastern Europe in particular, both as solutions to the extensive population transfers, and as part of state-building initiatives that often involved the re-ordering and modernization of peasant societies.

(165) Gusti seized this opportunity to put his fully formed vision of rural reform into practice, drawing inspiration from the experience of the monographic research teams and from the many similar initiatives in other countries (including Yugoslavia, Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria and Austria) (39). 
39 = D. Gusti, Politica Culturii. 30 de prelegeri și comunicări organizate de Institutul Social Român (Bucharest, 1933), 473–86.

(173) In contrast to secular visions of modernity (such as in the Soviet Union or Turkey), this version sought to rationalize religion and use it as a source of morality underpinning social order. (76) 
76 = Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building, op. cit., 103–4.

(174) As with its counterparts abroad, such as the British village hall, German and Austrian Volksheim, the Turkish Halkevleri, the American rural civic centre and the French maison pour tous, the ca˘min cultural had a key role in the modernization of the countryside. (78) 
78 = Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building.

(176) Serbian migrant builders had brought the first brick houses to Dioști in the mid-nineteenth century, introducing a new architectural style that copied the urban petty bourgeois architecture of the nearby town of Caracal.