Cultural Theory and Intellectual Politics

An Interview with Russell Berman, Department of German Studies, Stanford University

Restructuring the Bulgarian wood-processing sector: linkages between resource exploitation, capital accumulation, and redevelopment in a postcommunist locality

Based on recent primary research, in this paper I explore the emerging contours of the postcommunist forest-products sector in Bulgaria and, in particular, the ramifications for community-level restructuring in a small, mountainous region located in the southwestern part of the country. After ten years of postcommunist transformation, the current government has only very recently initiated the task of wholesale reform of communist-era structures extant within the forestry and forest-products sectors. This is an unavoidably complex process, involving reorganising tenure over forest resources (with some measure of restitution of formerly private forest resources to precommunist era owners), privatising and decentralising logging and related activities in the woods, redefining the role of the state in oversight, management, and planning, and the development of a supportive institutional context for the growth of, in particular, small and medium-sized private enterprises throughout the forest-products chain. Restructuring of the wood-products sector in one Bulgarian mountain locality is the primary focus of the paper, with a five-fold descriptive typology of wood-processing enterprises proposed. Based in part on manifest differentiations in corporate governance and institutional network orientation (including markets), this typology assists with the analysis of challenges to sustainable local restructuring in resource dependent communities. These models are discussed in turn in terms of both the theoretical implications for Bulgaria's 'transition model of development' and the empirical ramifications for regional development and well-being.

Localities, natural resources and transition in Eastern Europe

This paper develops the claim that an emergent 'transition model of development' is resulting in the (re)marginalization of rural localities in post-communist countries. The specific case study of local development in a rural Bulgarian locality, since 1989, illustrates some of the ways in which this new model of development is combining elements of the communist and pre-communist development models alongside incipient market-capitalist relations. Careful attention to issues of 'path dependence' (cf. Stark, 1992; Smith and Swain, 1998) proves quite useful for conceptual elaboration of the 'transition model of development'. The important role of the natural environment as the stage for local protest generated by this transition model of development and as the ultimate source of economic surplus is also discussed. In the conclusion some of the broader implications of these findings for the study of post-communist transition are explored

Paradoxes of conservation and development in postsocialist Bulgaria: Recent controversies

Based on extensive primary research in the 1990s a number of contemporary Bulgarian environmental controversies are examined, which highlight some of the paradoxes of sustainable development in a postsocialist context. Water sector controversies such as the Djerman-Skakavitsa diversion project forest and national park and other protected area management controversies in the Rila and Pirin National Parks and the Rhodope mountains are sketched. Extension and creation of new protected areas presents both challenges and opportunities to local residents and conservation agencies alike but creative solutions are at least being considered within a framework of sustainable regional development. It is found that dependence on natural resource hinterlands for commodity and non-commodity uses provides for new, complex and contested regulation between stakeholders and the postsocialist state at a variety of scales from the local to the global, with nested though mutable, scale-dependent relations. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

The hidden histories and geographies of neotraditional town planning: The case of Seaside, Florida

The neotraditional resort development of Seaside, Florida merits special attention from geographers and urban planners because of the normative claims made by its designers and because it has garnered widespread attention from practising architects, planners, and social critics. Under the banners of 'neotraditionalism' and 'community planning' the principles implemented in Seaside have also been employed in numerous other developments in North America. Central to Seaside's appeal and normative content is the deliberate attempt to resurrect an idealised past of uniquely American communitarianism through the skillful manipulation of urban form. We develop our critique of neotraditionalism through a deconstructive analysis of the physical and ideological spaces of Seaside. Specifically, we discuss the origin and development of Seaside, the centrality of its urban and architectural codes, the paradoxical deployment of public and private spaces, and the emergence of a distinctively neotraditional subject. Our basic claim is that neotraditionalism is actually a carefully veiled form of what Foster has called "postmodernism of reaction"