Encounters Across Borders. Modernist Ideas and Professional Practices in the 1970s Romania

Building on several international professional meetings of architects organized in Romania or abroad, this article details how various modernist principles, traditionally subsumed to Western European culture, were gradually reinterpreted as an object of policy and professional knowledge on urban space in the second and third world countries. The article analyses the dialogue between Romanian architects and their foreign colleagues. It highlights how these conversations adjusted the hierarchies and power relations between states and hegemonic  centres of knowledge production. In  this  sense, it contributes to the recent research on the means by which the "trans- nationalization of expertise" "transformed various (semi)peripheral states into new centres of knowledge and thus  outlines  a  new analytical space where domestic actions of the Romanian state in the area of urban policies are to be analysed not as isolated practices of a totalitarian regime, but as expressions of the entanglements between industrialization models, knowledge flows and models of territoriality that were not only globally relevant, but they also often received specific regional, national and local forms.

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