The Bright Capitalist Future is Here to Stay (personal geography)

The rubbish which Bulgarian people produced in their Communist past was little. They were cherishing and reusing the rare, usually imported plastic bag again and again, the food left-overs were used to feed the domestic animals or in a compost, in order to buy a drink you needed to exchange glass bottles. The shoppers provided their own packaging – net bags, trolleys, aluminium containers. There were special recycling depots called “Secondary Resources”, where one could submit old paper, metal, glass in exchange for some money. These were resources needed, recycled and reused. With the fall of the wall, hunger stroke for a while, but then the political system got sort of democratised and imports flooded, and plastic bags of all colours penetrated the everyday. Capitalism arrived, promising development = consumer comforts. Done with the totalitarian abstention! Now, people, you can speak Out and (hopefully soon) buy MORE. So from a country with an established recycling structure – like the depots mentioned above (they shut down), Bulgaria was swept by plastic rubbish. Somehow the Bulgarian could not do without the foam trays and cling filmed tomatoes, as they would have done before. Now, more business is generated – more packaging is made, new recycling plants are being built, sophisticated systems imported from countries which have been enjoying the nylon cucumber wrap for much longer. Bulgarian farmers were then sent to courses to learn about Organic produce. The courses were held in the same shop selling new synthetic fertilizers. People from the developed countries came to build organic goat farms, next door to the village facility of the same type which had been rearing goat on grass, bush and salt for centuries in huts made of earth and stone. The Developers needed expensive, elaborate imported mechanisms and structures. Then with the entry in the EU these mechanisms became essential for all… What the arrival of consumer capitalism did, was to eradicate the existent sustainable structures, revamp it, and resell it back as a hip trend. Developing Bulgaria is going where developed Capitalist Countries are coming from. Can we only weep?
Restore, rearrange, reassemble, revamp, renovate, revise, recover, redesign, return - the Parthenon marbles - redo, respect, rent: verbs that start with re-, produce Junkspace.

Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace