When I first visited Dimitrovgrad in 2005, the impression of a large town marketplace spreading out to all parts of the town seemed to hang all over the place. The interurban bus pulled up on the street leading to the marketplace, and the procession of cars heading that way did not end until the small hours of the day. The vendors opened their stands at two o’clock in the morning, and the dark alleys hustled and bustled with people. As if the marketplace, once forced out of the town, along the railway tracks, had slowly but steadily spread beyond the farm land where it stood; it had taken over the old sports hall and was making its way into the residential blocks of flats. As if the impression of invasion was dictated by the sentiments shared by the vendors themselves – the marketplace was shameful and dirty, even if indispensable and real. Dimitrovgrad, the town of the youth, “the beating heart of the industry”, had become the town with the largest open-air marketplace in 1990. The impression changed when I revisited the marketplace in 2008 – getting off the train, I found a seemingly more tamed and hidden marketplace with changed working hours. There is a deeper change in the structure of capital behind this change on the surface, which I will try to analyze here.

There are more than half a million large panel and reinforced concrete dwellings in Bulgaria, their exterior rehabilitation (known as sanirane in Bulgarian) being subject to public policies from above and business initiatives from below. These relations of interdependence could be either in conflict or in agreement. The conflict goes deeper than it seems because the state provides mostly for the normative regulation of the process, whereas the financial burden is carried by the flat owners sharing floor ownership of the building. This is all specified both in the European and in the national legislative framework, and will be further elaborated in a comprehensive set of sublegislative acts. The lack of agreement has produced visual effects in the urban space, particularly in its periphery.