Jiu is of particular interest because of the way successive state agents sought to alter its social landscape. The ministries in Vienna and Budapest set out plans for modern mining, industrial and social spaces in such new towns as Petrosani, Petrila, Vulcan and Lupeni. The local peasantry was to be swept away and replaced with laborers from across the empire to populate these towns. The everyday lives of workers would be organized based on their professional and marital status, provided with generous benefits such as subsidized housing, heating and light. Yet Jiu’s miners proved both willing and able to organize themselves in resistance to the state and to mining companies, using both the strike and their privileged role as “makers” of modernity to highlight the problems of these model communities.
Habsburg planners sought to build an industry around rational, modern, and most of all, universal principles. Yet this did not engender a predictable course of development. Local markers of economic modernity (e.g. industrial development, capital investment, legal structures supporting private property ownership, socialism) coexisted within an area deeply divided between other hierarchies. Jiu was split between peasants and townsmen, the urban communities further divided by categories of ethnicity, confession, gender, wealth and political affiliation. This paper seeks to explore the tensions between the aspirations of the planners and the problems of daily life in the model coal towns of Jiu.