‘Mafia Baroque’: post‐socialist architecture and urban planning in Bulgaria

This paper traces the reception of the architectural style known as ‘Mafia Baroque’ within the professions of architecture and urban planning in Bulgaria. The debate within these professions was strongly linked to the general decline of power among former intellectual elites and the specific decline of architects and planners, who were sidelined as arbiters of ‘good taste’ and disempowered as regulators of urban growth. The reaction to this style also highlights the rise in public concern over corruption and organized crime and dissatisfaction with post‐socialist urbanization. This paper chronicles the extent of changes in construction and regulation in Bulgaria during the 1990s and argues that planners and architects were challenged not only by their professional marginalization but also by a deeper embarrassment over cultural change. It then relates this debate to broader post‐socialist anxieties over insufficient regulation of urbanization and fear of failing to meet Western European goals for economic and political change.     

Network closure and integration in the mid-20th century American mafia

Criminal networks are thought to be biased toward decentralization and security rather than integration and efficiency. This article examines this tradeoff in a large-scale national criminal network spanning more than 700 members of 24 distinct American mafia families operating in the mid-20th century. Producing a novel network image of the American mafia as a set of highly differentiated yet intertwined islands of criminal activity, the analysis uncovers a small-world structure that allowed both for strong intragroup closure and high intergroup connectivity. This balance reflected a division of network labor in which integrative bridging connections were disproportionately concentrated among a small number of criminals. Furthermore, the criminals who held such bridging ties tended to be either low- or high-status—but not of middling status—within their respective organizations.