Overlapping Nostalgias: Negotiating Space and Labor in the (Post)Communist City of Bucharest

This article explores infrastructural transformations within communist and postcommunist Bucharest, arguing that they constituted the foundation for divergent discourses of nostalgia. The themes of production and domesticity provide a spatial focus and a framework for the investigation of this phenomenon in relation to workers as an urban social group. In reference to (post)communist Bucharest, I go beyond the spatial and temporal ambiguity that seems to trigger nostalgia, and I suggest its concrete embodiment in the structure and praxes of the city. I propose that under the communist regime, the experience of nostalgia was a way of coming to terms with the abrupt break from precommunist material and symbolic conditions, while the theme of labor became a vehicle for the normalization of those changes. The understanding and praxes of labor in the new condition of the city became a vehicle for nostalgia, and constituted the main reference point in the appropriation of the new urban and symbolic structure

Urban courtyards: Ideologies of domesticity and the landscape of welfare in communist Bucharest

This article addresses the emergence of urban landscapes as a form of welfare tied to the provision of housing in pre-communist and communist Bucharest. Despite the importance of welfare landscapes in post-war capitalist Western Europe, this notion has been little addressed in relation to former communist countries in the Eastern Bloc. The case of Romania is exemplary in articulating how the phenomenon emerged within a planned economy where urban planning and housing provision were exclusively state-controlled. Welfare landscapes shifted during the communist regime, from their prior manifestation as a dense network of garden courtyards and public gardens to become a regulated system of parks with specific ideological purposes. This article proposes that state-planned welfare landscapes were paralleled by ‘urban courtyards’ that rescued the memory of the pre-communist garden city and informally established different extents of a ‘good life’ within standardised housing ensembles