Discreet Commoning in the Bloc: Informal practices of 'living together' in the collective housing estates of post-socialist Bucharest

In an abrupt urbanisation, the socialist state constructed large collective housing districts, radically transforming the Romanian cities. After 1989, thriving neoliberal policies of radical privatisation, collapsing public infrastructure and rampant individualization, affected urban communities. Despite dominant narratives of socialist planning “failure” (Murawski, 2018), the legacy of the socialist-modernist housing project still endures (Marin & Chelcea, 2018). The remains of a public grid in need still trigger dwellers’ practices of informal appropriation and everyday protocols of care and repair (Mihailescu, et al., 1994). Inhabitants adopted and collectively transformed the in-between spaces, articulating a specific practice of living together that resembles a “quiet sustainability” (Smith & Jehlička, 2013). In this context, the research aimed to document the ephemeral and informal practices of the post-socialist Bucharest from the perspective of emerging urban commons (Stavrides, 2019). By noticing manifestations of urban informality (Acuto, et al., 2019) and instances of everyday conviviality (Illich, 2009) the research seeks to reveal them as local forms of “latent” commons (Tsing, 2019; De Angelis, 2017).
The inquiry adopted a qualitative methodology, with a strong participative approach. Methods included storytelling, situated research, containing interviewing, ethnography and drawing, completed by mapping, live projects and archival research. The fieldwork was situated in Drumul Taberei district and anchored around the case study of OPEN Garage project-space. Working as an “extra room” for inhabitants and researchers alike, the space allowed the research to engage and support the informally driven urban commons. Field research identified examples of informal practices of transforming, using and maintaining the in between spaces among the district, such as gardens by the bloc, open garages or adopted libraries. Case study analysis illustrated that sometimes also individual pursuits of informal care and ephemeral appropriation may trigger communities into coagulation, generating implicit, discrete forms of commoning. Findings evidenced how an acute sense of creative disobedience compensates for the local urban commoning low level of explicit organisation. By resisting impulses of their excessive formalization, the research points towards articulating and supporting the conditions when latency might blossom into discreet forms of commoning.