The urban political ecologies of the green spaces of socialist housing estates: an analysis of green spaces in Bucharest, Romania

Abstract

This paper employs the Urban Political Ecology (UPE) framework in order to decipher the unequal geohistorical developments of the Green Spaces of Socialist Housing Estates (GSSHE) in Bucharest under socialist and post-socialist urban political economies. We respond to the call for provincializing and expanding UPE research beyond the Western world with our theoretically informed, empirically grounded study, as literature on socialist and post-socialist socio-natures is virtually non-existent. Bucharest’s GSSHE developed during the socialist era through an allocation of informal temporary land use rights that engendered practices of gardening and agriculture. During post-socialism, residents retained informal rights to use the land, engaging in activities such as gardening, temporary constructions, and house expansion. Simultaneously, patterns of both formal and informal privatization also began to emerge. The last decade brought strong institutional-led change, as district mayors of Bucharest redeveloped green spaces to serve the shifting conditions within the capitalist urban political economy. As some spaces have been completely destroyed, converted to parking spaces, bulldozed for temporary and illegal constructions, or placed under a green revitalization program, these more recent developments have come into conflict with, and partially into a negotiated relationship with, the past legacies of gardening, alternative welfare, and their preserved inequalities.