Smaranda:  ‘I live in a super busy and hectic city. I wish I had more green spaces around’. Bucharest, Romania

Smaranda is a Romanian woman in her early fifties who moved to her three-bedroom flat in a 13 storied block in her childhood in the early 1960s. At that time, the block and that entire area of Bucharest were predominantly inhabited by railway workers including her father who received the flat from the Grivița Roșie [Red Grivița] railway factory where he worked.  After 1989 and the change of the communist regime, her parents managed to buy the flat for a small sum, approximately 400 US Dollars.  Smaranda enjoyed living in her flat with her parents and her sister while her mother and grandmother were still alive. Back then, Smaranda felt that Bucharest was less busy, with fewer cars and pollution on the streets. Smaranda currently lives with her partner and they have no children. For several years, she has hosted her nephew, her sister’s boy, who is in his 20s. She loves him dearly, ‘as being her own son’. She buys healthy food and cooks for him since he is training to become a professional sportsman.

Smaranda’s kitchen furniture and the cooking stove were bought during the socialist period. She would like to change them but the furniture makes her feel at home since it reminds her of her mother. ‘I have a spare bedroom that needs to be refurbished’ Smaranda writes on one of the cards from the research pack. Smaranda says that whenever people in the block change their furniture or large electrical items, they leave the old furniture on the block’s skyline (internal) balcony where the rubbish chute is located, or on the ground floor. Some of Smaranda’s neighbours also bring large objects to the corner or the back of the block.

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