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Accepted Paper:
Walking around Bucharest's dormitory quarters: some notes on serendipitous intimacy at the temporal outskirts of a postsocialist city
Alina Apostu
(SOAS University of London)
An audio-visual accompaniment to walks around one of Bucharest's dormitory quarters built during the communist regime, questioning the role of happenstance intimacy between infrastructure and its inhabitants in the continuous transformations since the fall of the regime.
Paper Abstract:
This presentation draws on walking as multimodal ethnographic method to investigate occurrences of intimacy between the inhabitants and the infrastructure of one of Bucharest's dormitory quarters, initially built as part of the massive urban transformation demanded under the communist regime. As a work in progress, the presentation draws primarily on auto-ethnography and observations of public life inspired by the work of architects and urbanists such as Jan Gehl. Using audio-visual material, the presentation aims to explore the serendipity of ordinary life shaped under particular power regimes and to interrogate the notion of intimacy as a lens to understand public space and public life as they have been transforming under the communist regime and in the 34 years since its fall.