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

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.