Urban Space and Neighborhood Culture – the Rahova-Uranus Project
As part of the Offensive Generosity Initiative, this project contributes to the development of a free and active archive aiming to document the life of the Rahova-Uranus neighborhood and its inhabitants. The goal of the research includes, but it is not limited to the visual and textual gathering of personal experiences of peoples whose voices are otherwise rarely heard in the public. Our aim is also to contribute to the articulation of claims on behalf of a community that is in danger of eviction ever since the plans for the area’s further gentrification are officially confirmed.
Memory and oral history
As other marginal neighborhoods, Rahova-Uranus is particularly under-represented in the urban history of Bucharest. By using the methods of oral history, our goal is to understand the undocumented past of Rahova-Uranus, and hence the ways in which personal memories are attached to urban spaces. This section of the project includes narrative life-story interviews with inhabitants regarding their pasts and present in the area, but also the mapping of the neighborhood in terms of architectural and population change. The temporal-historical aspect of our study can develop our knowledge regarding the ways in which different regimes and urban policies were aiming to erase the past. At the same time, personal testimonies and life-stories are still valuable resources for the understanding of the various layers of urban history as they are still present in the built and the social environment of the neighborhood.
Gentrification, the newcomers and the struggles around the future of Rahova-Uranus
Amongst the new actors today in the Rahova-Uranus neighborhood we can both find those who took the chance provided by privatization and got back houses back as previous owners; while at the same time there is also a growing amount of new investors. In terms of their activities the central question is related to their future plans and visions regarding the neighborhood while at the same time these ideas should be confronted with the expectations of the inhabitants and their perceptions of the area’s future. More particularly, the new investments put the notions of private and public sphere into question, as some of the new investors – seeing the potential of the area in design-, and creative industry-related activities – are interested in the gradual privatization of public spaces which often makes it impossible to maintain the ways in which inhabitants used these places previously. In other cases new investments are completely detached from their surrounding environments and the investors don’t even intend to connect themselves more to the space and the peoples of the neighborhood. With regards to these problems, we also need to take into consideration the survival strategies of the predominantly poor inhabitants of Rahova-Uranus, which often determines the relatively short run of the plans they have regarding their future lives. To understand the claims and counter-claims regarding the neighborhood and its future, we intend to use the method of focus-group interviews that allow space for the mutual articulation and debate of the different perspectives.
Neighborhood culture
Deprived or marginal areas of cities are often imagined as ‘cultureless’ spaces where the outcomes of long-term poverty made people incapable for developing their creativities. As we intend to prove in our project, instead of taking them at a face-value, such negative images require critical revision related to their exclusivist understandings of what counts as culture and what doesn’t. In order to do so, our attempt is to provide a vivid and subversive picture of the expressive cultures in the Rahova-Uranus area. This includes the forms of dance, music and performance as integral parts of the everyday life; the ways in which taste or fashion is understood and represented predominantly young inhabitants of the neighborhood; the ways in which they use streets and squares for leisure-activities; and also the creative practices of language-use exemplified by several items of ‘neighborhood-slang’. These forms of expressive culture are all contributing to what we call ‘neighborhood culture’, through which both urban space and everyday life are becoming meaningful categories for those who live in the area. Moreover, as all of these forms of taste and culture might exemplify it, the emerging forms of neighborhood-culture and identity are often based on practices of appropriation, relying on a highly diverse set of cultural patterns. These forms of cultural sychretism are often neglected or refused not only by those actors and institutions that are positioning themselves as defenders of the nationally framed ‘high’ culture. As several examples suggest, communities with such intermixed cultural patterns and belongings such as the one in the Rahova-Uranus area are often neglected by – or at least falling out of the scope of – Romany activism as well, since many of these initiations are aiming to establish themselves on quasi-national, exclusivist notions of culture and belonging. These conceptions can be also challenged and modified on the basis of experiences gathered in such ‘in-between’ communities as the one targeted by our study.
gergo : draft-proposal after the metting with maria and irina
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