Community space
The Pajura Gardens, Bucharest
In a city overwhelmed by constructions and losing its green areas at an accelerated pace, and where inhabitants are incapable to resist decisions from high-above, the Pajura gardens represent true spaces of freedom, where inhabitants take back their city.
Video ▶The gardens set up by the inhabitants of the blocks of flats in the Pajura neighbourhood have a history of over 60 years. It is said that they were established due to an enactment of the communist regime aiming at transforming unused urban lands into farm lands, but this is just an “urban legend”. Although there used to be many such gardens on either side of the railway, only a narrow strip is still worked by the inhabitants, while the rest of them were destroyed and converted into parking lots or green areas lacking identity. The few still resisting gardens owe their existence first and foremost to a well-formed gardening community, who justified their presence and utility firmly: according to the remarks of a lady from Sibiu, “if there hadn’t been the gardens, it would have been a focus of infection, or a place for storing old items”.
The status of the gardens is unknown – the respective land is public property and belongs to the city or to the Romanian Railway. Although it is public property, its collective use is aiming towards an “extremely fluid property type” (Bogdan Iancu, sociologist), located between the public and private ownership type.
The working of the gardens has a double function. On one hand, gardening practices and sharing the same resources – land, water, the security system installed for all gardens – bring the community together. On the other hand, the gardening community drawn near the public area bestows identity to a generic and anonymous space.
In a city overwhelmed by constructions and losing its green areas at an accelerated pace, and where inhabitants are incapable to resist decisions from high-above, the Pajura gardens represent true spaces of freedom, where inhabitants take back their city.