Postcards with Wildflowers: Memory, Women, and the Nature of Climate in Domestic Bucharest

• In Event: Placing Climates Across (Post-)Soviet Regions: Knowing, Writing, Planning

Abstract

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, beginning in 1965, marked a shift in Romanian housing and urban planning that diverged from earlier Soviet models such as the microrayon. This period was defined by an aggressive demographic agenda aimed at increasing the population, enforced through repressive policies that criminalized abortion and relocated rural populations into standardized apartment blocks. While these policies led to an unprecedented expansion of housing stock they failed to meaningfully integrate green space or account for lived environmental relations, unlike earlier socialist planning efforts. This paper argues that despite the state's disregard for environmental quality, women played a crucial role in nurturing particular ecosystems around the home. Specifically balconies and courtyards—nominally marginal, materially exposed—became sites of ecological improvisation: medicinal gardens, green buffers, quiet refuges for reproductive autonomy. These improvised practices, shaped by generational memory and gendered labor, reveal alternative ways of knowing and adapting to place-specific urban ecologies. By foregrounding women’s situated ecological knowledge—especially in relation to nature care, climate mitigation, and reproductive health—this paper shows how informal practices resisted and supplemented official environmental planning under socialism. It situates Romania within broader Soviet and post-Soviet territorial regimes, illuminating a gendered geography of climate adaptation that operated beyond state-sanctioned expertise.

Author

• Iulia Statica, U of Sheffield (UK)