Big collective housing ensembles where built in Romania since 1960s. As houses for all, they were radically enacting the modernist and socialist utopia. But life didn’t followed planning and utopia never materialized. Its derailment was in fact a chance for the inhabitants to step in and transform the common spaces through collective practices of care and repair. Utopia was tamed and the ensembles became neighbourhoods. Designed as a “new town” of micro-rayons at the outskirts of Bucharest, Drumul Taberei neighbourhood developed a situated pattern of collective practices, making it an ideal case study for the research and activation of “latent” urban commoning (De Angelis, 2017) in the post-socialist context.
Literally opened since 2020 in a former garage at the ground floor of a collective housing block in Drumul Taberei neighbourhood, the OPEN Garage is a research laboratory and community equipment. Following locals’ example which transforms their garages into commercial, services, hobbies or meeting spaces, the project works as a “supplementary room” for the inhabitants and researchers alike. The project grew through cultural activation, applied education and action research. First, a Garage Library for kids was set up from donations, followed by a series of DIY workshops with the library users. Next, the space programing and research methods were expanded by a diverse team. Furthermore, a Garage School involved groups of students from landscape and sociology engaging in fieldwork research of the area. An active summer and autumn followed, like organizing near the Garage a series of street events, exhibiting the research’ results in the Garage, releasing a Map of Collective Practices and launching a series of Video Documentaries communicating research findings. The research evidenced the inhabitants’ strong attachment to their neighbourhood and the key role played by the collective practices of managing the common spaces to express and maintain this attachment.
Although small in scale, frail in sustainability and basic in organization, the OPEN Garage is the only cultural space of micro-rayon 7, or The Loop as locals call it. Research-driven, interdisciplinary and open for participation, the project tests and runs a situated version for a “small but many” type of networked community equipment, situated in a neighbourhood chronically lacking community spaces, under-planned and further enclosed by an exacerbated individualism and radical privatization.

OPEN Garage is both a research project and a physical space for the community. The on-going research is addressing the dominant depreciative public narrative over the collective practices for managing the common spaces of proximity in the big housing estates. Bringing research-based evidence that values these practices’ role in resourcing the community life, the research acknowledges them as local answers to the ecological, social and political city’ crisis. In the same time, OPEN Garage seeks to plug into the network of formal and informal spaces of the neighbourhood, seeking to articulate and support local practices and actors, while proposing programs and creating spaces for participation, which are now lacking in this type of neighbourhoods. This research-driven initiative and spatial-based narrative pleads for a situated type of community equipment, specific to the collective housing estates built in socialism, which can be replicated across the city, the country and the region.