Nana: “Of all the blocks I have lived in, the block I live in now is my favourite. The neighbours are polite and the staircase is clean. It does not smell at all, and I like that I cannot see the rubbish chute.” Bucharest, Romania
Nana, a woman in her late 70s, moved into her current flat during the pandemic. As a result, she never got a chance to meet any of her neighbours. Very rarely she would encounter people in the block’s corridors, and when she did, their interactions were hushed. She remembers once meeting one of her neighbours when she went to throw her rubbish, but they did not exchange any words. So, in an atttempt to get to know her neighbours, Nana started looking at the avizier (noticeboard). In most blocks built in Romania, the noticeboard is placed in the entrance corridor, near the letter boxes: there, the block administrator usually affixes a list of all the flats and their occupants. Nana would curiously peek at the list and be able to tell how many people lived in each flat on her floor. She could even see whether they were paying rent on time. Recently, however, people’s names have been replaced with each flat’s number — and Nana has gone back to wondering about her neighbours’ lives.
Nana is glad that the rubbish chute is not on her floor. As the above quote illustrates, people’s wellbeing in the block is directly impacted by the position of their flat in relation to the smells of the chute. Wellbeing is similarly impacted by how communal spaces such as the chute room, the elevator, and the staircase are maintained. Nana still remembers the smells of the block she used to live in back in her youth: ‘I loved everything about it,’ she says, ‘except for the fact that the kitchen was in front of the garbage chute! Every time the chute was blocked, I would be able to smell it through our kitchen window’.
