Children continue to play around the block nowadays. But for those of us who grew up "between blocks" the feeling that children's
games have changed, is very much present. This feeling is linked to the fact that
even playgrounds have changed. "Between the blocks" is now different.
Because of garages and parked cars, there are fewer spaces between blocks. Cars constantly
come and go on the alleys between buildings. Playing takes place in specially-arranged
places, with specially-prepared gear. The gear can be used in a certain way, with
a focus on the child's safety. Up to an old age, the children are in the presence
of an adult who supervises them. Usually women during the week, men in weekends and
days off. They are the same blocks, from the big housing sets that started to be
built since 1965 in Romania, but the social life taking place here is different in
many ways. The city has changed its role.
Certain cities became resources for foreign employers searching for manual workforce.
The urban workers are competing on the labour market with the daily travellers from
the country side, who own a household which allows them to get some of their daily
food without buying it. Rural workers can manage easier with a minimum wage. From
6,2 million labour contracts in Romania, over 1,7 million are minimum wage and 1
million are part-time. Being busy in Romania is not a guarantee that you're not poor
- it is the European country with the highest number of busy persons who are below
the poverty line.
In the small cities, some of the apartments are empty, families have left for country
side to benefit from the resources of a rural household or they found a job abroad.
In the districts of small cities, plenty of children live with one parent. Also there
are many cases where older brothers take care of their younger siblings, while their
emigrating parents are searching for their luck in other parts of Europe.
In big cities, the social composition of job orientation has changed significantly. If
families of manual workers predominated before 2000, after 2000 college graduates
started to be more present. Approximately 15% of Romanians have a college education,
while in the big cities (of over 200 thousand inhabitants) the percentage is between
24% and 38%. The number of those having a college education tripled in most districts,
while one of five families of workers left the district. Some of those with college
education live alone or share their rent with colleagues of similar ages. Others
live with children, but only after the age of 30, the average age when they become
In cities with over 300 thousand inhabitants the generation effects are visible. A new
generation of educated young people chose to stay there after finishing their studies,
benefiting from the wave of expansion of labour markets between 2002 and 2008. They
reached their parenting age after the end of economic crisis between 2008 and 2010.
In these cities, the birth rate has increased significantly after 2011.
The changing of roles of the cities in the urban hierarchy also meant a change in the
ways of using the district. In big cities, playgrounds were again populated by babies
and small children, but this time accompanied by their mothers who are on maternal
leave. Around the blocks, there are no school-age children or, at least, not so many.
They leave school at 4 PM, because of their "after-school" programs. Also, educated
parents invest significantly in sports and artistic skills training programs.
They invest for three reasons. First is for offering them an education that adds to cognitive
schooling, while their income, as parents, come from selling skills, knowledge and
creativity they have as employees. Secondly, because they structure the play time
after school, relieving them of this complex obligation . Third, grandparents,
relatives or nannies can bring kids to these activities, while their parents finish
work . This time reorganization leads to the formation of new friendships and
playground networks, which often transform into mutual visits. Children's friendships
are not with the children from the neighbourhood, but with those they spend time
with at school and during the extracurricular activities. Children play around the
block, but not as much as 30 years ago. Also, their play has changed and their friendships
Several decades ago
Only a few decades ago, school finished at 12 AM for those in the elementary school,
and at 2 or 3 PM for secondary school or high-school students. For these children
autonomy was compulsory. Right from elementary school, children had to know how to
reach home from school, which most of the times was close to their house. This is
the reason why these cohorts of children named themselves later, over the years,
as "the generation with the key hanging down their necks" ("latchkey kids"). In order
to get inside the house, children wore the key to their neck, so they didn't lose
it. There was nobody waiting for them, parents were at work.
For the "generation with the key to the neck" the spaces between the block were arranged
as the blocks were built. The vegetation, if there was any, was just planted. And
the play equipment was minimal. With a few especially designated spaces, the props
of the games were based on the everyday objects lying around the blocks, often left
behind by construction sites: glass, stones, bricks (chalk), wood, even hard concrete
surfaces or spaces between the block left uncovered, dirt.
The number of cars at that time was very small, the problem of parking places was not
a pressing issue, nor the physical safety of children, since there was no risk of
traffic accidents. Rather, the problem of safety came from the sites still open,
the debris left behind the closed sites or the labyrinth-like structure of neighbourhoods,
hardly legible for children, which brought the risk of getting lost. For these reasons,
children were playing "around the block".
Around the block was also the place where friendships were formed. On the one hand, schools
were planned to take in children from one neighbourhood. Children from the same school
were often neighbours. On the other hand, due to the unstructured institutional time
between the end of classes at school and the arrival of parents, around the block
was, by excellence, the place to interact with other children. And there were plenty
of children, since the generational effects also operated in that period. Employees
got assigned jobs at the beginning of their careers. This overlapped with the position
in the life cycle, which lead to kids living in the same neighbourhoods having similar
Parents, in their turn, got off work at 4 PM. For some employees, the working hours were
organized in shifts, which sometimes could be an advantage from the point of view
of children supervision, one of the adults was home (but he was tired). But most
of the times, childcare required the help of the extended family network, with grandparents
playing an important role, if they lived in the same city. If they didn't live in
the same town, as it often happened, they turned into an important resource during
holidays. Memories about country side holidays accompany the memories related to
playing around the block.
In the absence of urban grandparents, the networks of neighbours were very important
in the supervision of children. Either in the form of friendship networks that were
formed between the parents with children of the same age, or in the form of an elder
person who turned into a kind of grandparent of the family. The networks of grown-ups
played the role of an informal cooperative of children's care and supervision.
The novelty of living in the block
Life between and in the blocks was very different from other forms of organization of
intimacy and social reproduction. The blocks of flats in the new districts have created
and normalized a new reality: the family consisting of two spouses, with their children,
living separately from their own parents and in which both adults are employed.
A possible alternative scenario would have been only encouraging men to be part of the
labour market, while distributing women as housewives in order to take care of children.
As it happened in the XXth century, during the industrialization process in many
Western countries. Most likely, careers would have looked very different, closer
to the life of Western suburbs and the childhood games would have been others. But
the real history in Romania meant hiring both men and women in the labour market.
Socialist planners realized that it was much cheaper to build an apartment for two
employees and to socialize the costs of raising children, through dedicated institutions
(nurseries, kindergartens, schools). Even now, Romania has the smallest pay gap between
men and women.
Still, it is quite expensive to completely socialize the costs of raising children. Some
of these costs were still private. The difference in the timetable of parents and
pupils was the key element which created a few generations of children with a part
of the day that was non-institutionalized. Or, just as important, were the short
maternity leaves, of three to six months of maternity. Nurseries and early institutionalization
become a necessity for the rural immigrants who moved to the city, to work in their
new industrial or bureaucratic jobs.
Women were, in turn, were called bring their work abilities to the economic growth. The
heterosexual, mononuclear, neolocal family, with both spouses employed, is a historical
novelty. It was not an exception in the world at that time, but it was definitely
The formation of the new type of family is a gradual process and is related to the emergence
of the new type of dwelling in assemblies of blocks dedicated to the new labour force
necessary for industrialization. It took almost two decades, between 1947 and 1965,
for the urbanization and industrialization to interconnect and produce together cycles
through which they stimulated one another.
The socialist growth model
Since the late 1950s, research that aimed to streamline factory production time insists
on the necessity of a program for construction of dwellings for workers, as a way
to minimize the time for travelling and the transport costs which should have been
covered through payroll.
For example, Biji & Trebici (1958) show that at the Factory "I. C. Frimu" from Sinaia
a quarter of the total annual transport costs of the employees would have covered
the construction costs for 20 new apartments. Furthermore, the annual labour fluctuations
which were between 5 and 20% during the 1950s, could have been dramatically reduced
if the workers had been "fixed" in the city. The same term is later used by the sociologist
Henri H. Stahl (Constantinescu and Stahl 1970), when discussing the need of building
the urban areas of Slatina of the 1960s, the first construction project in the socialist
period of a factory and a city equally.
So the construction of dwellings for workers begins (Mărginean 2015; Grama 2017) at the
same time with the construction of factories. Which obviously requires an additional
expansion of the construction sector and a redirection of the productive consumption
of construction materials to domestic markets. But this reorientation was not a trivial
one. It involved complex decisions related to the mechanisms of economic growth.
Socialism was often described as an autarchic system. Industrialization and urbanization
seemed to be the main instruments through which an internal, autonomous system, controlled
by the Communist parties, was created. Romania was often treated as an exemplary
case of this thesis.
Although the socialist political economy had its own endogenous growth mechanisms, they
should be evaluated and described in conjunction with the global economic processes
to which these economies participated from a peripheral position. Despite the impositions,
corrections and subordination to Moscow, the leadership of the party had a wide range
of action. The specificity of the Communist response to the situation of national
dependence consisted of the development of the fixed capital in order to produce
industrial products, with the help of advanced technological production means. This
particular type of response is not only a regional one, but it is a wider response,
offered by the peripheral states to the problem of dependence in Africa, Latin America
or Asia throughout the 20th century.
The model had also some fundamental prerequisites. The first was related to the necessity
of financing the technological imports in order to ensure the acquisition from the
global markets of the equipment necessary for the industrial production. The second
prerequisite was to monetize the everyday life, in order to allow the emergence of
a mass of industrial employees and a mass of agricultural producers. The two conditions
were extremely difficult to fulfil, both for the USSR after the First World War as
well as for the other Central and East-European countries after the Second World
Still, unlike the Soviet Union of the 1920s, Romania, along with the other Central and
East-European countries, benefited after the Second World War of a global economic
context in expansion. Even if it has not benefited directly from international financial
support, Romania has taken advantage of the expansion of European internal markets
and the wave of cheap equipment of major continental industrial complexes. As such,
exports played a key role in financing the post-war East-European development.
In parallel with the growth mechanisms through exports, Romania has also developed a
second economic mechanism. The total percentage of construction works of the total
investments over the four decades was around the 50% average, with higher percentages
in the 1950s and declining in the 1980s. The expansion of industrial constructions
sector and, starting with the 1960s, of the one of urbanization, generated internally
a productive consumption which allowed the emergence of an entire network of suppliers
of raw materials, energy, fuel and production assets. From the size point of view,
this circuit represented, by excellence, the Romania's internal market, compared
to the consumer goods market.
The development of the built landscape - dwellings, factories, roads, channels, dams,
railways, construction equipment - was the form through which the internal consumption
was ensured, which allowed the emergence of a complex internal economy. A dwelling
requires many types of components to be built, such as cement, wire, reinforced concrete,
insulating glass wool, doors and windows, glasses, excavators, cranes, concrete mixers
etc. All these involve other factories or production units. Moreover, they require
workforce to get all these gears in motion.
The formation of large assembly of housing starting with the 1960s is the result of using
urbanization as a mechanism of economic growth in the Socialist period. In the new
assemblies there were apartments for "people without families", but most apartments
were built for "families". But not for any families, but for working families formed
of a single family core, with a limited number of children.
This is a very precise selection of the social form which had to be cast inside the new
dwelling assemblies with apartments that had maximum four rooms and a pretty limited
surface. The rural family was definitely not organized at that time in that way,
both as a way of organizing the agricultural work, the sexual division of domestic
work, of the role the children had in the agricultural work, the number of children
in a family and especially the family cores in a household or in the neighbourhood.
The new family allowed for the lowest investment cost in relation to the work capacity
brought in the new factories, while not charging too much the socialized costs of
When we follow the Socialist urbanization process and the mononuclear and neolocal working
family, a few notes are needed about the way the industrialization really worked.
Since the family that lived in these apartments was a family with both spouses employed,
the work organization had a strong impact on urbanization.
A key element here is related to the fact that the model of economic growth based on
productive consumption, maximization of demand in constructions and not on the consumption
of population, generated expansionary pressures and rather than replacing the morally
used or degraded fixed capital. Fulfilling the plans of constructions of halls was
more cost-effective than fulfilling the plans of putting into operation of the production
means. The major effect was a lower rate of productivity increase, despite high investment
As Popov (2007; 2010) also shows, Romania is not singular in this respect, as the Soviet
Union had, in its turn, smaller replacement rates of fixed capital than the United
States. However, Romania differs from the Soviet Union by the fact that the expansion
was fundamentally financed by exports in the European expansionist context, and most
of the fixed capital is installed between 1960 and 1978 . In 1984, the biggest
part of the fixed capital in Romania had an age between 15 and 20 years (World Bank
1984), while in the Soviet Union the major investments were made between 1930 and
1948 (Popov, 2007).
The expansionist pressures on fixed capital had side effect in Romania: the fact the
there was no need for an equally high rate of replacement of labour with capital.
Keeping the old equipment in operation still requires keeping in production of a
dedicated workforce. So, investments were not accompanied by dramatic effects of
contraction of the volume of industrial labour force. The expansion of labour force
was significant: in 1985, for example, 42% of the entire population was engaged,
and the employees from the industrial sector represented 38% from the total of those
This has two implications. The first is that the urban employees are offered the possibility
to have stable jobs. They could change their jobs, by generating big fluctuations
of the personnel hired in a factory. But, in principle, the new technological waves
did not generate redundant labour force. And this made living in the city to offer
a certain security of income and life.
The second implication is related to the relationship with the countryside. Romania had,
in the same period, the highest amount of agricultural producers in the population
(almost 4 million) from the East and Central Europe, although the percentage has
dramatically decreased, to 27,9% by 1990. Even though the expansion of industrial
production was quick, a significant amount of the rural labour force was preserved.
The salaries of workers represent an important source of solvable demand, which creates
a market for agricultural consumer goods, domestic industrial goods or goods for
housing. The agricultural products sold to the workers have gradually monetized rural
areas, which, in time, have become themselves markets for industrial products.
What we see here is that the Socialist city seems to be a complex unit, which interconnected
educated social categories and manual employees in forms of urban stratification,
with its own cultural struggles and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. The Socialist
city was economically integrated with the adjacent areas, and the economy was organized
through some "production chains", which united the producers with their providers.
The big city itself was a "containment and retention structure" of working population,
of organization of employees flows and interconnection between agricultural economic
or extractive sectors with the industrial sectors from smaller cities.
The factory as a birth place of solidarity networks
The neighborhood was an important area of solidarity networks. But in parallel the factory
itself and the dynamics of labor relations generated a certain kind of solidarity,
central to social reproduction.
Workers' institutional negotiation bodies were atrophied during Socialism. Labor unions
were formal. However, in practice, workers have been able to put pressure for wage
growth and better working conditions in three ways: through their territorial mobility,
through mobility between productive units and by changing their profession through
Factories depended on the willingness of workers to mobilize informally for periods of
fast and condensed production. Consequently, any non-verbal dissatisfaction of workers
could have led to a slowdown in the work process at crucial times, which would jeopardize
the fulfillment of the plan.
The backup army of non-employed workers with the necessary qualifications that might
have taken the place of undisciplined workers was not a real threat that the managerial
staff could mobilize. Maintaining the level of production and, moreover, the attempt
to expand it depended both on the existence of functional and quality production
means and on the existence of a skilled and mobilized workforce.
This has inevitably led to the delegation of the task of keeping factory discipline to
the workers themselves, organized in peer networks that had to ensure the coordination
and discipline of each individual. The director was only interested if the work teams
were satisfied and productive as units, to be able to fulfill the plan. However,
openly expressing your dissatisfaction was seen as an act against the system, equivalent
to political insubordination, and could lead to tough sanctions.
But while the individual critical voices were silenced, the forms of discipline in production
relied on relatively autonomous collectives. In addition, much of the negotiation
process between workers operated through a system of reciprocity based on trustworthy
networks at the limit of legality. Ironically, the promise of workers' autonomy,
denied by the police forms that individualized the workers politically, was achieved
in terms of relatively autonomous working groups, due to the dependence of managers
on the availability of workers as a whole.
Managers, constrained by the plan, have tried to hide their limited control by inventing
new rules, continuously reorganizing factories, and inventing new intermediate levels.
This has led to genuine organizational proliferation, which has come up with ambiguities
about responsibilities and obligations, which eventually endangered the efficiency
of the organizational processes of rationalization. But the managers of the Socialist
factories, especially factory managers, did not lack control tools.
For managers, it was difficult to manage workers at individual level, being confronted
with a huge mass of employees who used inter-organization mobility as a negotiation
method, as argued above. But managers could manage the total volumes of workers.
Here they had two ways to adjust their entries. The first was to rely on a low-skilled
workforce, with a very large recruitment area, a strategy specific to cities like
Timişoara or Braşov. The second, as in Cluj, was to bet on a workforce that they
could train, while at the same time attempting local retention by urbanization or
commuting on a smaller distance.
The emergence of networks of local suppliers and customers has gradually allowed, in
addition to pooling economic resources and political action, the formation of a pooling
strategy for the mass of employees. The city itself, through the network of kindergartens,
training schools, hospitals, neighborhoods, has become a retention strategy. Tensions
inside the factory on controlling the production process and income levels have turned
into urban problems. Class tensions have also become urban control issues.
Cities as retention structures
The factories directly organized the distribution of apartments. Some apartments were
distributed by local government, but the whole process was conditional on the existence
of a labor contract concluded with a local employer. Most of the workers received
the apartment directly through the factory, while the municipal assignment channel
was used by other social categories. The local construction company assigned them
with whole blocks, which were then offered to employees for rental and, sometimes,
more rarely, for purchase. Workers from the same factory, who often came from the
same village as rural immigrants, received apartments in the same block (Csedő et
al. 2004; Troc 2003). Often, workers were clearly aware that Socialist residential
spaces were only an annex to the production process. An apartment in the block was
closely related to work performed in a factory.
Factory workers' collectivities overlapped the networks of workers who came from the
same village and were housed in the same neighborhood or even in the same block.
Thus, the networks formed in the factory intersected with the neighborhood connections
determined by the place of origin. The Socialist political economy has structured
a specific field of relationships that favored an identification process around strong
trustworthy networks. Trustworthy collectivities inside factories overlapped with
other types of networks, such as those originating in neighborhoods.
For many city dwellers, finding an address in a neighborhood they were not familiar with
was relatively difficult and often required guidance. All the more so as if the placement
of the workplace or of the friends and relatives did not require it, the workers
did not visit other neighborhoods. The workers were much better acquainted with the
geography of their own neighborhood and, only to a lesser extent, the geography of
the other neighborhoods. For some, the attachment to the neighborhood mixes with
a strange feeling of pride that they feel in the face of the massive nature of constructions.
The block, in front of the block and the neighborhood networks have become important
and multiple contexts of socialization for both children and adults.
The multitude of factories put employees in a convenient situation. They were able to
change their workplace, which they did, using this strategy quite often. In the epoch,
the process is called "floating" (Mihu, 1971), a metaphor with reference to the chemical
processing processes in which there is a floating and unstable mass above the precipitating
material. The metaphor refers to the movement of workers almost as a natural, inevitable,
chemical-like movement, which, in part, was true. Often, factory managers have not
opposed the "natural process", but have used it further. The "floating" workers of
the plant could be better ordered at city level. The city becomes a "containment
structure", both as streams of quarantine practices and as a significance ecosystem.
Managers have tried to turn the city into a magnet.
With more mobility, more workers could be used to negotiate additional housing investments.
This has brought more demand for intermediate goods also produced in the county.
But the new workers are, in fact, the former peasants in the hinterland of the city.
They no longer had to work in agricultural production due to rationalization: new
means of production, chemical fertilizers and especially new economic circuits in
which agriculture becomes a source of raw materials and intermediary goods for the
factories in the city and the neighboring cities of the county. This allows the resumption
of industrial production circuits and even their expansion.
The Socialist neighborhood as an architectural structure has survived Socialism. But
the social life inside this neighborhood has changed substantially. The factory was
the place where workers formed solidarity networks, which often overlapped the solidarity
networks in the neighborhoods that the workers lived in. The neighborhood, as a housing
unit with various types of amenities such as school, health center, parks and shops,
began to be built only after 1965. This is because urbanization, as a process of
building housing units, gradually becomes a way to ensure economic growth by ensuring
the consumption of products generated by industrialization. It was not the only mechanism
for economic growth, export playing the role of a main circuit. However, urbanization
and the construction sector have used this mechanism to ensure very high economic
In the urbanization process, from the many social forms of reproduction and intimacy,
the home accommodated the married couple, with a single family nucleus who moves
away from their parents and both spouses are employed. Also, these families have
a considerably smaller number of children, the apartments having a maximum of four
rooms. But not all reproduction costs are socialized by these new urban machines,
the housing units. In the uncovered places, a new world appears, the childhood life
in front of the block, "the generation with the key hanging down the neck". These
children benefit from the fact that there are other children of their age in their
neighborhood and that they have time and space to play using the ad-hoc props next
to the blocks. Most often, this props are the remnants of the old site, the one on
which the blocks they live in were built. This is how a series of new games appeared,
using the broken bottles around the block, or the stones, or the pits and small pieces
of branches around. Networks of friendship overlapping neighborhood and school friendships
are impossible to understand beyond the complex production of social relationships
generated by Socialist industrialization and urbanization.
Now these social relationships have a different texture. The social composition of neighborhoods
has changed. Especially in major cities, we have a substantial increase in educated
people, because the city has a skilled labor offer in the global assemblage line
of products based on knowledge or delocalized services. The time of the children
living in the neighborhood now is otherwise structured. "After-school" programs,
as well as sports and artistic skills training programs, make friendship networks
often no longer overlap with neighborhood networks. Also, the neighborhoods have
changed. The spaces between the blocks have turned into car parks and access roads,
now indispensable. Playgrounds have been restricted to arranged spaces and usually
equipped with play devices with preset functions. These devices are often designed
for young children who are also using them under the supervision of mothers on maternity
leave - leave that has grown sensitively. Children's games are transforming, precisely
because the social life of children has changed. In fact, the neighborhood's life,
in its entirety, has changed.
 About 94% of the urban population in Romania is employed (business owners are a minority
of 2% of the population) and often this comes on the background of organizational
techniques to intensify activities during the work program.
 After the introduction of the new labor code in 2011, the lunch break was taken out
of the meal schedule. For many, the work schedule becomes in practice eight hours
and a half or nine hours.
 However, these lower rates of replacement of the spent fixed capital were not a problematic
feature of the economic model in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Central-capitalist
countries have had unusually high rates of fixed capital replacement because they
were in a position to invest in new technologies in new geographical areas. This
has created new technological blocks outside of national spaces, in dependent countries
(Anderson, 2013a, 2013b; R. Brenner, 2006). In this way, in the central-capitalist
states the costs of replacing the spent fixed capital were reduced. The internal
replacement of the used equipment did not come with the pressure of retrofitting
the entire supply chain (Anderson, 2013a, 2013b; R. Brenner, 2006).