Approved in 1993 by the Moldovan Parliament, the Law on Privatization of Housing was the starting point of a large-scale transfer of collective housing state property into the hands of residents. The process through which tenants became flat owners was rapidly completed. Over the following thirty years, close to fifty percent of the population left the country to work abroad, leaving a significant number of housing units intermittently vacant (see Dr. von Hirschhausen’s project on multipositioned families). As a result, day-to-day housing problems are managed by a remaining population, who on the one hand lacks the experience of collectively owning space – as opposed to rural independent housing ownership or the Soviet era tenant status during which housing repair and maintenance of collective space was assumed by the State. On the other hand, these problems can’t be understood as a shrinking city process, but have to be addressed and resolved with the ghostly presence of a significant number of habitants abroad.

Based on ethnographic material gathered during successive stays in Botanica – one of the main peripheral residential area of Chisinau, mainly composed of collective housing built during the Soviet era –, my project compiles the views of residents, architects, housing fund managers, and city planners to study how the historical transition from public to private management and contemporary multipositionality of numerous residents affects evolution and planning of the city. Moreover, it examines specific issues depending upon the configuration of each microdistrict, including problems posed by the densification of inner-courtyard individual housing lots, trees and more generally green area management, abandoned collective infrastructures such as schools, informal built extensions (garages, dovecotes, and the like).