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Dr. Sandra Parvu

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Faculty member at the ENSA Paris Val de Seine, and a research fellow at the Centre for Housing Research (CRH-LAVUE)

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sandra.parvu@paris-valdeseine.archi.fr

 

What is your project and why did you choose it?

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As a trained architect and an urban studies scholar, I am interested in how design practitioners work within an administrative framework that aims to implement larger political visions of housing, landscape etc. My initial project is focused on the urban history and present transformation of ChiÈ™inău, Moldova’s capital. It is still run by planning institutions inherited from back when it was a small peripheral Soviet republic depending upon a zonal institute based in Kiev. I am examining the role these inherited institutions play in the transformation of ChiÈ™inău, today the nation’s capital, and more specifically in the context of conflicts in the courtyards of collective housing, an in-between space interlacing private interests with municipal politics. LimSpaces is also an opportunity to develop collaborative projects. With Béatrice von Hirschhausen, we plan to look at how rural families have developed coping strategies that play on multiple grounds as agricultural workers or cheap labor on building sites. With Claudia Eggart, we focus on the triangle border between Ukraine, Moldova and Romania that has become, in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, a main route for Ukrainian wheat exports. Our research aims to investigate the superposition of actors and large spectrum of scales involved in the (re)shaping of this borderland.

 

What brought your interest to the region?

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The initial interest is autobiographical. Part of my family fled Moldova in the 1940s, and access to its territory was forbidden. Because of that, and based on various storytelling, it had a ghost-like dimension, which since then, I found was one of the country’s sore point. In 2002, at an international exhibition of contemporary art the Moldovan artist, Pavel Brăila created a piece entitled Probably Moldova Doesn’t Exist in response to an exhibition poster’s map in which Moldova was missing.

 

Sandra Parvu was trained as an architect at the University of Cambridge (B.A.) and Princeton University (M. Arc.). She received her PhD in Architecture and Urban Studies at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris and the Institute of Architecture at the University of Geneva.

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Photo : Alain Ollier and Gilles de Fayet

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