In the trunk

Twenty years ago I was teaching for the first time the Sociology of Everyday Life course, which was taught by Professor Vintilă Mihăilescu. One of the exercises that male and female students had to go through was the ethnographic exploration of informal spatial practices. I recall that among many interesting topics, somewhere towards the end of the stack of printed and filed research reports, I opened one that described in detail the case of a supermarket parking lot in the Titan neighborhood that was largely hijacked from its designed function and had become half a park where parents, grandparents and grandchildren socialized and participated in impromptu games on the asphalt, and half an informal sports complex for soccer, badminton, and foot tennis. In 1997, when I'd spent almost three months in the area, I could see people in the window of the 311 bus on my way home, walking through a maidan tamed by well-trodden paths through tree-lined alleys. It was there, years later, that t