We Should Have Asked What Year We Were In! Wastelands and Wilderness in the Văcărești Park

Abstract In Central and Eastern Europe, nature protected areas came into being in a dramatically changing society, economy, and culture. Formerly industrial and infrastructural landscapes have been both materially and semantically reshaped through practices of restoration and attempts to revitalise ruins of failed modernisation projects. Around a socialist‐era empty lake, landowners, real estate developers, casino capitalism, displaced people, hopes, fantasies, wild and stray animals converged, creating a differentially ordered landscape in an antagonistically articulated coexistence of wastelands and nature. Văcărești Nature Park developed a specific historical and social trajectory, as it became closely related with local middle‐class projects and anxieties. In it, socialist ruins came into direct, sensuous contact with both nature and the fractured history of post‐1990s Bucharest capitalism, enacting a twin infrastructural and ecological inversion.