Interview with an activist

Hi Adrian, could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about the organising in Cluj that you’re involved with?

I’m Adrian Dohotaru, an activist researcher from Cluj-Napoca, which is the second largest city in Romania after Bucharest. I’m 40 years old, and I work in an association that I founded called Sustainable Organized Society (SOS). We have alerts around specific issues/emergencies and are active in locations around Cluj, such as SOS East Park and SOS Pata Rât, but we also combine these alerts with a more systemic approach of long-term campaigns.

We also conduct reflection on these campaigns using participatory action research and citizen science methodologies. Most of my research is more or less informal. I do studies and guides, but I’m not as interested in the written format as I am in the action part of the participatory action research that eventually results in public policies. In this sense, at a local level at least, the city hall is now engaging with the campaigns that we started several years ago and is now investing in several green public spaces and blue-green corridors. 

We do campaigns mostly in the Cluj Napoca area, but also in larger Transylvania, as well as national campaigns, for example we are in a national network of 12 cities campaigning for urban protected areas in Romania. We are campaigning for national legislation to recognise a category in between green public spaces and protected areas. As well as campaigning for this category in the national legislation, which is actually going to be implemented, we are campaigning to have all these types of areas to be even more protected. We propose about 20 protected areas in Romania and we are negotiating with the authorities to have a protection status, especially focusing on trying to recuperate areas that have been privatized – which is a big problem. Now in Cluj, this is actually happening through a renaturing project, where 10 million euros out of the budget of 100 million euros for public green space is dedicated to recuperating the privatized areas in East Park.

That said, unfortunately on social issues the city hall is not that open. The social housing and affordable housing campaigns where I cooperated with Eniko Vinze (see Eniko’s article on housing in the ‘Holding Spaces’ section of this journal), and other activists are not necessarily the focus of the city hall – these areas are only receiving very small investment. The related problems in Cluj concerning the segregation of the Roma community, the spikes in rents and the financialisation of living are not being addressed. Even though we run campaigns to address these social issues, which for me is quite important and overlaps with environmental work, the environmental campaigns are more appreciated by the city hall and more successful – for example, the authorities started to invest hundreds of millions of euros in green public infrastructure.

Besides my activist work, I’m a wannabe director. I directed my first film, which hopefully will be shown in some upcoming festivals. It’s about a person with whom I collaborated in this larger framework of participatory action research where I developed a technique that I call performative anthropology. I convinced him to shoot the last years of his life until he died, including moments where he was evicted several times. I saw that he had an old semi-digital camera from the early 2000s in his room and I convinced him to make a video journal of his precarious living conditions and that of his neighbours.

At the same time, I’m involved in public policy. I used to be a member of the national parliament between 2016 and 2020. As an independent MP I proposed laws towards more social justice, for example, to have a living wage in Romania calculated by the National Institute of Statistics. The law proposed that every government increase of the minimum wage should be correlated with this living wage. I think this was one of the most important laws that the parliament voted for but unfortunately, it was not implemented or transposed into public policy. There are several other laws, like a new law for green public spaces, that I also tried to get implemented.

I’m also involved with other NGOs, for example NGOs that are affiliated to the Babeș-Bolyai University, which is the main university in Cluj. I collaborate with other NGOs in other cities trying to promote participatory budgeting in Romania. This is one of the ideas that I popularized 10 years ago with other people from civil society, and actually at this point there are many town halls and city halls in Romania that have participatory budgeting. Unfortunately, this is still at a shallow level, so we are trying to convince the authorities to implement a new design and a new format in order to have more profound, more deliberative participatory budgeting. 

What are the key environmental and ecological struggles taking place in Cluj at the moment?

Right now, one of the most important struggles is about the inefficiency of waste management. We have landfills in a segregated area (the ghetto of Pata Rât) where about 1500-2000 people live, which is a severely polluted area, which from time to time also pollutes Cluj. The smell comes to the city, but, on a daily basis, people that were evicted to the area are most affected by the pollution and the segregation. One of the activist campaigns in the last 15 years in Cluj was to desegregate this ghetto.

Now the city hall is externalizing the responsibility of investment in the sense that the major investments (which are not that big – a few million euros in order to desegregate Pata Rât) are made through Norwegian funds. Local money is usually used for education, transport and so on, but not necessarily for affordable housing. So most of the money for affordable housing and  desegregating the ghetto is coming through these Norwegian funds. In the last few years, through these Norwegian funds, about 72 families were relocated from Pata Rât, but because Pata Rât is so big, the number of inhabitants in the ghetto are only slightly decreasing.

Another major campaign where I think we have been most successful is to get back privatised public spaces. A lot of public spaces were privatized after 1989. What we tackled in the last years was to get back some of these spaces. To build parks or “blue-green corridors”. This transformation is happening right now in Eastern Park, which will be the biggest park in Cluj; 5 times bigger than the actual park which is from the nineteenth century. 

We have another campaign concerning green mobility which aims to link the metropolitan area of Cluj together through bike lanes, green areas and pedestrian alleys. We are trying to do this in order to reduce road traffic. At the level of the Cluj County area, the number of cars doubled in the last 9 years. And if in the county area of Cluj the number doubled, in the metropolitan area of Cluj the number of cars actually quadrupled, so it’s 4 times bigger than 9 or 10 years ago. This is a huge problem because most of the cars are second hand cars coming from Western countries and they pollute a lot.

This is why it’s important to have pedestrian alleys and bike lanes in order to stop people using cars and at the same time to have a metropolitan area with good public transportation; activist campaigns are currently underway to achieve this. And I think it’s good to have this activism not only for mobility purposes, but also to have new places – not only malls where you have to pay your entrance – to have spaces near the river that people have access to for free; public spaces. As I told you before, a lot of these places disappeared in the last 25 years and only after 25 years have we started to recuperate part of them; the level of privatization was dramatic. We had privatized parks, privatized sports bases, privatized courtyards for schools that were only used by people who rented them. We are trying to tackle this problem in an eco-socialist way.

So I would say that campaigns for green public spaces and blue-green corridors are quite significant. The city hall has already invested tens of millions of euros and there are other projects of hundreds of millions of euros in order to have more public spaces. One of our criticisms is that these public spaces are not based on Nature Based Solutions when they are planned. Right now there is too much grey infrastructure for events or gatherings, but we are calling for more natural and permeable surfaces – not necessarily, grey infrastructure and asphalt and so on. So these would be two major campaigns.

One campaign which is not successful at this point but I think at a certain point will get more attention concerns pollution caused by airplanes circulating the city. The planes are not making a detour around the city as they seek to go faster. In order to do a detour (and most of the planes go to western countries), they should go to the eastern part of Cluj, which would add 45, 50 kilometers of detour to their journey. Since we have so many cheap flights and planes, the pilots are paid more if they save fuel. In order to save more fuel and to be faster they are crossing the entire city, creating a terrible noise especially for people in the eastern part of Cluj Napoca. People are complaining, but at this point with no success. I think that when there will be street protests, the campaign will be far better.

We also have some fights for trees. Quite recently there was a symbolic but important fight to prevent 20 trees from being relocated away from the centre of the city. The campaign actually got a lot of attention because it was on one of the most important streets of Cluj in the center. The trees remained there after some debates, petitions, street protests and after some specialists such as urban planners, ecologists, landscape architects, and biologists came into the debate with alternative viewpoints. So this would be a recent example of an active civil society that convinced authorities not to relocate those trees or to cut them down. 

Obstacles and solutions

That said, at the same time I would say that there are problems at the local level and especially at the national level. We do not have a coalition of civil society working with green and progressive parties. I think we need this in order to tackle – as the Greens are doing in Germany with the AfD – the extreme right in Romania. I think that a green left-wing progressive movement would even better tackle the extreme right parties.

For a while, everybody said that Romania was quite a peculiar case in that we don’t have an extreme right. One of the reasons was that the so-called social democrats are actually social conservatives, and some argue that this warded off the extreme-right. But the growth of the extreme-right is now happening in Romania and we have two extreme right parties. One is called Union of Romanians (AUR) which is now the second largest party in the polls after the so-called social democrats, and they surpassed in certain polls the national liberals.

I have the feeling that many government politicians are now trying to regain ground lost to the extreme right by shifting to a new conservative stance on all kinds of issues. The parties in government, for example, are now attacking the possibility of LGBTQ+ marriage in Romania, which is not in the legal framework but was recognized for a couple that married internationally. The government is now attacking the right to have international marriages recognised. 

In order to have a more powerful green civil society I think we should have a party that communicates with civil movements at different levels of power: the local council level, the county council level, the parliamentary level and even the executive level. To bring these kinds of things that are not present even now in Romania. Even though it is quite late, this theme of climate change or climate urgency is now recognized as important. 10 years ago it wasn’t a part of the public debate.But, at this point, even though it’s still niche, it is sometimes covered in the local and national media. In my hometown in Cluj-Napoca, the median temperature increased by 5 degrees in the last 30 years, which is quite a lot – and people are starting to talk about this change and about public policies to have less cars, to have more public transportation, to have more trees in the city. To have all the communist blocks refurbished in order to tackle climate change.

You mentioned that one of the aims or one of the ideal ways to tackle each of these issues is to create a green left coalition that is engaged with civil society. So far what approaches and methods have been taken, and are being used by the different activists and organizations to fight on each of these struggles?

We have several tactics. For example, street protests. We organized several street protests concerning real estate construction in a neighborhood near a forest, where they wanted to build a road inside the forest. So we tackled that issue with hundreds of people that came to the protest and real estate development stopped for a while, and we’ll see in time whether it will be stopped for good.

We also have online petitioning and we are auditing meetings at local council and the county level. We are also producing expertise because some of the activists are quite linked with the universities of Cluj and we are producing papers that might be taken into consideration. When the strategies of the Cluj County or the Cluj City Hall are created in a more participative way, we have activists and scientists, people from the universities and NGOs that attend the meetings, present their case and sometimes they are writing parts of these strategies. 

So we have this kind of involvement, but at the same time, real estate capital has much more influence. We should see our involvement within this balance of power that it’s happening at the local level and which is everywhere. We are quite small when we go to debates, run online petitions, produce media reports, media releases etc, we’re trying to compete with real estate developers who are trying to invest billions of euros in the ex-industrial area of Cluj. It’s quite difficult to compete with them because even when we raised some public attention, they bought the whole local media and we could see their commercials everywhere. This is why it’s an imbalanced fight. But still, we are trying to fight our fight as well as we can and we can influence things.

This is something that gives me energy because it gives me satisfaction that there are so many things that we can do in this so-called “wild east”. I see that our work is relevant even though we lose a lot of fights.

Do you have any cross border links and what kind of transnational support could be helpful?

Well, I see my activism as being, “glocal” from the famous saying “think globally act locally”. This is my inspiration. So too is the online university, but online with, let’s say a quotation mark because I steal a lot of books. I read books. I don’t pay €100 or 200 euros for them. I cannot afford them. So I steal them. I am listening to Abbie Hoffman. This kind of connection helps me a lot. Another kind of connection that I have for inspiration is to see what other activists are doing in other countries.

I also watch documentaries and have meetings at an international level. For example, through the Transeuropa festival we can meet to see similar fights in a framework which is not parochial.

Most of my research is quite informal. So if I go on a vacation in Budapest I try to meet participatory budgeting actors and activists that are telling me what’s happening in Budapest, this is something that I also did in Portugal or Poland or the Czech Republic or in Denmark. I try to connect with activists. Almost everywhere I go I see protests. I go there for hours and talk with the people over there, exchange information and so on.

At the same time, I think we should have more connections like these, besides literature and festivals. Because most of our fights are common fights I think. Especially if we want a more democratic Europe; a more federal state at a European level; a more social state at the European level, these connections and networks should be even more formalized in order to influence institutional Europe. And in this sense, I think, sometimes I’m lacking the expertise and the connections.

Adrian Dohotaru, is an activist researcher and film director from Cluj-Napoca, founder of SOS and a former member of the Romanian parliament.

Seema Syeda is Communications Officer at European Alternatives.