This article explores infrastructural transformations within communist and postcommunist Bucharest, arguing that they constituted the foundation for divergent discourses of nostalgia. The themes of production and domesticity provide a spatial focus and a framework for the investigation of this phenomenon in relation to workers as an urban social group. In reference to (post)communist Bucharest, I go beyond the spatial and temporal ambiguity that seems to trigger nostalgia, and I suggest its concrete embodiment in the structure and praxes of the city. I propose that under the communist regime, the experience of nostalgia was a way of coming to terms with the abrupt break from precommunist material and symbolic conditions, while the theme of labor became a vehicle for the normalization of those changes. The understanding and praxes of labor in the new condition of the city became a vehicle for nostalgia, and constituted the main reference point in the appropriation of the new urban and symbolic structure.
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