Planning Capital Cities

Miruna Stroe

Bucharest’s urban planning instruments

during the communist regime: systematization

sketches, plans, projects and interventions

Introduction

The focus of the article will be the urban planning regulation instruments
at work during the communist period in Bucharest. As the previous articles
pointed out^1 , the modernization of Bucharest employed imported urban
principles from Western Europe, reshaped and refined to match the reality of a
Balkan town. The effort to overcome the historic disparity between planning in
Bucharest and its European models can be observed from the first documented
regulations regarding urban embellishment and hygiene of the Organic Statute
(1834/1835, a precursor law to a constitution) and all the way to the last
Directive Urban Development Plan (1935/1939) before WW II. The ambition
of the administration, in conjunction with the apparition of a professional
milieu dedicated to urban planning^2 proved fertile for the establishment of
urban development principles for Bucharest that were still valid decades later.
We shall discuss further how some of these principles were brought back to
attention at different times during the communist regime.

Through the influence of “founding fathers” such as Cincinat Sfințescu^3 , the
ideas, methods and institutional organisms active in the West were imported
and adapted to the local context. Up until the Second World War, a very active
and fertile period of theoretical debate put forward a series of strategic plans
for Bucharest, which were incrementally aiming to change Bucharest into a
truly European capital.

The change of political regime from parliamentary monarchy to communist
republic under the watchful eye of Moscow, together with the need for
reconstruction, resulted in an alignment to soviet urban principles. This article
is not the place to discuss the Western filiation of many of these ideas, disguised
as original soviet science, though this is a valid point. We are only going to point