a simplified canonisation and average-thinking take over in the attempts
for quantity. The problems caused by that are well known: mono-functional
splitting of the territory, schematic thinking in well-known patterns, short-term
town extensions instead of sustainable adaptations of the existing urban parts
and so on.^18 Sofia’s urbanism in the 1960s and 1970s means predominantly
housing developments in the course of the urban extension. The historic urban
parts and the core fall into a zone of disinvestment. By the way, the urbanism
focuses on the conversion of abandoned military areas, some of them located
near the city centre. The orientation of the urbanism to not build up territories
has however also some positive aspects: it is a chance to preserve the urban
heritage in the compact parts of the capital from the unreflecting modernistic
patterns.
The shift from the intensive to the extensive urban policy doesn’t happen at
once. In 1956 the Council of Ministers orders a new land use plan for Sofia
and the adjacent territories. Two teams are ordered and offer two substantially
different concepts: The first one (the “Neykov-plan”) pledges upon an inner
reconstruction and succeeds in shrinking the cities growth. The second one
(the “Siromahov-plan”) proposes using the free territories surrounding the
capital in order to solve the need for mass housing development as well. The
Fig. 6
The representative largo in front
of the Party House implements
the hierarchy of ideological
meanings.
(Reproduction, Arhitectura)Grigor Doytchinov