Grigor Doytchinov
Fig. 16
The view on Sofia’s urban core shows a regulated matrix and a
southward orientation. (Google Earth)to the study 80% of the citizens link the place with
the image of Sofia’s city center and define it as the
secondary image symbol after the Alexander Nevski
Cathedral. The place “Bulgaria” is defined as the
“most frequented” and most “comfortable” by young
people. The realization of the place directs definitely
the orientation of the city center to the south and
creates a unique link between the symbols of the
urban core and the regional ones - the mountain
Vitosha and the hill of Lozenec.
The immediately afterwards following urban
intervention is a logic step: the turn of the central
boulevard “Vitosha” into a pedestrian zone in 1985.^37
The boulevard connects as a strip of urban animation
the largo zone with the place “Bulgaria” and the
Southern Park. The creation of the large scaled
pedestrian zone^38 contributes to Sofia’s urbanism,
which is wining complexity in the 1980s because
of the renewal measures intended in the urban
core. The creation of the pedestrian zones cannot
be argued with city-establishing or crowded traffic
volume, known from western cities.^39 In this sense
the tendency can only be explained with the whish
for streamlining with the West, but also with the
approach of the political system for representation.^40
Though even here political necessities are the driving
force behind the project, the intervention in the
historic part of the city upgrades the urban heritage
as well as the public spaces in a human way. The
differences between the new qualities created in the
renovated parts of the urban core are in a serious contradiction to the poor
standard of the peripheral housing developments from the socialist period. The
technocratic work approach sticks with the awoken public desire for context
and emotion in the urban milieu. The policy of human space creation causes
a change in the professional attitude of mind, partly running as a controversy
between a critical younger architectural generation and the established
masters of the socialist modernity. The controversy “total rebuild versus
identity causing preservation” leaves the closed professional discussion and
comes slowly but surely in the media, becoming an object of public criticism.
Some critical articles of the 1980s focusing on the low quality of the housing
complexes can be assessed as the fore-signs of the political changes in 1989.^41
The crises of the political system reflect on Sofia’s urbanism in the 1980s. The
collapse of the socialism is closely connected to the incapability to reach the
expected consummation level. The processes of self-excessive demand make