IntroductionThe analysis of Bucharest’s development after 1990 reveals both a culturally
and socially affectation of the whole city but also deep traces in the physical
space, functional structure and urban morphology of the peripheral territory.
Bucharest peripheries are today the mirror of a conflict state, which is worsened
during the economic crisis started in 2007.
Although generically called “transition period” after the 1989, and accepted as a
relatively homogenous entity in the history of spatial planning in Romania,^1 it can
be brought down into several distinctive periods, defined not only by the socio-
economic and political goals, but as morphological steps in the configuration of
the periphery. “The key changes in the spatial planning system did not always
emerge in a progressive manner, but rather as conjunctions of catalysts from a
broader institutional field, such as political shifts, discourses, availability of EU
funds, learning and networking processes, actual development patterns and
related civil society agency”.^2 According to Munteanu and Servillo there are five
distinct episodes, corresponding to the main political shifts at the national level:
1989–1996, 1997–2000, 2001–2004, 2005–2008, and 2008–2012. Although this
chronology is correct in terms of the political, macro-economic and legislative
transformations that have shaped it, only a small number of periods are relevant
to the phenomenon of the urban expansion of Bucharest, related to significant
changes in its urban structure and peripheral tissue morphology.
The first episode (1990–2000) is marked by a general enthusiasm, but also by deep
confusion due to a melting system between the communist remnants and the new
capitalist elements in all domains. The former planning law was repealed and it
appeared a “draft for an alternative comprehensive system based on prescriptive
land-use planning at the local level with supra-local and national integrative