Urban expansion in Bucharest, after 1990: errors and benefitsThe expansion of Bucharest began after 1990, following the abolishment of a
series of laws of the communist administration, which restricted building on
land outside the city or within the limited localities established by the law for
the extension of the collective housing areas or of industrial units.
The first building law was the Law No.50 from 29 July 1991, authorizing the
execution of construction and certain measures to achieve housing. The law
was configured after the French model, but without having from the beginning
all the other related and necessary legislative acts, such as the cadaster and
land registration law and the urban planning law, which appeared later^6.
The legislative factor has introduced enough ambiguity and permissiveness, but
it has gone along with the political factor, which seeks to configure appealing
electoral agenda in front of a population, obviously untrained in democratic
practices. Bucharest had 11 mayors starting from Ștefan Ciurel, resigning in
1990, to the today’s Sorin Oprescu.^7 Among the promises of the politicians, no
one has taken into account up to 2000, the marginal areas of the city, except
maybe the punctual commitments of asphalting, public lighting and sanitation
of the very poor neighborhoods at the city edges. The status quo, the economic
problems, the nonexistence yet of a master plan of the city, didn’t seem to
concern much the authorities. There seemed to be many other things that were
more important, caused by the virtue of the events after 1989 events.
One of the special moments of this decade was ”The Bucharest 2000
International Planning Contest”, launched in 1996 with a prestigious
international jury, gathering competitors from all over the world, some of them
notorious. The winning team, Meinhard von Gerkan and Jais Joachim from
Germany, proposed radical and quite un-realistic interventions for the Unirii
area,^8 and thus the implementation of the result was not possible. But what this
competition did was the attracting of the investors’ attention to Bucharest. The
”Bucharest 2000 Zone” was not ready to receive behind the ”Casa Poporului”
the “forest of skyscrapers”, as proposed by von Gerkan (even if it was declared
in 1998 a”national interest zone”). Therefore the more permissive peripheries
were open for both office buildings and housing estates.
Among the most important urban projects developed in the periphery of the
capital, started in that period (some still in progress), are the residential districts
Cosmopolis and Henri Coanda, the commercial objects Carrefour Militari and
Metro Baneasa, and the offices in Straulesti, Baneasa, Pipera and Voluntari.
Some of them are still in progress.
It would be appropriate to mention here some details about the dealing with
the urban context at that time. First, it was a period of a direct struggle with the
inherited image of the ”monstrous urban systematization” of the communist
era. The term of ”systematization” replaced the term of ”urbanism” as an
inappropriate for the communist regime one, meant all types of interventions