Planning Capital Cities

Urban expansion in Bucharest, after 1990: errors and benefits

the central area and to build infrastructure for the certain city’s strategic

development poles. Not literally presented in this agenda was the problem

of the uncontrolled urban expansion. It was reached indirectly, because the

attention of the municipality was directed only to solving the problems within

the existing urban tissue.

The weakening of the real estate pressure and the relative maturity of the

administration concerning the adapted urban development plans, have made

possible several important strategic documents guiding the city evolution. The

awareness about the need for an integrated vision for the development of the

city and the need for an integrated management of the metropolitan scale of

Bucharest characterize these documents. The start of the new General Urban

Plan of Bucharest in 2011 was one of the important moments, stating some of

the city’s compulsory management levels: the public space and quality of life,

the urban identity, the business opportunities and economic development, the

sustainable development, and the regional relationships.

The overall dynamics in the drafting of urban land regulations has been very

much diminished after 2008. They came with the changes of the Urban Planning

Law and the provision that forbade the initiating of Zonal Urban Plans by private

developers and by limiting the land use ratio to no more than 20% from baseline.

If in 2009 there were a total of 124 Zonal Urban Plans approved in Bucharest

territory, in 2013 that number drops to 18 - a rate decrease of approx. 88%.

A great number of the zonal plans have been

developed in Bucharest and its surrounding for

central and semi-central areas. Most of those made

in peripheral areas are residential developments

of various magnitudes. Certain elements of urban

sprawl do occur in this period with a greatly reduced

speed and have dominantly a residential character.

Many peripheral objects, as schools, kindergartens

and health facilities that were tackled mostly by

private investments, begin suffering because of their

mono-functionality. What is missing, however, are

public spaces, community areas, cultural facilities,

and this makes the peripheries to have yet a pauper

image, deprived of identity and representation.

The period of real estate crisis, with its lower

construction pressure in the peripheral areas,

emphasized the problems that occurred previously by

having their effects on the environment, such as “the

increasing size of the urban heat island, the increased

pollution, (...)”^19 and on the urban functionality and

on many other levels.

Fig. 6
Spatial distribution and concentration areas
of residential projects in 2010, in Bucharest and
peripheral areas.
(Stan, after Pătroescu)