Planning Capital Cities

Urban planning through major planning documents after 1999: urban centrality between vision and reality

Without giving any hierarchy between them, the following can be noted:

• the change in lifestyle for many inhabitants of Bucharest^20 , coupled
  with an increasing purchasing power but also with the search for
  better living conditions stimulated several waves of sprawl which
  gave rise to new core-periphery relations and a certain imbalance;


• secondly, the scale and speed of the urban expansion phenomenon
  after 1989, but especially after 2000 till the peak of the economic
  boom in 2008^21 has lead not only to a territorial imbalance, due to
  a fast growing periphery and a late reaction to a territory in loss of
  spatial cohesion but also to an increasingly large urban mass that
  was putting a lot of pressure on the city-center, already affected by
  previous interventions and thus no longer able to provide a good
  representation and service to farther and farther territories;


• thirdly, as an immediate consequence of the first tendency, due
  to the outward growth of the city, the problem of administrative
  borders was soon a problematic issue in ensuring a coherence and
  in providing services for a population installed in dispersed areas
  across the periphery; the surrounding territory still lacks basic
  equipment;


• in the fourth place, a rapid growth in the rate of car ownership^22 and
  also in individual mobility, sustained the diffuse expansion along
  with a change in the patterns of localization for people and activities;
  the lack of anticipation of this shift in transportation, combined with
  a well-developed but clearly inefficient and slowly reactive public
  transportation lead to an abrupt suffocation of the traffic system in
  Bucharest, further privileging peripheral movement.

Summarizing on the inner area, a lot of the proposals from the diverse documents

drafted around 1999 and later on, were severely affected by speculative

building and real-estate developments that also lead to some strategic sites

to become missed opportunities. The development existed but it was done in

an uncorrelated manner, the result being a growing incoherence and a delay

in the consolidation of the urban identity of Bucharest. In a report written for

the Bucharest Strategic Concept 2035, professor Doina Cristea states: ”the

best located land resources were consumed”^23 the polycentric development

of Bucharest is complex, so too are the implications of its failure, leading to

the impossibility of: developing the central area, the progressive consolidation

of the traditional business center in the perimeter of ”Bucharest 2000”; the

development of a system of urban poles for services and recreation; the 40%

increase in designated area for urban representative function, including in the

area ”Bucharest 2000”.

Considerations on the centrality of Bucharest in 2012

The effect of the aforementioned tendencies is complex but regarding our

focus on centrality the following observations can be made: