Planning Capital Cities

Suburbanisation in Sofia: changing the spatial structure of a post-communist city

Fig. 3
New luxurious condominiums
replaced old 2-story houses in
the inner city districts.
(Google Earth)

land demand by extending at the periphery than to redevelop areas in use. A

spatial outcome of the failure to recycle land was the existence of industrial

belts in the inner areas. Usually developed before World War II, most of these

industrial zones have never been recycled. As cities grew outwards they became

under-utilised ‘bottlenecks’ with rusting factories and warehouses, old railway

infrastructure and enclaves of ‘dead land’ within the urban fabric.^15

The post-communist transformations

The main outcomes from the transformation process after 1989, which

influenced the urban development, were the re-establishment of land and

the real estate markets, the emergence of a large number of private actors

operating and the opening of the urban environment to the international

economic forces.^16 It is reasonable to expect that the functioning of land and

real estate markets would produce changes in the urban spatial structure and a

population redistribution, which would lead to gradual change of the densities

curve.

Although the land and real estate markets have been quickly established,

they are still underdeveloped in the region.^17 Due to the fall of the real

incomes and the lack of a well-developed credit system, the most households

are too constrained financially to participate actively in the market and to

make the expected adjustments in the population densities. Nevertheless,

the period after the fall of communism witnessed some visible changes in

the spatial structures of the cities. Sýkora summarises the most important

trends and processes:^18 The residential function is rapidly declining and there

is a sharp commercialisation of city centre. The most common mechanisms

for commercialisation are: the change from residential to commercial use

within the existing building stock, the displacement of the existing residential

buildings by new commercial ones and an the intensification through in-fills and

additions. As the supply of sites suitable for commercial development in the