Angelica Stan
Urban expansion in Bucharest, after 1990: errors and benefitsThe period that followed the fall of the communist regime in Bucharest has
meant a radical change in terms of city dynamics. If until that moment, the
urban territory had been strictly controlled and limited by the administrative
policy of the communist administration, after the December Revolution
1989, it became a permissive boundary, potentially manipulated by different
interests. In addition, the release of the system that has destroyed a good part
of the Bucharest’s valuable built heritage in order to accommodate a project
completely alien to the aspiration of the people creates the premises for the
expression of freedom, enacting individual initiative and every citizen’s desire
to define its own living ideal. This ideal, after decades of forced living in block-
of-flats, in dormitory-neighborhoods, had embodied in the desire to ‘escape’
from the city, to live in a house with a yard, ‘on earth’, closer to the natural
elements.
Among other changes, Bucharest was also facing a turnaround in terms of
spatial dynamics: from a relatively compact city between its administrative
limits, since it had a clearly defined role and a central position within its
agricultural sector, to a city with a very unbalanced territory of influence, with
a strong residential expansion to the North (announcing a development gap in
the southern part). Today, Bucharest clearly shows a chaotic development of
the entire peripheral crowns.
For at least 18 years, the Romanian Capital, like many other cities in Romania,
fully lived the phenomenon of uncontrolled expansion on adjacent territories,
a fivefold driver phenomenon , coming from different layers of urban life:
economic, social, cultural, administrative and environmental. The paper
discusses the phenomenon of Bucharest peripheral expansion through a model
diagram analysis known as DRSP - Drivers, Responses, State, Pressures and
Impacts, used by The European Environment Agency.
Abstracts