Planning Capital Cities

Abstracts

Mihai Alexandru

Urban planning through major planning documents after 1999: urban

centrality between vision and reality

After the fall of Communism in 1989, following a fifty year period of an
overregulated and exclusively public funded urban reconstruction supposed to
answer to a new ideological order, Romania’s planning system was facing new
challenges: the property law issued at the beginning of the 1990s as well as
a profound shift in the lifestyle of some of the inhabitants that had access to
new resources, stimulated a new trend in urban development characterized by
massive city expansion and, later on, punctual and contested interventions in the
historical fabric of the city that still continue today. Faced with such a challenge,
mainly driven by the private sector, the planning system is progressively trying
to adapt by repeatedly issuing new laws, additions to old laws etc.

While it is not an exception, Bucharest is the most dramatic exponent of these
changes to which several urban planning documents try to react. The weak
legislative frame allows a process of progressive deregulation that impacts an
already weakened city-center.

The General Urban Plan, 1999, is one of the main pioneering documents issued.
It promotes the idea of several areas of centrality in order to tackle the limitless
expansion as well as to absorb some of the more intensive development, spread
all over the city without a clear logic to that moment. The organic development
of the city, made possible by legislative gaps, tells a different story.

The Strategic Development Concept of Bucharest, 2012, is a straightforward
document that, apart from an integrated approach, assesses the becoming of
the proposed centralities, analyzing their degree of confirmation or their latency,
together with an overview on the expansion of the city and the possibilities of
tackling it after the economic crisis. This is also the occasion for reconsidering
some strategic parts of the city and for proposing a system of centralities that
is articulated at several levels and scales together with administrative and
legislative recommendations. A new General Urban Plan is currently in progress
and is aiming to be a more operational instrument. It remains to be seen if the
legislative planning system will demonstrate sufficient flexibility.