Planning Capital Cities

Sofia before World War II: urban design as a cultural implication

There is without doubt an analogy between Sofia’s

ring road and Vienna’s Ringstrasse, because of both

the dimensions and the principles of composing.^38

The design of the places is similar: the compositional

axes are oriented at right angles to the ring road.

The radial streets of Sofia are located as transverse

axes to the ring road and can be interpreted as the

Vienna’s places along the Ringstrasse, getting this

way an important compositional role. Despite of the

similarities between Sofia’s and Vienna’s ring roads,

there are differences too. The ring road of Sofia is

more the result of a generous planning in the end of

the nineteenth century and less a historic trace, as

like in Vienna. It is planned in the course of an “outer”

urban extension, which is the essential difference to

the Vienna’s Ringstrasse, which is built on the former

Glacis, the fortification belt between the medieval

city and the surrounding towns. It is consequently an

“inner” expansion in the course of the incorporation

of the surrounding communities into Vienna in

the middle of the nineteenth century.^39 To see the

design of Sofia’s ring road just as a repetition of the

Vienne’s example would be incomplete, because the

topography and the river flows are as well important

preconditions for its lay out. Also the consideration

of the medieval defensive trench is a point for the

tracing of the ring road, especially on the southern

city edges.

Sofia’s urbanism until the World War I manifest two

phases: The regulation focuses on the modernisation

of the Ottoman settlement in the first phase. It is a

large scaled intervention, which rationalised and

intensified the use of the territory.^40 The first phase is

closely related to the activities of the foreign experts,

who accelerate the Europeanizing of the settlements

image. Their contributions are in the professional

sense decisive and trend-setting, but their work is

Fig. 8

The three basic elements of the urban model

of Sofia: the historic radial directions, the

newly planned ring roads and the orthogonal

grid of streets displacing the ottoman

patterns. (Doytchinov/Petev)