Planning Capital Cities

Mihai Alexandru

The city-center

An increasing incapacity of the city-center to accomplish its multidimensional
role is apparent due to several reasons: the newly built mass, diffuse, has a poor
connectivity to the city-center due to the slow reaction of both public transport
and route infrastructure projects and cannot justify investment in large urban or
infrastructural projects; the first wave of urbanization takes place as far as tens of
kilometers away from the city center generating large unoccupied land creating a
spatial discontinuity, ”a void of interest” for different investors and urban actors;
the urban mass created as a result of the urban growth raises an issue of city-
center capacity which cannot evolve at the same pace; due to the displacement of
some of the population in the periphery, the commuting phenomenon is making
the city-center a less accessible place, although it remains a large traffic generator.

Despite this lack of capacity in a territorial (metropolitan) context, at its own
scale the historic city-center gains new interest: capitalizing on a growing
tourist phenomenon, a still ongoing refurbishment program of the historic city-
center begun in 2007, contributes to an overturn in its popularity, by partial
pedestrianizing, car access restrictions, pavement and furniture remodeling,
but most of all, turning an impoverished area in an area dedicated almost
exclusively to consumption in the form of terraces, cafes, bars and nightclubs.
”In the central area of Bucharest the distinctive mark of the moment seems to
be the forcing of a new volumetric configuration, the incoherent dispersion of
functions, the overcrowding of an already saturated old fabric”^24.

The so-called success of the historic city-center is nevertheless relative as at
least two main risks can be identified: a process mimicking what Jane Jacobs^25
explained as a risk for popular areas of cities, namely a mono-functionality as a
result of intense polarization of a single activity that is attracted by that specific
place having as consequence the exclusion of other activities, especially
dwelling^26 which is a basic ingredient of the city-center; a decrease in the
representativeness of the city-center for the inhabitants of Bucharest, as some
social exclusion is apparent as a result of the functional specialization that is not
coherent with social diversity^27.

The emergence of new commercial centralities

In the first phase of development after the Revolution (1990-2002), as new
residential areas were built in the far periphery, there was also a series of
commercial areas that followed briefly, but their success was to be of short
term; implanted mainly in relation to main routes access, the answer they
gave to a rapid demand of services in periphery was not sustainable, neither
financially nor efficient. Their specialized offer, no longer corresponded to
further changes in lifestyle of inhabitants, thus around 2000^28 a new generation
of shopping centers, commercial areas and malls were built closer to the city,
sometimes in the dense urban fabric, offering a higher diversity of services.