The Renaissance of Bucharest
The False Dilemma between Preservation and Development in Romania’s Capital
If the urban issues in Bucharest were simple, they would have already been solved a long time ago. A solution is missing because few are willing to accept that regardless of who their opponents are: the Real Estate Mafia, NGO fanatics, Predator Developers, the Activist Mayor - and I apologize for not being up to date with the latest insult vocabulary, they are correct to some extent. We are stuck in extreme positions on an essential debate for the future.
Let’s start with an important idea worth repeating with every opportunity: Bucharest's architectural and historical heritage must be protected and cared for because a city that does not respect its past cannot speak about the future. However, there is a significant difference between this position and the idea that most of the city should be a museum and preserved entirely. A city is not a museum, it is a living organism continuously developing to respond to the needs of its residents who live here today and in the future.
Open Air Museum or Manhattan on the banks of Dâmbovița
Bucharest is a young city. It is true that we can trace the history of a settlement on the banks of the Dâmbovița River to Vlad Dracula (yes, that one) and even before, but at the beginning of the 19th century, the city's population numbered around 30,000 people. Unlike Paris, Berlin, or Amsterdam, Bucharest was described in documents from that time as a slightly larger village. In the following century, the city will undergo significant transformations, starting to be described as a Garden City and Little Paris. To this day, the modernist architecture designed by Romanian architects such as Marcel Iancu, Horia Crengă, Haralamb Georgescu, is appreciated and studied in architecture schools in Europe, just a small example of the architectural value of the city.
However, this does not mean that everything old is also valuable. A significant part of the built inventory has exhausted its lifespan. Just as a car is not designed to operate for hundreds of years, the same is true for most buildings. A city that cares about the safety of its inhabitants would encourage, with urgency, that many of these buildings be replaced by earthquake-resistant and energy-efficient buildings. But such a proposal is considered extreme today, met with insults like those in the introduction, because we mistake old for valuable. As we have shown, sometimes this is the case, and we have many reasons to showcase our architecture and history, but in many other cases, the only thing that should be protected is the lives of the people who live near these buildings.
Currently, Romania’s capital is not an easy city to love, and each one of us can identify a list of problems, from traffic to the quality of public spaces. But the charm of Bucharest is to some extent this slightly unpredictable pace of life, of a European capital located at the gates of the Orient, in constant need of balancing the old with the modern, the order with the spontaneous. All these buildings that we now consider historic and worth protecting were at some point new and modern. Today, we have the chance to decide what the future of the city will look like. In this debate we can include both visions from the extremes: skyscrapers like in Manhattan or an open-air museum, but in reality, the options from the middle of this spectrum are the most captivating. Regardless of whether we look to Vienna, Amsterdam, or Copenhagen, we see cities where the old and the new coexist, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in contrast.
Looking Ahead
The idea that blocking development in Bucharest helps the city in the long run, a strategy endorsed most visibly by the current Mayor, is the perfect reflection of the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I have no doubt that he and many activists sincerely believe in their fight and think that they stand on the right side of history. But the reality is that the urban deadlock in Bucharest leads to the acceleration of development in the immediate vicinity of the city, in the metropolitan area that is not affected in any way by the opinion of Bucharest's Mayor. This is a major problem.
The mayors of the dozens of towns nearby Bucharest approve construction projects en masse because they collect the taxes, but the challenge of building new infrastructure and public services is passed on to Bucharest. That is because people who purchase in these areas continue to work, take their children to school, and live their lives in the capital, but now they are completely dependent on their cars and thus contribute to the worst traffic in the European Union. It’s the eternal problem of urban sprawl.
If the real priority is to save Bucharest's architectural heritage, the most important thing would be the massive rehabilitation of buildings and the construction of new mixed projects in central areas. Otherwise, the polarizing debates around suspending Zoning Plans and Protected Areas will be left without buildings to protect in the face of a strong earthquake - a certainty that we hope is still far into the future.
Even if part of the motivation for blocking the city's development is to punish the real estate "mafia" for the "chaotic" development of the past, this is a bad way to go about it that stems from a basic confusion of what hurts investors. Developers have capital or access to capital that they can invest somewhere or not, and naturally, an investor will take their capital where they can put it to work. That could mean some other market, but often enough it also means the immediate vicinity of the city where development is possible.
Developers aren’t significantly hurt if you don't allow them to invest in Bucharest, the money is still in their bank accounts unaffected and looking for other opportunities. What you clearly hit is your own city budget, housing affordability, and the overall urban economy, while at the same time, you amplify chronic issues like car dependency and urban sprawl. The lack of predictability of an investment in Bucharest is one of the major vulnerabilities in attracting international investors. Are they also the real estate "mafia"? If that’s the case, let's welcome them with the well-known banner of the ‘90s "we don't sell our country", and once they run away, we can continue to work in peace towards a multilaterally developed socialist society (most Romanians will recognize this, but Google that if you don’t).
If we want to demand higher standards from investors, and I think we should, there are countless models we can adopt so that they support the impact their projects have on the city's infrastructure: through impact fees at the time of authorization as well as through collaboration tools in the public interest. The basic principle is that if you want a permit for more floors, first build a kindergarten or a public park.
The cities that I mention throughout the article have such functional models; just take as an example how much a building permit costs in a US city. It is true that not everything in life is about money, but many of the major public investments that Bucharest needs are dependent on a large budget and a strong urban economy - both of which are affected over the long term by deadlock and uncertainty.
There are several controversial ideas about the future of Bucharest that are not often discussed publicly
I believe they should be, and I can share them openly here because my livelihood fortunately does not depend on votes or social media likes.
Such an example is the obsession for parking spaces. Cities like Berlin, London, and Paris have eliminated parking minimums for most projects, in other words, they removed the rule that states you must build a minimum number of parking spaces for a project to be approved. Some cities went as far as completely banning the construction of parking spaces even if the developer would like to add them. We must ask ourselves why is their perspective so different from ours?
The answer is that experience has shown that you get what you encourage: if you build parking spaces, you promote car dependency and contribute to traffic congestion, but if you prohibit parking spaces and invest in public and alternative transport, you will guide the majority to choose alternative ways to travel. I anticipate a valid counterargument: invest in public transport first, and then we'll see about parking. I agree, but like any structural change, we need to start from all possible points towards the destination.
The movement to limit parking spaces is a major trend in urban planning worldwide. We can build residential parking spaces, especially at the city’s edges, and public parking spaces underground in the central areas, but no matter how much we build, we will never have enough space for all cars - they simply don't fit. That doesn't mean we ban cars, something I completely reject, but it means we make transportation easier and faster through other means. Bucharest will be a successful city when wealthy people choose to take the subway.
The Little Paris naturally loves to find inspiration from the real Paris, from which we borrowed a long list of ideas like the administrative organization of the city or even street signs. Then let's do what Paris is doing today. A major reorientation, at all levels, towards the vision of a 15-minute city. In short, the idea that you should be able to reach all essential services on foot or by bicycle within 15 minutes from where you live.
Mayor Anne Hidalgo is building hundreds of kilometers of bike lanes, transforming over 70,000 parking spaces in the city center into spaces for people, such as new green spaces and playgrounds for children. This is what a paradigm shift could look like, a bold vision worthy to be integrated in the General Zoning Plan (PUG), a document that has not been updated in Bucharest for over 20 years.
The list of unpopular ideas about Romania’s capital is quite long, including: the lack of mixed-use buildings as a rule, setbacks such as Height(H)/2 instead of continuous fronts that offer gentle density at a human scale, some central areas where we still have village-like density allowed, the lack of road infrastructure that prioritizes cycling and public transit over cars, and the need for a new Law of Bucharest for administrative reorganization (do we really need 7 Mayors and 7 City Halls?). All of these I think make great topics for future articles and public debates, but for now I ask those who find these proposals revolting: why have cities much more advanced than Bucharest reached these answers, are they ignorant and lacking vision, or are we?
What is happening today in Romania's capital compounds the very problems we are trying to solve. There is no bold vision of the future, we are witnessing leadership guided by a religious belief that is impervious to reason. An independent mayor had the chance to build a city that is easier to love, in partnership with investors, experts, and the community, but instead the window of possibility was consumed by puritanism, false dilemmas, and a messianic struggle with the 'mafia,' with only one clear loser: the city and its residents.
The Renaissance of Bucharest is thus postponed. The silver lining is that the current Mayor of Bucharest will hopefully manage, unlike his predecessor, to leave behind a City Hall with a decent financial situation that will allow a paradigm shift in the next term, under a mayor ready for bold change instead of activism financed by public funds.
We are here today because urbanism and the future of Bucharest are debates with many nuances that are difficult to boil down in a political slogan. However, what can be summarized is that extreme positions, between skyscrapers and absolute preservation, are in false opposition. It is possible to have modern buildings and protect our architectural heritage, and it is possible to build new buildings in Bucharest without destroying green spaces or historical monuments. We know this because we see it happen in dozens of cities around the world. What must end is for one of Europe's largest capitals to remain stuck in binary thinking and extreme positions.
