Bucharest is my city. I can't stand it, but I also love it deeply.
It's hard for me to imagine living somewhere else. It is a city in which each historical year fights with all the others.
It's a city made of superposition. Every player came and tried to do unto the others and then make its own perfect work, and none of them succeeded.
This is the third episode of the Disobedient Buildings podcast and Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project at the University of Oxford.
Our focus is on the everyday lives of the people living in three European countries the UK, Romania and Norway.
My name is Gabriela Nicolescu and today I take you to Bucharest,
where I speak with Ștefan Ghenciulescu editor of Zeppelin magazine and lecturer at the University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest.
Talking about different historical layers of the city,
about impoverished owners and the ghettoisation of southern parts of Bucharest, and about cars, traffic and pollution.
Zeppelin is a platform for architecture and design and and the city it's built up starting from the magazine,
which is which we started the more than 20 years ago. It was called the differently then.
Then we started also to do exhibitions and research works and books and interventions in the city.
So now it's extremely broad.
It ranges from architecture to research to curatorship, all the other things that you can imagine around architecture.
It's also it's a small team, and then we are very much into collaboration.
Most of our recent projects are done in collaboration with other institutions, organisations, people and and so on.
So what kind of stories to say about Bucharest? But my stories about Bucharest are always about the layers.
We are very much into talking about history.
We felt frustrated already 15-20 years ago that the magazine is always about the contemporary and the now.
For us, it's important to talk about history, but not about history very much in an academic way, but about history in a productive way.
A lot of the things that we publish and most of my architectural work,
which is not about design an exhibition is about older buildings and what you can do with them,
even if they're not heritage buildings and still not protected.
There was something very important happened at the beginning of the 16th century, which was that the sultan,
which was the sovereign also of the account, which was the principality of Bucharest, was the capital.
Forbidden City was. And this was very important because the city did not evolve like every typical European city,
which is very compact, intense in its walls and then grows a little bit.
It's developed from starts freely like cities do today.
Even in the beginning of the 19th century, the city was extremely large, it was larger than Barcelona at that time, with very different densities,
a very heavy core and then a lot of very important streets that went into the territory and in between them, a rural area.
So not the typical city and then the countryside or the city, the suburb, the countryside, but the mixture of city and countryside all the time.
And then you have the development in the 19th century, which is the 20th century which had to deal with it.
And then of course, you have socialist when you have especially Ceausescu.
And the thing about Ceausescu was that he wanted to race down completely the existing city.
That was his project. What he did was not raise big chunks of land, except for the most important part of the projects.
But he would actually build new boulevards, country boulevards or enlarge existing ones and then build roads of concrete blocks of flats.
And the idea was to go further and further and into the territory behind them.
But he wanted to have the the vista, the Potemkin think immediately.
So now if everybody walks or drives through Bucharest on their main streets,
you would think it's a city completely gone in the 70s and 80s and extreme.
Bucharest, you are always on a big boulevard. Maybe everything is compressed, everything is energetic and everything is loud.
And then you turn towards Twitter, you are in some kind of village. I think that it's fun.
It's fun. How many people leaving blocks of flats in Bucharest?
More or less we could. We could be sure that about 70 percent of the people in Bucharest live in this kind of housing.
And I think the first thing that somebody has to get when you speak about housing
in the socialist countries is that it's not social housing that should be stated to in a
very powerful way because social housing is housing that is subsidised by the government
for certain social categories and communities which have problems having their own home.
Of course, that was also the case in the socialist housing with some of these blocks.
But the main idea is that it was housing for everybody, especially in Romania.
You didn't have any legal alternatives to build or very few legal alternatives to build individual houses because after a certain point,
I think it was also forbidden. But some of the socialist housing was done by built through credit,
so people took credit in what we could have a credit in the socialist system and then they had their own apartment as the property.
Even then, housing in the city and urbanism and architecture are tools to build this new society.
And so they they were very ideological and very politicised.
And this was the idea which makes for some very interesting developments.
On the one hand, you have in all of these neighbourhoods, you have a mixed city that was never achieved in Western countries,
its social housing because you really had the doctor and the worker and the policeman and the teacher
living in the same building at practically the same apartment because you couldn't have it otherwise.
But regardless of the architectural typology, always what it is.
Also very important is that even if the buildings and everything is private in this building
because they have privatised the land is public and this is extremely different from,
let's say, the more traditional of the capitalist city in which you have very clear plots.
Then you have private land and public land, and then you have the way that people transform this land,
even if it's not theirs in an administrative legal meaning.
And this means that this blank slate and you shall have these buildings on,
it's actually also changed and it becomes a kind of disjointed puzzle of individual territories.
But legally, it's like that it has to be said that it now for these kind of buildings now represent communism for most of the people.
If they think in a symbolic way when they see block, they mean this kind of blocks.
So it's the representation of communism. As funny as it sounds for the architects, especially the photos, it is a Western model.
My father worked at Rome Waterbury. He was an architect who was a very young architect who did the urban plan with the colleague.
And they had done they had had their school in the 1950s, selling their socialist realism, which they hated.
And for them at the beginning of the 60s with this liberalisation period.
They actually for them, it was to do these blocks of flats in green.
It was not doing socialism. It was doing it like in the West. And the had actually Swedish magazine said you have to be present at or in
Europe to look at how things are done with prefab fabrications and so on.
And of course, they went to France, but they also went to the Nordic countries because not some countries were so strong on this kind of thing.
So it's a I think it's funny that what is today's the population was a symbol of communism was for the architects of the time,
a symbol of liberalisation and of reconnection with the West and of reconnection with the modern modernist tradition in Bucharest.
We have sent research packs and sending letters, writing cards, you know,
having all these materiality and contact with the people with our participants.
So one of them sent to us back sealable dust bag full with dust that he collected from his window.
He lives in this block, which is facing DeVita Boulevard with a lot of traffic.
And I think it's interesting to try to include the fact that the quality of of the life of the people
who are living in these blocks and in these apartments is not only something that has to do with,
you know, the structure of the building with the type of apartment with maintenance, but also with the quality of air with a space around the block.
And we, you know, the city as an organism.
Some people say there are more cars in Bucharest than people. It has to do this, of course, with public policy and the lack of, let's say,
the perfect public transportation and bike lanes and all the rest, but also with this obsession with cost.
And there are definitely more important than everything.
So there are people and of course you have to look in which people ask themselves for the authorities to
come and cut down trees because they are birds sitting in those trees and which are trashing their cars.
You know, so it's it's obvious that the social priorities are the city cannot take care.
I mean, there is no parking space possible to have for all these cars.
I mean, even if you would like to, it would be it would be impossible.
So you will have to shift to something else. But what can I say?
It's it's the cost of taking over a green space. The cars are taking over sidewalks.
You ask them why they were parked there and they said, but there's not no place else to park.
What can I do? You know, they are very sensitive.
See, I know it's not a good thing, but it's like it's a kind of Greek tragedy faith thing.
You know, they they have to park there because there's no nobody gives them a good parking spot, and so they have to park on the on the sidewalk.
There was a lack of the municipality to do this,
but it's also the lack of will is it has to do with populism because if you have Dutch cars, your we will get in big problems.
But I think mainly because those people in charge from starting from the government's door to the last guy in the administration,
they're totally into it. So they really believe that they believe in this car.
So they would if they can't understand why should the should they work against the car?
Because this is not the way they feel and they do themselves.
And this goes from a national strategy that has completely left out the railway because the railway in Romania is for poor people.
That's people who don't own a car. For me, it's fascinating that that you see people today.
On the one hand, they have these sustainability discourse, and on the other hand,
they're totally into the what was hot and what was good in the 1950s and 60s.
And and but in Bucharest, as the all other socialist countries, you know very well that they privatised everything in the 90s.
So we are a society of almost I think you remain an L.A. five percent of the people on their house, which is enormous here.
Everybody owns them and they are all on the market. So this adds a new layer because their attractiveness is very different and you have to.
For me that there are two basic factors when you buy an apartment here in Bucharest
that you look after is the earthquake is one because people have started to see that.
And then the position, the location is the other. And then you have the same kind of, let's say, concrete panel prefab block type a built in 1975.
If one is in a neighbourhood which is further away from the centre, then maybe its price is two thirds of the land located in the central area.
So I think that what happens is the kind of hidden ghettoisation in which people, which the richer they become, they tend to.
Even if you talk only about the socialist blocks of flats, they tend to move towards the centre.
And people who are older and cannot afford to live there anymore are moving more and more to the outskirts if everything is in private property.
But people are going to be poorer and poorer, the ones that are going to be to have these properties so cocaine will intervene.
In what kind of mechanism do friends to go to to aid poor people which own their house,
which is something completely different from council estates in Berlin, in England or or in or in Norway?
How do you deal with this kind of generalisation, which is is not really discussed now,
but which is undergoing in this fashion has a stealth way for a lot of fun.
I'm also interested in this topic on on property, especially in relation to the ageing of blocks and the fact that,
you know, in the eventuality of other and other major earthquakes,
I'm going to share with you some some materials from my research I brought with me a letter
that one of the participants in Burton wrote in this research packs Manuela storytelling,
in which an answer is the following when asked to say what worries her.
She said a possible new major earthquake similar to the one in 1977, which shook seriously Bucharest from the ground.
It can happen that blocks that were built in the 60s early 60s might be heavily affected.
So what happens to all the people who own a flat?
Yeah, it's an urgent thing. It's actually a disaster. We tend to focus on the ones in the first because they're the most endangered one once.
And this is true. I mean, it's the risk if you live in a 1940s building, it's much larger than if you live in a socialist block of flats.
Of course, it's clear that she's a very sensible lady. I think you really have to ask and to push them to ask them about what you think about the
common spaces and what to think about what happened with with the land around the blocks.
A lot of times we also ask them when when we had this kind of, you know,
our research and most of people answered, we need more parking space, even old people which didn't own a car.
They said, Look at all these cars need space. It's it's. And nobody told us about the meeting,
or maybe one in one in 20 sometimes say that they need that they would like to have a communal space or a new park and something like that.
Most of them really are really into this kind of kind of thinking into their own, into their own little problems,
which is a disaster because everybody makes their own improvements in their apartment and usually they stop
at the front door and sometimes in a block of flats which where the hallway looks like like horrible.
It really looks like a very, very bad space.
And you would think that people living there are really at the bottom of society and then you get into the apartment and it's like Alibaba's covered.
Everything is clean. But actually, when you get on the ground, it's a puzzle of very, very different areas, some of which are completely let down.
Others are occupied because costs are more important in Bucharest and people and some, I don't think to gardens and things like that.
The problem is for any kind of rehabilitation is that you have to bring people together,
and that is the case of Romanian society today that nobody wants to do something together with the others.
We are still in this kind of of pendulum movement from, you know, everything was had to be supported.
So total authority to nobody's authority and you have this explosion of individualism that started in the 90s.
And we very we are completely in it.
So everybody would like to do every improvements they could on their own thing, but not to do something with the others.
It still felt that if you do something together with others, it's kind of a waste of money.
So how can you bring to make rehabilitation like they did in Germany out there, like they doing in Britain when you have one owner?
It's it's quite easy. You know, it's not easy because of the money, but it's quite easy in a way to have.
We didn't have hundreds of owners. Thank you for listening to the Disobedient Buildings podcast edited by Anna Andersen and produced by Jack Soper.
If you want to hear more, go to our website WWw disobedient buildings,
dot com or search for our podcast where you normally find your podcasts in the next episode,
and Anna Andersen takes you to Oslo to speak with Maker's Hub founders as Else Abrahamsen and Jack Hughes.
What is the impact of participatory urban design projects for young people?