I am very saddened when I see the lack of respect that is associated with public education in Romanian.
For me, this is the ground zero. This is where everything starts from school,
the education you get your civic sense that eventually makes you care about the city and makes you understand the consequences of your own
deeds upon the city and upon the relationship that you have with the public space and with the buildings and with the people in general.
So I think everything starts from there.
This is the sixth 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 Ilinca Păun-Constantinescu Lecturer,
at the University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest,
talking about communities and education, waste management and trust the life of shrinking cities in Romania.
Bucharest is definitely not perceived as shrinking, but there are shrinking sides of it.
And while shrinkage in general may be perceived by many only from a demographic and from an economic point of view,
shrinkage is actually also about almost certainly from my point of view.
It's about culture and about public life and urban life, and it's about how people really live in a certain city or a name or hood.
It is a city of contrasts, and this reflects in so, so many levels.
There is this phenomena of of a kind of suburbanisation, but maybe I wouldn't even label it exactly in that manner.
But but it is indeed a fact that people feel the need to run away from Bucharest and and choose their
their second place or their main place that the outskirts of Bucharest or even even somewhere else.
And on the other hand, there is that side of Bucharest that we very seldom seldomly want to look at,
and it is the Bucharest of the marginalised, marginalised people and marginalised places.
The north part of Bucharest is its favour. There are so many sides of of the southern part of Bucharest that are being neglected.
So I would say that that fight and a lot of neighbourhoods in Bucharest are shrinking while others are prospering.
When we talk about the well-being of people in blocks of flats, but also in other kinds of context,
we also talk about the facilities surrounding the blocks, green spaces, mutual help.
How do you feel? It's the situation in Bucharest. So if we are talking about the large housing estates that were built since, I don't know,
in the 60s and 70s they were equipped from from the very start with public facilities.
This was the whole idea. So the whole idea of the development of Bucharest in the 60s had, at its core, the concept of micro rayon.
So it was like a module of housing office of blocks of lots of different heights and dimensions,
plus the facilities that go with it like can nurseries, schools, shopping centres and so on and so forth.
So from this point of view, those housing estates, they have the infrastructure to continue.
I don't know, a healthy public life that goes hand in hand with housing,
but in the contemporary days, there are several things that have happened to this public facilities.
So on the one hand, some of them were privatised and they were either shut down or they were replaced by by some other the some other functions.
And on the other hand, the new estates they do not have or they have very, very little other facilities.
So they sometimes they might have commercial centres at the ground floor.
And this is it. So what they do is that they want to use the facilities from the know, the ones from the 60s and 70s.
And this happens mostly to schools, for instance.
This is a huge problem that can even lead to bribery because there is such a high demand for poor schooling.
Then in an older neighbourhood, the newcomers or even people that live at the outskirts of Bucharest, they want to go to school in Bucharest.
Yes, and this is turning into a bad consequence for the actual dwellers of the housing estates from
the 60s because there are other people that want to take away the facilities that they have.
Do you think people live well in Bucharest? Well, some of them live well, but not all of them live well because democracy is a very polluted city.
The green spaces that that were already from from the start, not that many,
even those that are being being taken over by investors, sometimes things that they are being occupied with buildings.
So instead of reusing in in a sensible way what Bucharest has, there is always this tendency to to to move further and build on new land.
So I think that's a very big problem.
Bucharest has this very interesting texture, we're going to have a lot of industrial spaces that were even very central.
And when these industries closed, so they offered a key point for further development,
and this key point from development could have gone in a sensible way and in a way that that those pretty vast urban plots,
they could have been used more for the people.
But mostly, they have been used for investors that always identified with blocks of flats with housing.
And that was something that is not healthy.
I want to ask you to go back to your book and to the fact that you have curated an exhibition in 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
My question has to do with did the exhibition impact the way you understood the project shrinking cities?
I know it is a project that still, you know, you are developing and you keep collecting materials.
What about the participation to the Venice Biennale with the Fading Borders project, you know?
Does the exhibition do anything to the research?
Well, the exhibition really did a lot to do the research, and what I really loved about about this exhibition was the fact that it was not addressed,
so that was its purpose from the first from the beginning.
So the purpose was to to address it not only to architects and urban planners, but mostly to the regular people.
And our point was to listen to their opinion on this subject as well.
So when we had the exhibition that at Mark at the National Museum of Contemporary Art,
it was for the first time that this subject was brought to to to the wider public.
And within the exhibition, we had what we called an informal collector.
So it was a place where people could leave messages about their own cities.
After having visited the exhibition and the people that supervised the exhibition,
they always told us that the visitors would spend a lot of time during the exhibition, and in the end we got so many messages.
It was it was unbelievable. So we were very happy that we were able to let people express their thoughts.
And in the end, we saw it all the of all the messages which were, I don't know, a thousand messages, maybe.
And those messages were so accurate they were depicting real life problems that people identified in their home cities.
After having visited that it it made us shape some, some next steps for the film, for the further research.
So first of all, the fact that it was a confirmation for us that this subject was not marginal in people's minds and that
people care a lot about their hometowns and they they really would like to have something done there.
And they do care about all the facilities and all the things that defined the city,
made them industrial areas or beat them, whatever important buildings that are not functioning anymore in their city.
So even young people care about that and please give us some examples.
I mean, some examples of the messages you got, people observed very accurate what was happening in the cities, and that was a first big surprise,
like they observed, and they managed to describe how all these changes that affect the cities reflecting the urban life.
So there are many messages that were describing that.
Then there were other messages that referred to particular buildings that are not functioning anymore or that are ruined.
And some of the visitors came up with with small solutions are propositions for those buildings
or just as an observation of the value that that those buildings have for for their own cities.
I think it's wonderful when when you see that people really want to to be implicated in what happens to the city and then,
you know, whatever they do has effects in time.
It does. I mean, changes don't take place quickly. They take time.
Changes take a lot of time. Changes need to happen from within as well.
So it's always it's it's crucial that you have collaborators from within the
city because those people can diagnose the best and they know what they want.
They know what, what, what they would like for the city to be like.
So it's very important to to listen to them. But of course, it's not the it's not something easy to do.
It's not easy to have a simple collaboration between the community and all these institutions.
But if you want, this was one of one of our main conclusions at the Venice Biennale, and it's even titled that way the power of cooperation.
So there is nothing that that can be done without the cooperation between the civil society
and the administration and the local administration and the central administration and so on.
I will switch to the project. Some participants in the project living on blocks of 10 to 13 floors built in the 60s and 70s and for example,
I have taken with me a postcard that was written by one of the participants in Greta
in Mobile and answers the following when asked what needs to be repaired or improved,
used to get a parrot? Then I buy it.
Yes, we need to repair the ceiling of the bathroom because our neighbours from above have flooded us because of the COVID 19 pandemic.
We would not ask for a painter to come.
Well, I think it was very challenging to be trapped in a in a in a in a block of flats, in a large block of flats during or during pandemic.
So this was indeed a very problematic period for all these people.
Also, because you mentioned when you when you read that something about the neighbours that flood other neighbours.
That is a very common issue that happens here.
And of course, at all these piping installations, they are pretty old and they have always caused a lot, a lot of damage.
In our interviews, when we talked to two people that lived in any kinds of blocks of flats,
there have always been complaints about the neighbours and these complaints were either flooding.
And on the other hand, they were about noise. That is an issue.
And that is something that that when people moved out of these housing estates from the 60s and 70s and 80s.
This was one of the things that they searched for not to hear the neighbour anymore.
I think in Romania, in not only in Bucharest, though in Romania in general,
there is a huge problem with with with the relationship that we have with our neighbours.
The problem with the vicinities and it's hard for for for Romanians to be able to properly be a part of a community
that is an issue that needs to be taken into account when making projects for the new housing development.
You know how to find the balance between privacy and community because the Romanian search very much for privacy,
but is very dangerous when this privacy just transforms in an atomisation and in
the in a in an individualisation in which you just surround yourself with walls.
So and I think we're in that point where we start to lose our sense of community.
So we need best architects and urban planners to try to to work with that and to make people share more and work more with communities.
The issue of trust is huge in Romania, and unfortunately, everything that's related to the state correlated with mistrust.
And this is something very serious and that happens in education and the mistrust into all of the state institutions.
We need them schools or universities or the municipal companies that collect garbage or the city
halls that do planning with the way the city is something that is not going to go away very soon.
This is why we as as people that work both for the public system but are also part of the
private system we really need to do to try to change this mentality through our own examples.
That's the only way that this can be changed.
I heard in the background, I heard my background, somebody asking for pieces of pipes and other kinds of materials.
Yeah, more or less related to iron. So that's that's something also that brings colour about how Bucharest is.
You get money in exchange for old iron.
In Romania,
there are people that are usually part of marginalised societies that go around the block of flats and they shout fire out of a court of law,
which means we collect old iron. So it's something that's a it's a win win situation.
Yeah. So if you have some metal that you don't use at home, it's very convenient for somebody to.
Have come and pick that up for you. And they just collect that and they go and they receive a small amount of of money for that.
I actually love that and I love the the sound, and I love that little melody that that they have with that.
But one thing I was very shocked to to have a customer in our office to have a client who was trying to build a house.
And at one point he was explaining that he wants to get away from from his former blocks of flats because every once in a couple of days,
there is this lady that comes and sings this this song.
There was so much hatred around there that I was. I was shocked.
Yes. So it is colourful for for some of us.
But but but for her, for others, it is a matter of racism.
I think also it's a measure of how huge the disparities are in Bucharest and in Romania in general.
Even as we were saying before, 60-65 percent of the population lives in blocks of flats, which are more or less the same kind of size.
So, you know, despite this equalising society and despite them equality,
the differences are are so huge nowadays, I think much more bigger than they used to be in the socialist times.
There is no national project or ethanol or even local project that refers to the less favoured ones.
Social housing. Social housing occupies a very small place in the public discourse and measures, and it shouldn't be that way at all.
Housing has become just a product, a very expensive product that people have to pay for their whole lives.
So they have these huge debts and for an apartment that is not even that nice in the end,
so it doesn't offer the best quality is just a compromise that that they make.
So until Romania is going to to really understand the fact that they need to embrace the social issues more,
I think we're not going to go on the right path.
Thank you for listening to the Disobedient Buildings podcast edited by Anna Ulrike Andersen and produced by Jack Soper.
If you want to hear more,
go to our website W w w disobedient buildings dot com or search for our podcast where you normally find your podcasts in the next episode.
Anna Andersen takes you to Oslo to speak with Tom Davies from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Does post-war architecture need preservation?