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I am very saddened when I see the lack of respect that is associated with public education in Romanian.

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For me, this is the ground zero. This is where everything starts from school,

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the education you get your civic sense that eventually makes you care about the city and makes you understand the consequences of your own

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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.

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So I think everything starts from there.

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This is the sixth episode of the Disobedient Buildings podcast and Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project at the University of Oxford.

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Our focus is on the everyday lives of the people living in three European countries the UK, Romania and Norway.

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My name is Gabriela Nicolescu and today I take you to Bucharest, where I speak with Ilinca Păun-Constantinescu Lecturer,

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at the University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest,

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talking about communities and education, waste management and trust the life of shrinking cities in Romania.

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Bucharest is definitely not perceived as shrinking, but there are shrinking sides of it.

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And while shrinkage in general may be perceived by many only from a demographic and from an economic point of view,

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shrinkage is actually also about almost certainly from my point of view.

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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.

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It is a city of contrasts, and this reflects in so, so many levels.

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There is this phenomena of of a kind of suburbanisation, but maybe I wouldn't even label it exactly in that manner.

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But but it is indeed a fact that people feel the need to run away from Bucharest and and choose their

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their second place or their main place that the outskirts of Bucharest or even even somewhere else.

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And on the other hand, there is that side of Bucharest that we very seldom seldomly want to look at,

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and it is the Bucharest of the marginalised, marginalised people and marginalised places.

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The north part of Bucharest is its favour. There are so many sides of of the southern part of Bucharest that are being neglected.

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So I would say that that fight and a lot of neighbourhoods in Bucharest are shrinking while others are prospering.

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When we talk about the well-being of people in blocks of flats, but also in other kinds of context,

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we also talk about the facilities surrounding the blocks, green spaces, mutual help.

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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,

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in the 60s and 70s they were equipped from from the very start with public facilities.

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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.

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So it was like a module of housing office of blocks of lots of different heights and dimensions,

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plus the facilities that go with it like can nurseries, schools, shopping centres and so on and so forth.

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So from this point of view, those housing estates, they have the infrastructure to continue.

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I don't know, a healthy public life that goes hand in hand with housing,

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but in the contemporary days, there are several things that have happened to this public facilities.

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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.

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And on the other hand, the new estates they do not have or they have very, very little other facilities.

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So they sometimes they might have commercial centres at the ground floor.

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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.

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And this happens mostly to schools, for instance.

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This is a huge problem that can even lead to bribery because there is such a high demand for poor schooling.

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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.

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Yes, and this is turning into a bad consequence for the actual dwellers of the housing estates from

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the 60s because there are other people that want to take away the facilities that they have.

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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.

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The green spaces that that were already from from the start, not that many,

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even those that are being being taken over by investors, sometimes things that they are being occupied with buildings.

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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.

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So I think that's a very big problem.

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Bucharest has this very interesting texture, we're going to have a lot of industrial spaces that were even very central.

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And when these industries closed, so they offered a key point for further development,

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and this key point from development could have gone in a sensible way and in a way that that those pretty vast urban plots,

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they could have been used more for the people.

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But mostly, they have been used for investors that always identified with blocks of flats with housing.

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And that was something that is not healthy.

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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.

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My question has to do with did the exhibition impact the way you understood the project shrinking cities?

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I know it is a project that still, you know, you are developing and you keep collecting materials.

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What about the participation to the Venice Biennale with the Fading Borders project, you know?

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Does the exhibition do anything to the research?

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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,

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so that was its purpose from the first from the beginning.

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So the purpose was to to address it not only to architects and urban planners, but mostly to the regular people.

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And our point was to listen to their opinion on this subject as well.

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So when we had the exhibition that at Mark at the National Museum of Contemporary Art,

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it was for the first time that this subject was brought to to to the wider public.

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And within the exhibition, we had what we called an informal collector.

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So it was a place where people could leave messages about their own cities.

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After having visited the exhibition and the people that supervised the exhibition,

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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.

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It was it was unbelievable. So we were very happy that we were able to let people express their thoughts.

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And in the end, we saw it all the of all the messages which were, I don't know, a thousand messages, maybe.

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And those messages were so accurate they were depicting real life problems that people identified in their home cities.

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After having visited that it it made us shape some, some next steps for the film, for the further research.

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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

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people care a lot about their hometowns and they they really would like to have something done there.

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And they do care about all the facilities and all the things that defined the city,

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made them industrial areas or beat them, whatever important buildings that are not functioning anymore in their city.

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So even young people care about that and please give us some examples.

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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,

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like they observed, and they managed to describe how all these changes that affect the cities reflecting the urban life.

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So there are many messages that were describing that.

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Then there were other messages that referred to particular buildings that are not functioning anymore or that are ruined.

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And some of the visitors came up with with small solutions are propositions for those buildings

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or just as an observation of the value that that those buildings have for for their own cities.

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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,

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you know, whatever they do has effects in time.

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It does. I mean, changes don't take place quickly. They take time.

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Changes take a lot of time. Changes need to happen from within as well.

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So it's always it's it's crucial that you have collaborators from within the

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city because those people can diagnose the best and they know what they want.

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They know what, what, what they would like for the city to be like.

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So it's very important to to listen to them. But of course, it's not the it's not something easy to do.

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It's not easy to have a simple collaboration between the community and all these institutions.

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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.

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So there is nothing that that can be done without the cooperation between the civil society

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and the administration and the local administration and the central administration and so on.

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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,

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I have taken with me a postcard that was written by one of the participants in Greta

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in Mobile and answers the following when asked what needs to be repaired or improved,

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used to get a parrot? Then I buy it.

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Yes, we need to repair the ceiling of the bathroom because our neighbours from above have flooded us because of the COVID 19 pandemic.

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We would not ask for a painter to come.

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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.

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So this was indeed a very problematic period for all these people.

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Also, because you mentioned when you when you read that something about the neighbours that flood other neighbours.

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That is a very common issue that happens here.

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And of course, at all these piping installations, they are pretty old and they have always caused a lot, a lot of damage.

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In our interviews, when we talked to two people that lived in any kinds of blocks of flats,

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there have always been complaints about the neighbours and these complaints were either flooding.

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And on the other hand, they were about noise. That is an issue.

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And that is something that that when people moved out of these housing estates from the 60s and 70s and 80s.

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This was one of the things that they searched for not to hear the neighbour anymore.

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I think in Romania, in not only in Bucharest, though in Romania in general,

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there is a huge problem with with with the relationship that we have with our neighbours.

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The problem with the vicinities and it's hard for for for Romanians to be able to properly be a part of a community

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that is an issue that needs to be taken into account when making projects for the new housing development.

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You know how to find the balance between privacy and community because the Romanian search very much for privacy,

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but is very dangerous when this privacy just transforms in an atomisation and in

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the in a in an individualisation in which you just surround yourself with walls.

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So and I think we're in that point where we start to lose our sense of community.

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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.

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The issue of trust is huge in Romania, and unfortunately, everything that's related to the state correlated with mistrust.

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And this is something very serious and that happens in education and the mistrust into all of the state institutions.

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We need them schools or universities or the municipal companies that collect garbage or the city

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halls that do planning with the way the city is something that is not going to go away very soon.

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This is why we as as people that work both for the public system but are also part of the

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private system we really need to do to try to change this mentality through our own examples.

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That's the only way that this can be changed.

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I heard in the background, I heard my background, somebody asking for pieces of pipes and other kinds of materials.

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Yeah, more or less related to iron. So that's that's something also that brings colour about how Bucharest is.

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You get money in exchange for old iron.

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In Romania,

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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,

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which means we collect old iron. So it's something that's a it's a win win situation.

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Yeah. So if you have some metal that you don't use at home, it's very convenient for somebody to.

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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.

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I actually love that and I love the the sound, and I love that little melody that that they have with that.

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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.

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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,

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there is this lady that comes and sings this this song.

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There was so much hatred around there that I was. I was shocked.

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Yes. So it is colourful for for some of us.

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But but but for her, for others, it is a matter of racism.

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I think also it's a measure of how huge the disparities are in Bucharest and in Romania in general.

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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.

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So, you know, despite this equalising society and despite them equality,

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the differences are are so huge nowadays, I think much more bigger than they used to be in the socialist times.

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There is no national project or ethanol or even local project that refers to the less favoured ones.

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Social housing. Social housing occupies a very small place in the public discourse and measures, and it shouldn't be that way at all.

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Housing has become just a product, a very expensive product that people have to pay for their whole lives.

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So they have these huge debts and for an apartment that is not even that nice in the end,

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so it doesn't offer the best quality is just a compromise that that they make.

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So until Romania is going to to really understand the fact that they need to embrace the social issues more,

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I think we're not going to go on the right path.

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Thank you for listening to the Disobedient Buildings podcast edited by Anna Ulrike Andersen and produced by Jack Soper.

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If you want to hear more,

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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.

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Anna Andersen takes you to Oslo to speak with Tom Davies from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

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Does post-war architecture need preservation?