Micro-urbanism and identity. Case study_Bucharest, the city as palimpsest

Abstract

Bucharest, a palimpsest city composed of all its historical stages, starting with natural writings and erasures of urban text til rough displacements, is currently the witness of rapid changes that often leave gaps in the urban structure. In this process the public space becomes most affected, because an arbitrary intervention of the post-communist period fails to mediate the relationship between public and private. A central theme of contemporary Romanian society is the loss of a sense of belonging to a community, primarily due to ambiguous relations established between historical and everyday reality.
As Stefan Ghenciulescu noticed in his article “Unpublic.Urban Space in Bucharest after 1989”, (...) islands of order, cleanliness and even luxury exist close to vacant deserted places. Public domain has become a battleground of interests and insignia. There are still existing rules but they are often bypassed or ignored. There is not an empty field but does not seem to be part of a coherent system. Therefore I think we can talk about city territory as an archipelago of private spaces.1In this context, the article aims to draw attention to an acute current issue. The emergence of discontinuities in the city structure creates the tendency of using space for a different purpose than the initial one, reaching a point where the mediation between social and urban space occurs.
The project is part of a series of urban interventions-proposals on urban level that identify waste sites, vague areas, along with the community tendency to appropriate them. This type of local-scale interventions, without having a permanent character, represents a socio-urban hybrid that turns a local tendency into a temporary occupancy vision of space, based on its dominant character. The study objective is to identify an intervention strategy that respects the spirit of place, and in the same time that will identify the fragments along with their own identity and write a new layer filling in the urban tissue. Thus, the urban tissue is handed back to the inhabitants through a punctual intervention, a strategy in which the process in itself becomes the most significant element of urban cohesion.