Urban nature transition

Urban nature is not an innocent element. No matter how it is presented - worked or left to grow - the various forms of vegetation speak overlapping languages: about politics and ideology, about architectural and urban design, but also, quite simply, about taste.

In Bucharest, for several years now, vegetation has also been in a period of transition. The change is evident and reflects, on a different scale and by different means, the broad dynamics of post-1989 change. It is not so much urban (and architectural) transformations, but mainly changes in mentality. From Bucharest's parks and squares to the trees that accompany you as you leave or arrive in the city, everything displays, in a paradoxical mix, the opulence of liberated nature and the typical care of the domestic spirit. Exotic flowers and plants on the way to the airport, in the parks - a plethora of trees and shrubs, flowerbeds, many multicolored, fences and fences of all sorts, almost triumphal entrances (if they weren't made of pipes and tin) announcing which park you are entering, signs (also metal) telling you under whose guidance all these wonderful feats have taken place.

What is this almost naturist nature talking about? And above all, what is it talking about in comparison - or, rather, in opposition - to the natura natura of the years of communist rule?

I will try to decipher the overlapping languages I mentioned at the beginning of the article by walking through the streets and the common green spaces of the apartment blocks and, especially, in two of the three parks of the ^Floreasca neighborhood1. What I am interested in are the public and semi-public spaces that allow an understanding of the urban articulation of this neighborhood on the body of the city.

The example has not been chosen by chance - Floreasca has been renowned since the beginning of its urban configuration (about a century ago) as one of the greenest areas of the city. The new socialist neighborhood takes advantage of this exceptional microclimate - an urban area where nature invites itself abundantly into the city, for the well-being of those who will live there. The design of the new neighborhood has been sufficiently documented to understand both the architects' motivations and the (political-)ideological substrate. Besides, it is the neighborhood where I was born and grew up, so I know every turn of the street, every alley in the park.

A little ideology

Vegetation in general, and parks in particular, occupy an important role in the socialist city, regardless of the ideological moment, even if their function is apparently expressed differently. In the years of socialist realism, urban nature is seen primarily as an ideological element, with Moscow - as in so many other places - as the model to follow. In the Stalinist plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, aesthetics - "the beautification of [the city] by means of plantations"² - was to be seen alongside politics, as this attention to aesthetics was a distinctive factor in the "character of the state and social regime"^3. In the socialist city, the green areas are more numerous and are designed to represent real "mass cultural institutions of a new type"^4. The role of urban nature is thus to erase old class differences, but also to remove "the contrast between the periphery [lost in greenery] and the [overbuilt] center"^5. Through its composition, the public green space is an element of social and urban harmony - built according to the same politicized Gestalt as socialist-realist architecture - while at the same time contributing to raising the "ideological, political, cultural and professional level[s]" of ^working people6.

Since the first destalinization, urban nature has been viewed differently, with references this time being sought in the position of ^Western architecture7. "Planting" increasingly becomes "a compositional element on the scale of the city" and a "humanizing factor"^8. Instead of the tectonically constructed, centered and symmetrical composition, the green space now offers a more "natural" nature, adopting picturesque, almost deconstructed forms; what it aims at is not only to raise living standards, but "culturalization", leisure, etc.

Read the full text in issue 5/2013 of Arhitectura magazine

PHOTO:

Carmen Popescu

Aurelian Stroe

Eftimie Popescu

NOTES:

1 I approached the theme of this article in different ways in "Capitalist realism - a quick foray through the parks of Bucharest"(Dilema Veche, no. 242, September 28, 2008) and "Projected happiness. Old myths and new ambitions in a Bucharest neighborhood" (Alfrun Klimes/ Marina Dmitrieva (eds.), The Post-socialist City. Continuity and change in urban space and imagery, Berlin, Jovis, 2010;

p. 170-195).

2 "Bibliography", Arhitectura R.P.R., 1952/ 1-2; p. 59-60.

3 R. Laurian, "Open spaces planted in the socialist city", Arhitectura R.P.R., 1954/1; p. 16-24.

4 Idem.

5 "The Great October Socialist Revolution", Arhitectura R.P.R., 1951/p. 10-11; p. 3-4.

6 R. Laurian.