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Mnemonics, a ludic vision of freedom

photo: Andrei Mărgulescu

Public spaces in Romania's cities have changed significantly in recent decades. Most changes have occurred organically, as society itself has changed. Many of us wonder whether the transformations have been for better or for worse, and Mnemonics is an attempt to understand how positive memories from the cities of our childhood could contribute to improving public space in the future.
Mnemonics refers to the ancient technique of collecting memories, ars memoriae, based on the relationship between thoughts and their visually invested, impossible-to-forget, meaningful visual support. The capacity of space to generate powerful memories remains the ultimate challenge of architecture and makes the emotion of a story endlessly mentally reaccessible.
The theme of open space invites us to reflect, to search for an imaginary thread which, according to this criterion, unites in an image different moments of a space representative of the world of the Romanian city and of the society that has seen it transform. As in the second half of the twentieth century many small and large towns in Romania experienced an accelerated pace of urbanization, this growth resulted in an interstitial space of the new urban fabric which, left in the distant background of development priorities, returned to the inhabitants in its vicinity.
In the collective memory of the generations of the last decades in Romania, this fact is part of a common imaginarium generated by the evolution of free urbanism, which has reserved for the city's inhabitants a free space that no one claims, but which belongs to everyone. In Romania, the universally iconic image of the space between blocks of flats is still that of children playing under the eyes of their parents and grandparents, freely building invisible worlds in an empty space. The way in which a person evolves from being a child with a concern for play and games, to being an adult with a concern for himself and his community, represents the fascinating cycle of life, a territory of infinite possibilities for architecture and urbanism.
Thus, the image of the freedom to appropriate a free space through play remains for the children of the last decades of Romania's history a powerful piece of a mnemotechnique that keeps alive the memories of childhood - friends, games, events, the staircase of the block and the key hung around the neck, as a symbol of freedom, but also of responsibility.
The creativity of play and the boundlessness of the human imagination give us the chance to understand how precious places in our memories have the power to carry forward viable ideas for fusion with the generations that come after us, in cross-cultural encounters and in the formation of intra- and inter-community relations. The space between city blocks in Romania is the subject of contemporary interventions at the architectural, community, and educational levels, as a promise for a future scenario related to public space and how it can be used, the relationship between the intimate and the public and the specific filters between them, play, life in the urban space and how the community relates to it. (www.mnemonics.ro)

Starting from the idea that Mnemonics is the pretext for a multidisciplinary approach, Romeo Cuc, the project coordinator, invited professionals from different fields to express their vision on the subject in a personal way, from the perspective of those who find their childhood in the setting described by the two exhibitions presented at the Venice Biennale 2018.
Given their valuable discourse from a documentary and historical point of view, which argues the Mnemonics team's choice of illustrating the Biennale's theme, we considered it important to publish excerpts of these texts also in the ARHITECTURA magazine, for a better understanding of the exhibition concept.

Romeo CUC
After the blocks

(...)
Memories unite us and define our territories. A vast and complex territory of generations who wore the key around their necks and "were on their own" after school, until their parents came home late in the afternoon from work. For these children this meant FREEDOM, acceptance, spontaneity, spontaneity, creativity and improvisation - an imaginary universe built in the open space between the blocks.
The games we played, the friendships with neighbors, the gardens in the front and back of the block, with vines climbing up to the second floor, the loud laughter - all are colorful memories of childhood spent "in the block".
Shared memories and experiences, the chance for a sensitive discussion on the topic of the open space between the blocks of most Romanian cities and the possibilities of reusing it brought the Mnemonics team together - the timely meeting of several skills acquired from urban planning, architecture, art, journalism and communication, advertising, editorial projects and social engagement.
We are in the process of assessing the built environment in which we live and we consider blocks as an important resource with great potential to (re)generate communities, improve interpersonal relationships, the way of living and the use of public space. The worlds invented by children and the creativity of play give us the chance to understand how open space in our neighborhood can generate new ideas for development.
Mnemonics tells a story about a territory of freedom for several generations in Romania, about small gestures of living and integrated approaches to space - the home and the open space around it.
Mnemonics is a story about architecture and collective memory, about childhood and the joy of play, about future opportunities and possibilities.

Vintilă MIHĂILESCU
Make PLACE!

About half a century ago, the ethnologist Ernest Bernea (1985) asked peasants in a village what they understood by space. "I've heard of space - replied a local to Bernea's question - but what is space? In the book it's called space, but we know space; that's what it's called. Okay, so what is space? - continued Bernea. "What is a place? A place is the world and the world is what God has given. Man comes, finds them and arranges them according to his own measure". And another said: "Where there is no thing, there is no place; what kind of place is that without anything? Place comes with work".

And there are all kinds of things in this world, so that places are also of many kinds: "There is a good place and a bad place; every place has its gifts, like man". And this one "may be of stone, it may be of spirit". "There are also places that make you sick", so that "it's not good to wander in foreign places, because you don't know them all, and there are bad places. A bad place is not to know; it's bad by itself, it's dry. Bad places don't go with good. A bad place is where a man gets sick when he steps: see, it comes like a spirit..." .
There is thus, it seems, an erotic relationship - in a deep, vaguely Platonic sense - between man and place. The latter, with its gifts, which come from stone or from the spirit - the geographers' natural space, the architects' built space - has a personality of its own, which man must discover so that he can then 'make it his own', that is to say, inhabit it. The place thus precedes, in a way, inhabitation (but only in a way, for otherwise all place is the inhabitation of things), being given to inhabitation, only to become part of it by the very fact of inhabitation.

Tame me - says the fox to the Little Prince...

The place that, by being inhabited, is made to fit the human being, is placed in a symbolic geography that we can call the "geography of the human being". At its center - or, perhaps better, towards its center - lies that place of man which is called home. Toward its center, I said, because home is an appropriation, it is his way of being of place to being of kind, it is the space where place becomes kind; it is le chez soi, it is Heim...

The history of the city in the modern era is, from one point of view, a chain of separations - of place and nature, of people, of objects, as well as a diversely modulated separation between urban and rural, a ramified abuse of enclosures, both material and symbolic. It all seems to culminate in a kind of McDonaldization (Ritzer, 2011) of urbanism, which has become efficient, calculable, predictable and controllable: urban rationality becomes irrational through excess, through abuse. Place becomes a useful surface or melts into non-place: "A space that has nothing to do with identity and is neither relational nor historical can be considered a non-place" - Marc Augé (1992). Let us add to this what we might call non-time, the result of demolitions and strictly pragmatic interventions by developers, which increasingly leave the city without memory, in a continuous present that is both functional and hedonistic.
Housing is becoming fetishized, inhabitants are becoming alienated, and living is becoming standardized...

Place is thus evolving towards non-place. "Something unimaginable in the time of Morus or even a few decades ago, the power of networks transports us into a utopia in the negative sense of non-place (ou-topos): by mediating its prostheses, it frees us from the local dimension" - Françoise Choay observes, but concludes that "it is legitimate to wonder whether belonging to a local horizon is part of what makes us human" (Choay, 2011).
The non-local therefore demands the in-local.

1. The formal city

While in the West, cities rose up against the countryside and feudal power, while at the same time clearly separating themselves from nature, in our part of Europe the city was initially more of a fair, a place for exchanges between villages, and then, when it began to develop, it was built as an extension of the countryside, often incorporating nearby villages and thus letting gardens and orchards permeate it. With its political origins, the encirclement of the western citadels, designed to protect the freedoms of craftsmen and merchants in the cities, defines a closed, orderly and necessarily rational urban texture, profoundly different from that of Bucharest, for example, osmotic and random, which incorporated 42 villages in its composition and which, in 1907, covered 22,453.649 square meters, of which only 6,800,000 were built - that is, without streets and squares, 11.3% of its surface area, 67.5% being courtyards and gardens (M. Mihăilescu, 1915/2003). For a long time, the garden-city label attributed to Bucharest was therefore entirely justified, and an archaeological survey of the Capital can still today reveal traces of the old villages.

I used to live in such a former village, still visible until recently, which stretched on either side of Teleajen Street (formerly Gândacilor - probably silkworms were grown there in those days), perpendicular to Duzilor and Vișinilor, parallel to Frunzei and Agricultori and ending in Orzari. In the 1970s, two houses away from the mines there was still standing a typical lowland farmhouse with an earth porch covered with reeds and a garden of over a thousand square meters, from which children used to steal cherries in spring. After 1990, it was the first piece of land in the area to be bought by a developer, and in place of the garden, the first two villas with high brick fences appeared.
A little further on was probably the former village square, of which a small, abandoned, no-man's, nobody's, everyone's, little quay remained, in the middle of which stood, slightly tilted by the weather, a 19th century stone cross. This is where pensioners used to meet, when it was nice outside, to play backgammon or chess, and where children used to play ball. An old country pub still operated on one corner, where the men of the neighborhood met regularly. In the mornings, some people would sometimes go out in their pajamas to the gate and have a chat with the neighbors. On sunny Sundays or holidays, some courtyards would be filled with barbecue smoke. At funer funerals or parsons' services, in most cases, the neighbors would pay their respects. All the children went to the same neighborhood school and we all bought our groceries at the same corner store where, after 1990, they also sold on credit. It was a real urban community, a real neighborhood.

By the 1930s, the Chicago School was already predicting the neighborhood's demise. By the 1980s, most experts were describing the disappearance of the neighborhood in favor of the city on the one hand and the dwelling on the other, on the evolutionary model of the legal transition from community (Gemeinschaft) to society (Gesellschaft). After 1980 and the experiences of the social upheavals in the urban peripheries, the neighborhood is increasingly privileged as an object of academic interest and urban policy in order to solve social problems, manage economic exclusion and rebuild social belonging. The "spatial justice" enunciated by Henri Lefebvre (1974) is beginning to be taken into account as a principle of territorial policies. Over the last two decades or so, the neighborhood has become a priority. "No policy will succeed in urban centers if it is not anchored in the experiences and aspirations of small neighborhoods, shaped, controlled and managed by their representatives" - declared the European Working Group on Local Social Development in 1992.
The neighborhood is not a community, but it can be a neighborhood. It is a space full of relationships and pathways, it is a place to walk in, which does not need to be outdated, as it is relatively self-sufficient in functional and social terms; it is not a lived-in neighborhood, but an optimum density of pathways and networks of sociability for the inhabitants of a neighborhood, which can support and promote an active identity on the borderline between private and public. It is an externalization of the home and an internalization of the city, an extension of the domestic and a peninsula of the public.
In short, it is a social space where biography meets structure, a place that allows private belonging not to feel excluded from the city. Like the place of the rural world, the neighborhood is qualitative: it can be good or bad. From this point of view, the quality of urban life is measured in the density and relationality of its good neighborhoods (which by no means means selective).

However, Bucharest is a city without neighborhoods. The systematization of the second half of the last century dismantled or fragmented them, largely replacing them with the dormitory-spaces of the block neighborhoods. Cooperativization and industrialization also created intense migration that ruralized them. In contrast, the deregulation of the early 21st century gentrified or ghettoized them.
Asked in a 2013 survey by SNSPA's Department of Sociology which neighborhood they live in, Bucharest residents identified about 125 relatively distinct areas. Of these, two thirds were nominated by street names, subway mouths or other such conjunctural landmarks, 27% referred to communist neighborhoods (Balta Albă, Berceni, etc.) and only 7% referred to old inter-war subdivisions (Domenii, Cotroceni, etc.) or convergence streets (Polonă neighborhood, etc.). Convenience stores were still desired by only 21% of the Bucharesters, and of the 424 restaurants nominated as favorites only about 7% were in the area of residence.
Urban references are increasingly distant and impersonal. And yet Bucharest residents love their neighborhood more than the city. Complementarily, from the etacization of the public and the cloistering of the private in the old political regime, there was a sudden shift, after 1989, to the privatization of the public and the display of the private. Having controlled the public space before, the state abandoned it with post-communism. Bucharest has no public spaces either. Which is why 83% of Bucharest's residents share the idea of a strictly pedestrian zone in the capital and use every opportunity to occupy the streets when given the chance, from Street Delivery to Museum Night, from open-air opera concerts to the Sunday closure of the Kiseleff Road. Abandoned spaces also become vacated spaces, from maidans to former industrial buildings.

2. The performative city

I was born and grew up on Tatra Mountains street, near Victoriei Square. At the time of my grandfather, who had bought the apartment block where we lived, the city was almost at the end. The entrance to the block was through a gang, which became a soccer gate for kids from the whole street. The wall of the front house was just good for leaning against for thick milk or knocking a one-two-three-at-the-wall when we played hide-and-seek. The lower fence of the house on the right was the most handy place when we played leapfrog. But the most important place was the small, unkempt park on the corner of the street, dominated by a huge mulberry tree, the true axis mundi of my childhood. That was the fortress and the boys' observation post, but only the biggest or strongest were allowed to climb it. The day a more entrenched classmate took me in the dud was the most important day of my life - at least I thought so at the time. There were also some swings that were contorted from so much use, but they were more for girls to swing on - and sometimes boys would race to fart on them.
Strangely, picturing myself as a child in today's much neater playgrounds makes me feel uncomfortable. All spaces and objects are accompanied by how to use them - they tell you what to do and what not to do; my dududu did nothing but dudes, but allowed you to do whatever you could think of with it...
*
Life in a block of flats, i.e. a socialist block of flats, was at first sight profoundly different. For many, it represented a displacement, either from the village homestead they had to leave or from the demolished urban home. In Snagov, a village almost entirely demolished and rebuilt with blocks of flats, I heard for the first time the expression "died by the block". It was like a medical diagnosis of an incurable disease: he was demolished, they moved him to the block, so he died.
And yet...
...in spite of appearances, to the homogenization imposed by block housing, the inhabitants have almost always and everywhere reacted by a dwelling that has allowed the domestication of these non-places.
The first thing that most new tenants of block flats did was to change their door, which was the same for everyone, for one that had something special, that was theirs alone. At the other end of the apartment, the balconiada began, i.e. the fight with the landlords to close the balcony. Once it was closed, it could be used for all sorts of different things: a handicraft workshop for the men, a place to dry laundry in summer and pickle pickles in winter for the women, a storeroom or a private corner for the whole family to drink coffee. Sometimes, even the austere geometry of the apartment became a variable one, with some walls being knocked out to reorganize the whole space.
I was once in an apartment on the ground floor of a block of flats where the tenants had cut a large hole in the floor and built a staircase to a basement box, which had become a cellar. When he wanted to offer me something to drink, the host lifted up the carpet in the living room, opened a hatch and disappeared down it, then returned with a bottle of brandy - "from us, from the country"...
Just outside the flat the staircase begins. In most cases it was dark and abandoned. Not infrequently, however, it became an extension of the apartments on the same floor: a plant, a painting and sometimes a table where housewives drank their coffee in the morning and men drank their brandy or beer in the evening. There was always at least one bench downstairs, just outside the block of flats, where people gossiped on and around it as if it were a village gate. Around the block, in a supposedly communal area, the ground-floor residents in particular were cutting out a little garden where they grew flowers, tended a tree or even planted tomatoes that the children would eat long before they ripened, much to the anger of the owners.
Behind the block, three metal pipes welded at right angles formed the adults' carpet beater and the children's soccer goal. The rest of the space between the blocks was mostly empty - or at any rate dotted with immediately occupied interstices: every imaginable children's game, a swing, a chess table or backgammon, and even a small vegetable patch. The blocks of flats next to a railway line then almost everywhere occupied that no-man's-land on either side of the railway tracks with small, illegal but tolerated urban gardens, where the villagers continued to keep a hen, two chickens, maybe even a pig, often fenced in with vines. On any train journey, you could see these gardens across the country.
Constricting and uniform, pre-1989 housing was often diverse and sometimes colorful. Everything that was space was etaticized, but there were also places liberated, domesticated, appropriated and thus transfigured - not so much physically, architecturally, as through the small gestures of inhabitation. In short, if dwelling can be ideological, inhabiting it is always psychological and can transform it in many ways.

3. The informal city

This performative city can be subsumed under what Tudor Elian (2017) calls and analyzes in detail as the 'informal city'. In the case of Bucharest, it seems to be about "the habit of Bucharest residents to fend for themselves, to compensate for the absence and at the same time the intervention of public administration, to take advantage of the interstitial spaces and times of the city and of an almost total urban freedom". The space for analysis thus stretches between the informal practices of residents and this 'almost total urban freedom', which often means legislative anomie. On the other hand, 'such practices are themselves architectural and urbanistic in the sense that they shape space and the city by generating distinct uses or spatial forms that fuse spontaneity, need, desire and habit'. But they are also "micro-political forms and attitudes of reaction or resistance to a dissatisfying status-quo". The author concludes: "The informal is therefore also a quasi-extreme form of local autonomy and decentralization of administrative decision-making".
Historically, this process appears to have been going on for a considerable length of time, which is not, however, in the author's view, so much the mark of a persistent rurality as of a particular urban development model: 'Bucharest remains, until late, largely vernacular, and its maintenance is still the responsibility of the citizens - for example, by repairing and sanitizing the road in front of the house. The persistence of this "model", we believe, does not point to a rural or still non-urbanized Bucharest, but to a certain urban culture (of its own or of Balkan origin) and a specific spatialization of this urbanity, defined to a large extent by an informal culture (constructive and otherwise)".
In other words, we could say that the market towns of the Old Kingdom are more orally based than written. And orality is always spontaneous and improvisational, unlike the "graphic reasoning" (Goody, 1977) indispensable to any bureaucracy - and, by implication, to any public administration. This orality of dwelling thus comes into conflict with the normative writing of official urban planning or, more often, takes advantage of its inconsistencies and inconsistencies to insinuate itself informally into the formal urban texture. From this point of view, Elian's main conclusion is that such relations between the informal of the inhabitants and the formal of the administration consist in the 'lack, so far, of levels and mechanisms of mediation between private and public, between the individual and the authorities'.

4. The urban(istic) imagination

More than half a century ago, Wright Mills made his mark on the social sciences with a provocative book - The Sociological Imagination (Mills, 1959/2000), which placed the imagination at the center of science. For Mills, the sociological imagination is first and foremost "an intense awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the surrounding society". To do this, however, "a person has to withdraw from the situation in which he or she finds himself or herself and think from an alternative point of view. One needs to think oneself out of one's everyday routines and look at them with different eyes (...); this imagination is the ability to shift from one perspective to another (...). It is the capacity to sweep our gaze from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self - and to see the relations between the two". So understood, the sociological imagination "enables us to comprehend history, and biography, and the relations between the two within society. This is the task and promise of the sociological imagination".
Mutatis mutandis, the need for imagination is also what we are talking about here, i.e. the intense awareness of the relationship between the biography of the inhabitants and the history of housing, between the personal experience of living and the surrounding urban space. The urban vision is therefore not enough; it needs to be complemented by an urban imagination that is given enough room to play. The orality of the informal city will, in any case, intervene to correct, adapt, transform, complete and enrich it through spaces of freedom.
Paradoxically, an urbanism might be imaginative to the extent that it renounces being definitive and forgets to plan everything, leaving the inhabitants the possibility of post-urbanist arrangements - even if it can then intervene, secondarily, in the co-imagining of these spaces of freedom. Paraphrasing Mills, we could therefore say that imagination in urbanism allows us to embrace dwelling and inhabitation and the relations between the two within the city in order to allow the city to regain its human place.

Ana Maria ZAHARIADE
Past blocks, ^future blocks1 ...

For reasons to which I will return, the current perception of block housing is tainted by a number of prejudices and a certain lack of knowledge: it is automatically associated with housing in large estates, marginal dormitory-neighborhoods, lacking the necessary urban amenities, often left in a state of disrepair, [...] with modest comfort, exceeding the expectations of an increasingly broad middle class, and also facing a certain lack of representativeness. The word 'block' often has such connotations, although it could (and logically should) also refer to inter-war buildings which, although still blocks, enjoy a different prestige, even if many of them have a 'red badge'. A sort of opprobrium hangs over the (mostly high-rise) blocks of flats, charging them with all the deformities of communism, modernity and "non-(non)-locality"... Is it really so?
As I believe that history can clarify and teach us a lot if we know how to look at it, I will attempt a brief foray into the subject. The high-rise apartment block is neither the invention of communism nor modernism. It is the product of urban agglomeration and land and real estate speculation. It can be seen as the invention of Ancient Rome: the so-called insula-ae was a high-rise building [...] which, during the imperial period, was the most common type [...], the height of which Augustus limited to ^21m2 by imperial edict. After a period of absence, we see it reappearing in the modern period, towards apartments (for rent) it is used for all social statuses: for example, Baron Haussmann uses it systematically and intensively for the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, brought by the need for urban housing, but also by the new way of life of the industrial and ^liberal city3. The Parisian bourgeoisie housing (giving Paris its current image) and, also at that time, it was also used for the underprivileged classes (subsidized or not), alongside the single-family housing typology. The model spread, with high-rise blocks springing up in many European cities for different types of users. In fact, at the end of the 19th century, the (increasingly high-rise) apartment block was one of the vehicles for the modernization of Bucharest, used in the construction of quays and grand ^boulevards4.
In contrast to this reality, what the modern movement brings is a more radical philosophy [...]. Growing in height thanks to new technologies, the block, hitherto subordinated to the logic of the traditional fabric (building regimes subordinated to urban space), becomes autonomous, detached from the pressure of external space and becomes a solitary object (point or bar), floating in the 'exploded' space of free urbanism. This question, however, raises a new urban rule, not the type itself.

After the Second World War, high-rise blocks (predominantly following the new urban rule in "large estates") are the most visible and uniformly widespread product of European urbanism and the most common European housing typology ever built, with a peak in the 1960s-70s. [...] A 1977 study shows that high-rise living seems to be the common way of life for about 6 million people in Western Europe, to which the former communist countries (excluding the former USSR) add another 34 million living in large (over 2,500 dwellings), high-rise blocks being the majority. A study of 15 European countries (10 western and 5 in the former communist east) estimates a minimum of 24.752 million apartments in high-rise blocks (over 5-6 storeys), more than half of which are in three countries (Spain, Ukraine and Italy); in some of these countries - such as Spain, Italy and Sweden - they are a perfectly natural alternative to high-rise housing. High-rise living is generally associated with the prestige of the big city. For example, 35% of apartment blocks in five major cities in Italy and Slovenia and over 60% in Spain are high-rise; over half of France's high-rise blocks are in the Paris region, and in Hungary, a third around ^Budapest5.

In the West, the coincidence of the technical and social problems generated by this accelerated construction is bringing about a decline almost as sudden as its rise. [...] From this, one might think that block housing is rejected on principle by everyone. However, even with the general increase in affluence and housing aspirations that are driving a demand for more living space and more indoor comfort than the general standards of the 1960s and 1970s, there is far from a consensus of rejection. As proof of this, in some countries (such as Spain, Italy, Sweden), the high-rise apartment block has a very good position on the housing market, being considered as valid a way of living as the individual dwelling, while in others, including former communist countries, it is a "dead end", which is not necessarily reflected in their resale price, at least in Bucharest. These paradoxical positions in the demand-supply game have diverse, circumstantial, highly culturally particularized and changing over time. On the one hand, many of them have to do with a "subjective hierarchy", a whole history of judgments and prejudices; some negative reactions have their origin in issues other than the architectural quality of the typology itself, being generated by mismanagement, inappropriate uses, social problems with much broader causes.

On the other hand, towards the end of the 1980s, throughout western Europe, even in cultures where rejection had been more drastic, the high-rise apartment block reappeared, but on a different basis. Coupled with urban regeneration, with varied and good quality housing at waterfronts and other attractive locations, often in the city center, the image of the "block" is recovering. No longer occupying the predominant position of the 1960s and 1970s, the high-rise housing typology is once again becoming a valid alternative to single-family housing, a tool of urban regeneration and an area of reformulating nuanced attitudes to urban living, architectural invention and experimentation with housing diversity, which is seen in all the current magazines. There are cases of predominantly high-rise functionalist cities, such as Brasilia, which are proving to be much more viable than was thought decades ago, being positively valorized as an alternative way of living to the traditional city.
Returning to Romania, where the predominant type of high-rise blocks built between 1960 and 1990 are very poor typologically (both in terms of building structure and types of apartments), we may wonder what their future holds.

The post-revolutionary evolution of the real estate market shows that, in the early years, the preferences of the new affluent were oriented towards the so-called "villa neighborhoods", built even further away from the city center than the large estates and isolated from what would be a real urban life. More recently, however, "the middle class is moving back into blocks of flats", as an article in the daily press put it. Some of the advantages of the multi-family high-rise housing typology are beginning to be recognized: the possibility of buying apartments smaller than a "villa", easier maintenance with less direct involvement, greater security, more central locations, even a view "over the crown of the trees", as the CIAMs used to say, etc. Developers build, apartments are bought.

So what is the problem? It may just be a delay in understanding reasonable contemporary trends. I think that's not so for at least two reasons, both of which call into question our professional responsibility. First, the new high-rise blocks of private developers offer the same typological poverty as those of the communist years: the flats are the same (sometimes even worse in terms of interior distribution), only slightly dilated and better finished and technically equipped; for the most part they show no inventiveness, no variety of living, no quest to offer anything other than the sad banality that the customer thinks is "model" and the developer sells as such. Then, the new luxury 'parks' are largely built in such a way that they isolate themselves from the city, they do not integrate urban life but fragment it; still less do they serve as instruments of urban regeneration. Of course it's easier (though I would hope it's not easier for the architect to design badly!), but it is sad - like any missed opportunity - damaging to the city and the urban community, and evidence of professional backwardness. Perhaps it's time to restore the block to its pre-war significance in city-building.
As for the rehabilitation of the large complexes, which here and there have started to rehabilitate themselves, that is another subject...

Stefan GHENCIULESCU

Non-public. Public space in Bucharest after ¹⁹⁸⁹⁶

Totalitarian regimes turn the public spaces of cities into the domain of their absolute power. Thus, it is closely monitored and transformed into a space of propaganda and expression of authority, of slogans, parades and monumental operations.
Under communist regimes, this domination was even deeper and more complex (and comprehensive). Private initiative was forbidden, since the state was the sole planner, the sole investor and the sole builder. Which is why a host of social relations involving any measure of freedom found their place almost exclusively in private space.
The house became the place where you could escape surveillance (in theory), where you could talk more freely and even listen to Radio Free Europe, or where you could organize parties for friends, since there were no real places where you could go out. Only in the house could you alter and personalize the standard living unit.
In 1980s Romania, there was no relaxation (of living conditions). On the contrary, the regime had become even more repressive and implemented a vast program of urban destruction and megalomaniac developments.
This is why the transformation of the urban space after 1989 seems all the more brutal compared with the rest of Eastern Europe. The unexpected disappearance of totalitarian control led, on the one hand. to the freezing of state operations (gradually resumed in a different context). and on the other hand to a boom in private initiatives. The previous arbitrariness of a centralized authority has been replaced by a frenzy of private activities, sustained efforts to appropriate individual spaces and a process of uncontrolled development.
Bucharest is a perfect case study, as both the regime's operations and the changes after 1989 were more complex and intense here than in the rest of the country. But the phenomena described here are relevant to the country as a whole, and - in contrast to the immediate past - they are relevant even to the entire Eastern Bloc.
How can we model the relationship between the community and the urban space in post-communist countries, as the theme exposed in the Romanian situation? My thesis is that the boom of urban vitality has been associated with a continuation - even a consolidation - of a mentality of "closedness", of lack of involvement and escape into the private space. After almost 30 years of development, the articulation and negotiation between public and private space is becoming weaker rather than stronger.

A collection of individual spaces float on a neglected substrate. This support - the city's public space - is used, consumed intensively and, in rapidly changing ways, parts of it are constantly seized. Thus, islands of order, cleanliness and even luxury sometimes lie in the vicinity of completely untidy wastelands. There are still rules, but they are constantly circumvented or ignored. The public realm has become a battleground of different interests and brands and no longer seems to form a coherent system. I therefore believe that we can speak of the city territory as an archipelago of private spaces. [...]
The construction of new houses and the conversion of old ones exploded after 1990, only slowing down after the financial crisis. The choice of a single-family house is hardly surprising, coming as a clear counter-model to the imposed collectivization. The new buildings, be they residential estates or neighborhoods developed almost spontaneously, develop as fragments of the suburbs, scattered on the territory of neighboring former villages, with no connection to each other or to the existing context; bits of the city, floating alongside commercial projects, remnants of villages, fields and forests. Sometimes luxury villas and garbage dumps coexist on the same street.
New houses, located either in these suburbs or in the city center, install high fences made of brick walls. But the strict demarcation of individual territories, the intense isolation from the overall space, also dictates the transformation of existing objects: fences that were once transparent are replaced by brick or opaque fences, the balconies of blocks are now individually covered in glass, in a euphoria of enclosure and separation of space. In fact, this retreat into private space deepens the same phenomenon that occurred during the communist dictatorship.

These changes can best be seen if we look at the former socialist neighborhoods, especially the large estates built outside the downtown area. These are neighborhoods that emerged in the 1960s out of a purely functional spirit: blocks and tower blocks floating in a sea of greenery. Sixteen years after the fall of the regime, the blocks, in turn - like everything else in the city - are being transformed from standard unit devices into a kind of stacked rows of individual houses, thanks to the changes made by the inhabitants.
Territorial developments in these neighborhoods are perhaps the most interesting. The once homogeneous space has become motley. In the first years after the fall of communism, kiosks appeared, spontaneously lining the streets. Most of them, built illegally, have since been demolished by the authorities, only to be replaced by more sturdy constructions: either newly built villas on plots of land legally returned to the rightful owners, or commercial buildings or even apartment blocks, usually unrelated to the existing structures.
The lighter interventions take the form of front or back gardens, clusters of parking lots, unusual garbage cans or even a small vegetable garden. Privatized spaces adjoin others that are entirely neglected. On the other hand, the energetic and spontaneous rediscovery of urban life is fascinating, along with some of its archetypes and spontaneously created differentiation within uniform structures. But all these tendencies seem like incongruous fragments that have not yet managed to coalesce into a system of public-private relations.

What next?

A conglomerate of closed, private spaces has replaced the frozen public space of communism.

The free revitalization of a place or archetypes of urban practice does not structure the places of communities. Public space is functionally used and consumed, but it does not have an identity resulting from community involvement. The big question is to what extent are the above phenomena specific and inevitable in a period of transition towards a normal society? Or maybe they actually represent a new type of attitude towards public space.
Trying to look at the issue from an optimistic perspective, it seems obvious that, as far as society as a whole is concerned, we have to go through a period of transition, followed by a re-establishment of more natural relations. Clearly, broken mechanisms need time to recover. And then there are the small signs of a slow and fragmented recovery of public space: new pedestrian areas, buildings starting to open up to the city... The fact that people are actually using these spaces and reacting positively to the changes should encourage architects and planning officers to push forward with the changes instead of waiting for various committees to deal with it.
Small artistic interventions, 'happenings', become ways to activate, even if temporarily, the re-creation of a public realm. Pilot projects, well thought through and communicated, can serve as examples of good practice. Involving the residents of a city or an area is an essential element of any project: reclaiming public space is probably irrelevant apart from building community.

That would be the optimistic perspective. One that, as architects, we are somehow forced to assume. But we cannot say whether the retreat and dislocation between public and private are only temporary phenomena or true signs of a new paradigm of urban life.
Perhaps we should look at the bigger picture. I dare say that, paradoxically, what is happening in Eastern Europe may point to more general phenomena. Clearly, the economic backwardness leads to a slower pace of fundamental change in urban society than in the West. However, in the latter case, the changes occur gradually and are subject to the regulating mechanisms of society. They may therefore be less visible, even if they are profound. In the East, the abrupt transition from one regime to another makes it possible to study the phenomenon in its naked form.
One may wonder whether the above is indeed entirely specific to Bucharest. Can we not observe how even in Western society public space has become increasingly private? Does the city, as Rem Koolhaas triumphantly claims, and many deplore, tend to become more and more a collection of autonomous objects, connected by an increasingly sophisticated network? To what extent are the traditional values of urban life still connected to the physical space of the city? In such a paradigm, how relevant are architecture, spatial planning and design? But this is a question that is certainly beyond the scope of this text.

Notes

NOTES

1. Excerpt from Ana Maria Zahariade, Symptoms of Transition, "a collection of fragmentary chronicles, "shards of mirror" [....] that can give an account [over time] of the dynamics of the reality that Romanian architects were confronted with after 1989, of some of the complicated, strange and difficult to interpret aspects of the post-communist transition, of the way it was perceived, problematized and theorized by those who reflected on it", Arhitext Magazine, 2007, and volume 1, 2009, Arhitext Design Foundation Publishing House. Today, there is a serious counterpoint to the situation described a decade ago in the text published on www.mnemonics.ro, a counterpoint that reflects contemporary reactions to the urban environment in Romania, signs of a change of attitude towards public space, especially towards the open space between blocks.

2. Patrulius, Radu, Locuința în timp și spațiu, Bucharest, 1975.

3. For example, in Durand's treatise (the key book of 19th-century architects), the apartment building and the rental apartment are a particular concern.
4. Lascu, Nicolae, Legislație și dezvoltare urbană, București 1831-1952 - PhD thesis, UAUIM, 1997.
5. Turkington, R.; Kempen, R. van; Wasswnberg, F. (eds.), High-rise Housing in Europe: Current trends and future prospects, Delft, 2004.
6. The original version of this text was (also) published in the catalog of the "Remix" project, which represented Romania at the 2006 Architecture Biennale. The text has been revised and updated, but - and this is not a good thing - it is still relevant and perhaps even worth republishing in this new context, not least because so little has changed in 12 years. In the former East, the "transition" seems to be going on forever, if not - as we have observed in recent years - leading to regression.