Unfolding Bucharest - Organic City Development Analysis

Unfolding Bucharest PILOT RESEARCH - SECTOR 1

Unfolding Bucharest At first sight, it looks rather risky: to try and explain how the so-called chaos works. And moreover, to foresee the direction of that whole chaos - this is as risky as any step on unsafe ground. After 20 years of transition, Bucharest is so full of contrasts, energy disorders and collisions, that its problems could hardly be expressed properly. From illegal mansions to collapsing investments, from pirate radio stations to a political instability and various social shortcomings - everything points out to a difficult urbanity, a non-standard territory, with an unpredictable and warring progress. At a closer look on the post-socialist trend, one could notice that certain changes occur similarly in comparable cases, following an internal logic, adjusted on the way to all sorts of crises and abuses.

The effervescence of the non-stop society in our Eastern cities has its own imperatives: huge energies are forced to find their own dynamics. In the absence of an urban strategy with clear rules and laws valid for all, such disparate evolution takes place following internal regulations, clearly pragmatic, without rendering the city something in return. Such self-regulated processes turn into a standard of the turbourbanism.

The goal of the Unfolding Bucharest Project is to document this process under construction, constantly influenced by lots of factors (the social and political background, the economic evolution, the education, the specific cultural context, the opening to European contemporary values etc.) and to attempt to imagine the future of eastern cities beyond clichĂŠs, in a positive and balanced perspective, following how shortages turn into opportunities.

The project started from the idea that mapping this various small, individual processes could, by their clustering in time and space, reveal a history of ongoing change and adaptation to the unstable social grounds on which the city of Bucharest stands.

Objectives: - understanding underling factors that influence Bucharest city development; - determine relations between different layers of data (economy - policy- social) and their impact on area character and quality; - determining and mapping different stages of post-communism city transformation (ex: urban sprawl) and the economical and politic climate that influenced them; - understanding how PUZ and PUD approved derogations transformed the character of an area overtime; - mapping discrepancies between PUG regulations and reality and how can these changes be controlled/integrated by future urban development strategies; - forecasting future transformations; - creating a common platform where NGOs, students and researchers can collaborate on city related studies;

Layers of Analysis: -

PUZ and PUD documentation (Municipality) PUG regulations (Municipality) overtime policy changes (Municipality) housing market price development (online real estate websites) local and global street and area accessibility (Space Syntax - Depthmap) general economic data (National Institute of Statistics) population statistical data (National Institute of Statistics)

BUCHAREST MUNICIPALITY

Unfolding Bucharest EXCEL DATABASE

REAL ESTATE WEBSITES

www

DATA VISUALISATION

DATA COLLECTION

NATIONAL INSTITUE FOR STATISTICS

INTERACTIV INSTALATIONS

PC/MAC

WWW

PHONE

TABLETS

SIMILAR PROJECTS WILD CITY BELGRADE

‘Wild City’ is a research into non-planned and barely regulated processes of urban transformations.

Starting off from the drastic changes in the urban structure of the city of Belgrade during the 1990’s, it tries to identify the internal logic of those transformations and investigates how to describe seemingly chaotic events in a process based and systemic way. The project has been made in a collaboration of Ana Dzokic, Milica Topalovic, Marc Neelen and Ivan Kucina. It has been developed both through a research at the Berlage Institute, Postgraduate Laboratory of Architecture, and as a part of STEALTH. Cities are environments difficult to grasp in terms of their physical and spatial complexity - even more if an urban environment is undergoing dramatic reconfigurations that appear chaotic. This project inspects Belgrade, a city that during the 1990’s found itself in a turbulent condition in which many of the functions and services of the city, previously provided by

REAL TIME ROME In today’s world, wireless mobile communications devices are creating new dimensions of interconnectedness between people, places, and urban infrastructure. This ubiquitous connectivity within the urban population can be observed and interpreted in realtime, through aggregate records collected from communication networks. Real-time visualizations expose the dynamics of the contemporary city as urban systems coalesce: traces of information and communication networks, movement patterns of people and transportation systems, spatial and social usage of streets and neighborhoods. Observing the real-time city becomes a means to understanding the present and anticipating the future of urban environments. In the visualizations of Real Time Rome we synthesize data from various real-time networks to understand patterns of daily life in Rome.

http://senseable.mit.edu/realtimerome/

institutions, had to be reinvented. In that period individual initiatives replaced the city’s primary systems in domains like trade, housing production and even public services. This fast and dynamic process created hybrid systems - in which self-organized ‘solutions’ played a major role.

Instead of perceiving it as 'wild' - not understandable and for that reason not approachable - this project is an attempt to make connections, establish regularities within what appeared or was commonly described as chaos.

Adaptability, the potential for small-scale innovations, and the ability to re-map the city through an unpredictable distribution of programs appeared to be essential for the new urban systems.

In this process the city has been acting as a machine for production of new urban forms and as generator of its own substance. The thesis is that, by extracting mechanisms of transformation processes, the strength already available in many ‘ground up’ actions of urban actors can be further used as a design strategy. http://www.stealth.ultd.net/stealth/01_wildcity.ht ml

Interface controls Interactive map

Unfolding Bucharest FUNCTIONS

Analisys layers

HOUSING OFFICE BUILDINGS SHOPPING

BUILT SURFACE HIGHT

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MARKET VALUE

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Statistical data

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Unfolding Bucharest FUNCTIONS HOUSING OFFICE BUILDINGS SHOPPING

BUILT SURFACE HIGHT

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MARKET VALUE

+ BUILT SURFACE/MONTH

600k 550k 500k 450k 400k 350k 300k 250k 200k 150k 100k 50k 0k S eptember 2004 March 2005

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Unfolding Bucharest FUNCTIONS HOUSING OFFICE BUILDINGS SHOPPING

BUILT SURFACE HIGHT

_ 24

MARKET VALUE

+ NR.OF PROJECTS/MONTH

22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 S eptember 2004 March 2005

4

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16

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600k 550k 500k 450k 400k 350k 300k 250k 200k 150k 100k 50k 0k

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BUILT SURFACE/MONTH

S eptember 2006

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Unfolding Bucharest

ADRESS: Sos. Straulesti 34 FUNCTIONS: Locuire DATE: 24 Oct. 2007 BUILT SURFACE: 37.331 m2 POT: 40% CUT: 2.8

FUNCTIONS HOUSING

MAX H: 60m SUBZONA M3

OFFICE BUILDINGS SHOPPING

BUILT SURFACE HIGHT

_ 24

MARKET VALUE

+ NR.OF PROJECTS/MONTH

22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 S eptember 2004 March 2005

20000

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40000 60000 80000 100000 120000 140000

Bucurestii Noi Studio Prices

160000

Bucurestii Noi 3 Room Appart.

Bucurestii Noi 2 Room Appart. Price

180000

Bucurestii Noi House Prices

Bucurestii Noi 4+ Room Appart. Price

AVERAGE PRICE/MONTH FOR THE SELECTED AREA

March 2008

S eptember 2008

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Unfolding Bucharest THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME AND CONSIDERATION: FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME ON THE FOLOWING E-MAIL FOR MORE INFORMATIONS OR POTENTIAL COLLABORATIONON DEVELOPING THE PROJECT: razvan.zamfira[at]gmail.com