Andreea Acasandre

The critics brought to the Romanian urbanism confront two types of values regarding the manifestation of functionalism. Firstly, there is the urban planning according to the communist times and its print on the Romanian urban spaces.Secondly, there are the urban actions from the period that followed the communist times, meaning the operations and projects emerged after 1989. This paper starts from the belief that there is a strong reliance, of interdependence and reciprocal determinism between the social sphere and the architectural and urban sphere of the city, in other words, between the built environment and its inhabitants or users. Even if there is a direct and easily definable relation between the two domains, in practice, it can be observed that there is a low linkage, caused by a series of factors which, without any doubt, brings serious damage for the urban development.

The public participation process represents the foundation for the development of a sustainable democratic society. This research paper focuses on the relation between the citizens and public authority throughout cooperation. The concept of public participation is understood here as the interaction between different kinds of actors, through available communication channels, in order to identify needs, opinions and beliefs with the purpose of adopting and implementing them in the form of public policies and decisions. This research paper highlights a communication rupture between the public administration and the citizens in Bucharest. Given the context provided by the COVID-19 pandemic, this research paper highlights the need to modernize the public administration in order to better communicate with the population. Some of the possible causes for the miscommunication, that appeared repeatedly throughout the survey, were the disappointment of the population with the public authority,...

This paper is concerned with the analysis of some worrying present tendencies of urban sprawl in the large, important economic centers of Romania. It focuses on the tendency of building new residential apartments on the outskirts of the big cities. Most of these developments target young people that belong to a still-developing middle class. Big problems emerge, however, when real estate investors take advantage of the buyers’ lack of experience and of the authorities’ poor management, offering small, badly-built apartments in new residential areas which are designed around only one function: housing. The absence of complementary functions that could support the development of communities gravely impairs the inhabitants’ quality of life. At the local level, I was able to identify two main problems: the absence of the necessary infrastructure to support such a massive increase in population, and the absence of local amenities. On a larger scale, the consequences are significant as we...

The study of the city from a sociological perspective was developed at the beginning of the 20th century, in Germany and the USA. Louis Wirth was one of the members of the Chicago School, together with Burgess, Park, Drake and Clayton. Wirth (1938) relates, from a theoretical point of view, the physical space of the city to the way of life of its inhabitants. Through his work, he develops the theory of the “urban personality”, which presents the modern urban way of life as being fundamentally different from the rural one. The differences mentioned by him were related to the number of inhabitants of the city, the social heterogeneity and density of the population. These are the three components that distinguish the “urban way of life”. Starting from this theory of the “urban personality”, through this article, we seek to define the urban personality of Bucharest, the Capital of Romania, in the context of the contemporary mega-trends: globalization, increased mobility, environmental i...

This research focuses on the presence of stereotypes regarding age and gender, using as case study the book Cities for people, by Jan Gehl. Recognized worldwide as one of the most important supporters for the rapprochement of the public urban space towards its citizens, Jan Gehl dedicated most of his career to the importance of the human factor in the planning of cities. This study represents a content analysis of the ways in which the characters from the Cities for people book are being presented according to gender and age. The research represents a quantitative analysis of all the images in the book, comprising individuals or groups of people (collective characters) involved in different types of actions. The results of the study highlight an a relatively equal presence of both genders (48.8% feminine characters and 51.2% masculine characters). Most of the images present individual characters, which gives us the opportunity to clearly see their general image, socio-demographic ch...

Several factors contribute to the lower quality of living of post-communist countries like Romania, such as housing quality, access to basic infrastructure or services including healthcare, and low income and education levels. To evaluate to what extent the quality of living is related to social and economic factors, including access to medical services, a field questionnaire was applied to 703 respondents from 8 settlements located in the South-East of Romania. Using the Principal Component Analysis, four determinants were selected to compute a Quality of Living Index (QoLI): sewage, room surface per dweller, dwelling accessibility and fuel use for cooking. The QoLI computed for each respondent varied between 29.7 and 94.8 with a mean value of 58.5. It was directly related to the level of education and income and with several healthcare parameters. The mean value for each Local Administrative Unit was used to establish a ranking, with the commune of Mihail Kogălniceanu (Constanța c...