Ioana Tudora, 2009, La curte. Gradina, cartier si peisaj urban in Bucuresti, Curtea Veche, Bucharest
- Author : Ioana Tudora
- Year : 2009
- Title English : In the Courtyard. Garden, neighbourhood and Landscape in Bucharest
- Publisher : Curtea Veche
- Publisher's Location : Bucharest
- ISBN : 978-973-669-849-1
- Pages : 194
- Edition : 1st
- Abstract : The purpose of the study carried out as part of this PhD work is to approach the issue of Bucharest’s urban landscape, its emergence, development and current trends, from an interdisciplinary point of view meant to bring together various perspectives regarding the theory of landscape, urban planning and the city’s history, as well as anthropology and social science. In the context of this urban landscape – term which is yet to be clarified from a scientific point of view - and with a particular focus on the social and cultural aspect, today's Bucharest is analyzed as the result of a double construction, political and vernacular: on one hand, the urban laws and policies and the manner in which these envisioned and still envision the urban development and modernization and, on the other hand, the daily vernacular practices in spaces that used to be or still are part of the traditional way of living in Bucharest. An essential element of the extremely complex structure of the urban landscape, the private garden represents the objects of this paper, not only for its green value, of nature enclosed within the city’s boundaries, but especially for its quality as a space belonging to the urban dwelling, a space surrounded, even today, by a series of tensions and major forces. The gardens and backyards are part of what could be referred to as “intermediate spaces”, situated between the public and the private space. During the last few years the European urbanism went through a series of major changes both on a theoretical and on a practical level, the new approach focusing on recreating these small gaps in the city’s built tissue, in order to ensure a social cohesion along with the intimist confinement of family life. I approached the problem of Bucharest’s gardens from multiple perspectives, trying to analyze a series of issues regarding the way professionals have dealt or deal with the transformation of the urban landscape, the traditional urban tissues and, by default, that of the gardens, as well as the main cultural and aesthetic patterns that have influenced their evolution and the daily practices related to this type of urban space. Due to the complexity of the topic, the study has been developed on multiple levels. On one hand, a theoretical approach, and on the other hand a series of analyses performed on a specific site. The terrain chosen for my study is located in Bucharest, in the area between Calea Dorobanţilor, Şoseaua Ştefan cel Mare, Calea Moşilor and Bulevardul Dacia. This site was selected mainly due to its complex morphological attributes, which allowed me to perform a detailed analysis of various spatial typologies and of their patterns of evolution, as well as due to its "anonymity", this being a central area scarcely studied or known by the inhabitants of Bucharest. The paper analyzes the manner in which the evolution of this site is connected to the evolution of the city in general, in the balance between political and vernacular, of the articulation and organization of this space over time, both on a spatial and on a social level. The problems of Bucharest’ gardens have also entailed an analysis of their presence on the large scale of the entre city, as well as of the cultural patterns which have influenced their evolution. The study focused on gardens as a specific element of the urban landscape and on the manner in which they are built and used within the studied site. I analyzed both the issues related to the major political projects of modernization for Bucharest’s society, and the vernacular “micro-resistances” which have counterbalanced the technocratic visions, causing a spatial and temporal extension of a series of behaviors specific for the habitation of Bucharest. Following these complex multi-scale analyses I have tried to come to a series of general conclusions regarding the urban landscape dynamics and the evolution of the city's gardens and backyards as a specific element of Bucharest's landscape.