Urban Geographies of Hesitant Transition: Tracing Socioeconomic Segregation in Post‐Ceauşescu Bucharest

Scholars have raised concerns about the social costs of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and geographers are particularly interested in the spatial expressions and implications of these costs, including apparently increasing residential segregation. Applying a range of segregation measures to 1992 and 2002 census data, this contribution studies socio‐occupational residential segregation in Bucharest. The conclusion is that Bucharest was relatively socio‐spatially mixed at both times; in fact, a modest, yet fully legible, decreasing overall trend is observable. This is at odds with many popular assumptions of the past 20 years.     

Global modelling…Without models?: Theory,methodology, and rhetoric in world modelling

Global models have provided images of the world and its evolution, as well as assessments of the contemporary world and the debates relating to such issues. However, this article addresses the inquiries and attitudes that are fundamental to the development of global modelling, and it emphasizes that a single image, or model, is incapable of valid, universal representation.     

Spatial plans as relational data: Using social network analysis to assess consistency among Bucharest’s planning instruments

Globally, planning instruments help shape the development of places under uncertain future conditions. In the context of a multi-level planning system, both land-use and strategic spatial plans are available, mandated by different policies and adopted by various authorities. Notwithstanding the excellent support consistency among such plans can provide for their transformative capacity, studies analyzing how plans interact, forming complex relationships, are rare. Treating plans as relational data gives insights into the outcomes acquired by a network compared to the transformations enabled by a single plan. As the theory of networks prevails for handling relational data, we applied social network analysis to evaluate external consistency among 10 plans of Bucharest, Romania and the surrounding region. All plans are currently in force, have spatial implications, and refer to different administrative levels and sectors, from the metropolitan to the sub-district level and from land-use and transportation to environmental plans. We first developed a framework for consistency assessment, covering four categories of external consistency. Second, following these categories, we extracted relevant plan statements from all plans. Third, we assigned one-way, symmetrical and contradictory relationships between the plan statements. Fourth, using directed and valued network analyses we assessed consistencies, inconsistencies and contradictions between plans. Finally, we validated the results by applying questionnaires to local experts. Our results indicate that consistency among Bucharest’s plans is high on a temporal scale regarding issues and general measures, but low for spatialized planning intentions on both vertical and horizontal scales. We discuss consequences of these findings for the transformative capacity of plans and the effectiveness of plan-implementation.     

The "housing question" and the state-socialist answer: city, class and state remaking in 1950s Bucharest

Housing nationalization as a solution to urban inequalities has a long history in European social thought. This article describes housing nationalization in a state-socialist context. Using a political economy perspective and relying on recently released archival material about housing in 1950s Romania, I argue that nationalization may be regarded as a special type of urban process. Nationalization raised the occupancy rate and intensified the usage of existing housing, desegregated centrally located neighborhoods, turned some residential space into office space for state institutions, facilitated the degradation of the existing housing stock and gradually produced a socialist gentry. Aside from similarities with other state-socialist nationalizations from the same period, Romanian nationalization resembled the housing policies of other statist regimes. The data also suggest that, even in the context of revolutionary change, the state is a sum of multiple, often diverging projects, rather than a coherent actor.     

Assemblages of Urban Leisure Culture in Inner‐City Bucharest

Inner‐city redevelopment in the south‐eastern European metropolis of Bucharest has been an intriguing object of analysis. Having been neglected for a long time by its inhabitants, urban politics and the local economy, the historical inner city recently experienced tremendous development of its evening/night‐time economy and leisure culture, as though it had received fresh impulses from European integration. However, there is no single cause which effected this unexpected proliferation. Therefore, this article traces the contingent ways in which the inner city has been affected, mainly through an empirical reconstruction of socio‐material assemblages of inner‐city leisure culture. A typology of (partial) assemblages is developed, which illustrates the heterogeneity, contingency and changeability of emerging temporary relations between various social, material and ideational elements. We demonstrate how localism and internal replication of limited business concepts have triggered the selective adaptation of various symbols of modernization. Against this background we argue that post‐transformational urbanity involves contingent social self‐referencing and socio‐material assemblage, rather than the adoption of prevailing translocal models of urban development. A critical reassessment of assemblage theory, as applied to this particular urban context, leads to final considerations concerning possible theoretical readjustments.     

Weird Exoskeletons: Propositional Politics and the Making of Home in Underground Bucharest

The article explores the politics of life underground in Bucharest, Romania. It focuses on a tunnel passing under Bucharest's central train station, where a community of drug users and so‐called ‘homeless’ have made a long‐standing home, using a space that many others considered uninhabitable. Relying on extensive ethnographic observations and interviews undertaken within the tunnels, the article traces and illustrates the socio‐material entanglements characterizing life underground. It frames this assemblage of bodies, veins, syringes, substances and various relationships of power and affect, as a ‘propositional politics’ of home and life at the margins. Such a politics speaks of drug addiction and extreme marginalization, but also of a sense of belonging, reciprocal trust and care. In tracing such a politics, the article does not aim to romanticize the status of home in the underground or to treat it as the marginal antithesis of normative homeliness, but to reveal the ways in which an affirmative, self‐grounding politics of home emerges from the immanence of tunnel life within the fabric of the city. As such, the article contributes to debates around homing practices in conditions of uninhabitability and proposes a radical approach to the politics of life at the margins in the contemporary urban.