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It all started with a walk in the cramming of Mănăștur in Cluj, when suddenly the wall of blocks made room to a huge green space bordered by woods and tens of urban gardens apparently emerged from nowhere. We reached “La Terenuri," the area named thus due to the sports fields set here. This place was the communal meadow of Mănăștur village, pulled down to be replace with what is now the densest neighbourhood in Cluj, Mănăștur. Here, for 30 years, things have not changed too much: people grow vegetables on generous plots and children play at their leisure on the green surface, in the woods and on the fields. All those take place under the umbrella of legal uncertainty of properties and claims coming in the time of the real estate boom.
Cluj, located in the heart of the Transylvania region, is one of the most important academic centres in Romania and a leading economic and cultural hub. Due to its geographic position, it has limited possibilities of expansion, so that there is increasing pressure, inside the city limits, on the green areas, on more vulnerable buildings or public spaces. In recent years, the city residents’ perception of the public spaces has suffered significant changes: the festival-related excitement, caused by the city receiving the title of European Youth Capital in 2015 and by the preparations for the European Capital of Culture event in 2021 has sparked several debates on the marketing of public spaces, the decentralisation of cultural events, the colonization of new spaces in the city or the urban life in the city’s neighbourhoods. “La Terenuri” area in Mănăștur neighbourhood is the result of a number of coincidences which began to occur in the 1970s, when the district construction works began and this area hosted the building site logistics. Before the communist era Mănăștur was a village where the communal pastures merged with the Făget woods. As a result of planning, the elongated, rural-like plots were covered with tower blocks and interstitial green areas. The area’s previous functionality as space dedicated to building site logistics until 1989 and its subsequent stagnation due to retrocessions have caused “La Terenuri” to basically continue in the same state, i.e. a vacant area on the district fringes, informally used by the residents in an individualistic manner, as a playground, a leisure spot or for urban gardening.
Socio.hu, 2016
Urban People. 13(2), pp. 221-233. ISSN 1212-811., 2011
The article deals with a change of an urban space in Prague-Kbely as it was reflected in the municipal press, with special attention to the fate of allotment garden colonies. There used to be several garden colonies in the suburban Prague district of Kbely. In recent years some of them had to disappear in order to make space for new development of Kbely. We propose an analysis of how this change was reflected in the local municipal paper “Kbelák,” which is funded by the municipality and is distributed free to every household in the district.
The latest excavations made in the dava of Cârlomăneşti led us to identify a number of habitation structures situated in the central area of the " Cetăţuia " Plateau. There are the remains of three big buildings, probably public ones, with a cult‐related functionality The most impressive is the apse edifice (Edifice no. 1), but only its foundation remained. The building had a rectangular shape, with an apse side. It has the shape of a foundation ditch filled with yellow earth. Under this building, the archaeologists revealed partially superposed remains of two other edifices (Structures no. 17 and no. 18). At the bottom of these structures one revealed portions of the floor, as well as three decorated hearths, one in the Structure no. 17 and two others in the Structure no. 18. It is difficult now to specify their dimensions, because they are partially caught in the perimeter of the V4bS area. If we take into account the data obtained so far, we could consider the length of these buildings somewhere between 9 and 11 meters. The presence in this area of three moments of functioning for important cult edifices, with decorated hearths, indicates a certain " assignment " of this space, a consecrated one.
2012
The multiple functions they perform in all urban and suburban structures, green spaces, help improve microclimate, recovery and highlighting the natural environment and to correct its deficiencies, remedy or annihilates the negative impact of harmful and participate directly in addition to groups of buildings. Instrumental in achieving ecological balance of human ambience, you have harmonization mutual relations between built and open spaces and planted between spaces Manmade site and surrounding territory. Human intervention puts the seal today more or less to the farthest corners of nature. This intervention makes it desirable and how functional and aesthetic quality of nature and appropriate balance between it and built spaces, makes it desirable to respect for landscape architecture.
This essay is referring to the Romanian countryside as the Yonderlands - ;a place regarded as a faraway land that is consistently within sight; both spatially in relationship to the city but also in relationship to its dwellers within the cultural, social and political perceptions of rurality. It aims to portray the contemporary direction of development of the rural space in Romania through understanding the underlying factors that shaped and redefined the countryside until today. The investigation follows the relationship between cultural consumption; particularly concerning the rural dwelling and the recent history of Romania’s political and social attitudes towards rurality along with, economic and cultural shifts that affected and reshaped the countryside both spatially and culturally; which in turn altered the local perceptions and approach towards the current state of development in the countryside. The main observation of this study revolves around the phenomena of “abandoned dreams” represented by the construction of large houses by migrants in the countryside that are left uninhabited under the false hopes of return. The research focuses on case studies in the Northern edge of Romania, Oas county where this phenomenon most likely started and is most prevalent. The case study is constructed mainly using direct observation, historical data and statistics, existing interviews and photojournalism research papers and videos, as well as visual data collected through Google Street View Maps. One in every six Romanians work abroad; the majority of which come from rural areas and the money sent back home has irreversibly changed their native villages. Not like in the city, transformations are greatly more visible in rural settlements, where the central street can easily become a platform for social competition. This new rural space is submerged in steel and concrete, the new realm is consuming the traditional timber houses and the few elderly left behind.
2015
The paper discusses the forms of public-private space division in a post-socialist Bulgarian city as everyday practices of inhabiting and appropriation of common spaces in one neighborhood of Plovdiv. The author’s anthropological research of urban spaces has included long-term observation of everyday practices in the city of socialism, the city in transition and the changed cities nowadays, following the line of the changing boundaries, distinction and expression of the public and the private, the common and the individual. Of particular interest in my research are the forms of transgression of the physical borders and social boundaries and of establishing new ones, according to the changing identities, social hierarchies, power relations, as well as forms of social solidarity, networking and investment in social capital. The paper presents cases of blurring borders and boundaries as urban discourses – of the socialist city, the city in transition and the city after 2007, when Bulga...
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Économie publique/Public economics
University of California Press, 2024
Open Book Publishers, 2023
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2020
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Archives Italiennes de Biologie