Published in Scientific Papers. Series B. Horticulture., Vol. LVII
Written by Alexandru MEXI, Ioana TUDORA
A city is made up by its people and by its architectural, urban characteristics. Bucharest lost most of its central historical sites during the last decade of communism. The shifts of paradigm of those days shift the entire history of a city, ripping away the historical, cultural and social center of a European capital. Even if the turnovers in Bucharest are never to be seen elsewhere in the world, the political decisions and expression that lead to a new urban landscape construction have correspondences in many other cities of the world, most of them marked by a similar history, thus totalitarian systems. In order to better understand the scale of what J.B. Jackson called the Second Landscape, at its most extreme expression, our paper will present the effects of totalitarian political systems on various urban landscape in the modern period, comparing the scale of the communist demolitions in Bucharest and the corresponding urban tragedies in cities like Berlin, Rome, Paris, or Pyongyang. The study reveals similarities between cities like those mentioned earlier and Bucharest in terms of political construction of the urban landscape, the landscape as a political tool, the impact of these politics on historical cities and their “absorption” by the daily life landscape.In order to understand the scale of the tragedy and its consequences in the future it is important to look for examples similar to the one given and to search for answers that may solve the problems that the ruins of the late communism era left to the capital-city of Romania. It is also important to understand how the daily spatial practices (de Certeau) are finally engulfing and integrating the political landscape from the collective memory.
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corresponding urban tragedies
