Urban Sprawl

The world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history. In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population will be living in towns and cities. By 2030 this number will swell to almost 5 billion, with urban growth concentrated in Africa and Asia. While mega-cities have captured much public attention, most of the new growth will occur in smaller towns and cities, which have fewer resources to respond to the magnitude of the change.
UNFPA (27.06.2007)

1.General view

Since 1800 there are strategies to decrease population number in big cities and to create small adjacent communities. POLICENTRE is an old term, and now forgotten.
Romanian urbanization was a false. After the War World Two the communist government forced urban movement towards cities. They needed a particular amount of people to start the “Industrial revolution” so they moved people from villages to cities. The process was careful programmed to dispense people all over the country. After ‘89 the people were not forced anymore to live in small cities so they all naturally moved in bigger cities. Those cities boomed in a very short time. There were no strategies to expand so the cities found a “naturally” way to grow. The old city becomes a center that attracts new land. Instead of breaking this centralization the goal was to engulf small adjacent communities and enlarge the cities boundaries. We never tried to keep those communities, to understand their way of living and to use them to enrich city life. Paradoxically, after we engulf them we are trying to simulate a way of living that copies them in our very strange understanding mode. So we create mutant parts of cities, out of context, lacking coherence, without center and finally without life.

Now we have a great problem because the city is used to grow, every man wants to live in a city but like a small farmer, or more precisely like they interpret the farmer’s life as a combinationof kitsch imagery of country life and urban facilities.

There are two growing models in our cities: horizontal expansion – single families dwelling – development with a large amount of vegetation and space and vertical expansion – multi family housing – development made in dense urban context without any green or social space. Those two models are particular reinterpretations of contemporary dwellings, easy understanding of contemporary way of living and architecture.

2. Model-01 Single families dwellings

After the ‘90 every Romanian family had a dream: to have a land, to live in a single family house with no neighbors if it’s possible. So very soon a lot of small districts of houses appear all over the country. Off course, the land must be very big so the perfect place was in that moment the land boundaries of cities. They rapidly form small communities. In that moment everyone want the biggest house ever so they transformed their flat apartment image into a villa. Unfortunately in that moment there were no architects used to design and to predict such a development on such a scale. Another disadvantage was that people had no culture of urban life in large scale communities, since they were moved from their villages into city just a couple of years ago so they have no knowledge of how to live in a new community. They also have poor abilities to live in the city and to participate to the community’s life. Everywhere in the world this problem was solved or tried to be solved 30 or 50 years ago. We have the opportunity to learn from them and to avoid making mistakes. But the architects have a big drive to build and to create after 60 years of interdiction. There is no time for studies. So they built. A lot! Very fast, very big and very bad. Those houses became the image of their frustration. There were some exceptions but just a few, lacking the power to set an example or trend. Soon, they realized that the development in these areas means a lot of money so the era of great real estate development began.

Urban development plans were designed for those areas. The lots were smaller now, just enough for a small size building. Huge amount of land has been systematized and portioned. All big cities in Romania had boundaries of single families dwelling proposals. Many of them have no utilities, no access roads, no perspectives but you can see houses arise all over the fields that surround our cities. There is no road to reach them but you can solve this issue by buying an off-road car to do that. You are in no men’s land with no water supply but you have wireless Internet.

In the late years people realized that those communities have no life, no center or urban facilities, and there are just a lot of individual houses with no link or interactions.

Urbanity problems are very difficult and complex to explain in a few words but the architectural approach is easier to understand.
Due to the general perception of multifamily dwellings as a communist block of gray flats, made of concrete and very rigid, people now want the opposite: a happy house, very colorful, diversely shaped and… single.
Here are some of the most successful patterns developed in these years, let’s call them: Bavarian, Tuscany, modern.

Bavarian means a house with high pitched roof, covered with ceramic tiles similar with those located in the high forests of Austria or Germany. Our region is plane, few meters above sea level (+90 n.m.) and with little amount of snow. These characteristics don’t mean anything. The house must reveal the pattern of a fairy-tale house, the granny’s house covered in winter snow and filled with a lot of joy. Everyone who escapes from the block of flats wants to build such a dream house. The yard is full of curved alleys, stone fountains, round flower field and garden dwarfs. These houses are more like gingerbread houses than a contemporary urban dwell.
Tuscany style appears some years later after the taste of people has became “subtle” and enriched by traveling abroad. They came with this image from the sunny land of Italy, of houses with large pergolas, with arched porticoes and round tiles on low pitched roofs. This kind of building comes from an arid climate and different topography but no one noticed that. The angle of the roof is very smooth because the climate was different but we fixed that… we made it like in mountain regions, very oblique. This is the “elegant” adaptation to our environment. The color is very gentle, sunny and copying the earth shades. In this house windows are large. Contemporary technology permits to make huge openings with no partition but instead of doing that architects provide a picturesque image of old windows with glued plastic pieces on glass window. It looks like a contemporary car with wood like wheels on tire. How many would buy that??!!

The modernist style is very formalist. The houses are made of pure platonic forms, linked together and very colorful. This is the Romanian interpretation of post modernism… a very light one. In Bucharest modernist style is still very popular so here you can meet white houses with line oriented windows, like in the ’30s, a composition of white cubes. I can say that some of them are very interesting pieces of architecture, but still 50 years late. If we look back at Creanga or Iancu dwellings we notice that those are more accurate and modern than contemporary ones. Those are houses that comprise the spirit of modern times.

You can notice that here we can talk just about the image, about the appearance of buildings and not about the organizational pattern, about functionality, about the new way of living… about the new kind of family… if there is one. We can’t talk about the latter issues because in Romanian architecture there is no interest for such. We want to live in a house but we are used with living in old block apartments so we create an empty shell that can’t sustain contemporary life. If we want to develop an answer to the problem we must try to understand our times and the contemporary way of living.

A simple example is the omnipresence of one element the chimney. Everyone wants a house but not without a chimney. We must develop that idea. There is no place for chimneys in our contemporary living! The chimney becomes something else – TV screen, a place of family gathering, blamed and loved in the same time. If we understand that the chimney was the place for the story teller in the older living patterns we understand why we enjoy so much to zap TV channels. But the next feature is the PC connected to the Internet. It is already changed back the family life. If the fire place was the single feature that groups together the family who listens to the stories, in the modern age the TV, radio, telephone, develop a large range of communication. Now the PC will bring together all media in a single feature like in old times. The change is still profound: there is no single chimney and there are plenty of PC’s for each member of family.

There are so many other changes: working time that doesn’t follow the 8-8-8 formula, so house pattern has changed, the shopping centers and semi-prepared food which change the kitchen facilities and storages, family social transformations, etc.

We must try to understand that the image of the house is just one piece of a very complicated puzzle, with more important pieces than the color or the shape of roof.

3. Model-02 Multy families dwellings

This is a model that developed much latter than the single family house. There was a certain adversity for such kind of living because of the latest years of communism when every one was obliged to live in such architectural and social form of living. None was prepared and some were compelled to leave their country houses and move to town in such collective dwellings. But blocks of flats have their certain qualities: facilities nearby, small distances to the city center, security… and a much cheaper price. So in the last few years every developer has build at least one block of flats. Unfortunately the living model of dwellings was not better compared to the old blocks, apart from the amount of square meters. Many of them have very complicated apartment layouts because of their of shape and width. The old blocks are in general 12 meters wide so that the rooms receive enough light from two sides. In contemporary times, the land is expensive so the developer wants a maximum of efficiency. That generates wider shapes with darker rooms and without good natural ventilations. All those issues conduct to a shaping of the apartments that is much worse than the old modernist ones. No social or formal improvements have been made because there was no time for that left.

There is also another direction to increase the density in our cities instead of new building areas, which is to create an attic on the old blocks of flats.

The amount of new spaces on the top of blocks became a very popular solution in Timisoara some years ago. The image of such development is very poor and cheap. Every one who wanted to do that would bring together a group of 3 to 4 workers from Maramures, who are very skilled with carpentry and they would build a country roof on the top of modern block.
The resulted image is very strange: a straight white modernist building with a huge and ugly ceramic angled roof. If our built environment looked ugly and gray before, now the image has changed… into ugly, gray and also weird. Such kind of roof is suited for smaller buildings, in other locations, shapes and times. All over the world such interventions are made in the spirit of the architecture environment. The shape and the materials are new ones, and the entire image of the building dictates the shape of the roof.
This form of development brings low life quality and generates small apartments, with shapes that make them inhabitable. The project materials are also very cheap, questioning the time-life of such structures. In a few years those roof-apartments are condemned to be demolished.

Density in urban developments means not only quantities of square meters but also a quality of the new living space and a different approach. In Romania, only time and new, contemporary ideas from some architectural projects and master plans will generate a positive development of living spaces, both interior and exterior. Unfortunately the time needed for that will be much longer than we expect it now, time needed for a new generation of young architects to grow and to develop a new kind of thinking and living.

4. Reference

Roger Fidler. Mediamorphoses. Ideea Design & Print, Cluj, Romania, 2004.