Reconfiguring the Macro Urban Landscape of Bucharest Based on its Native Traits

Abstract

The Bucharest’s urban landscape is hardly to qualify and often is considered a contradictory, multi-layered, diverse and uneven landscape. Looking back on the history of its formation, Bucharest’s landscape has been cristalyzed over centuries by assimilating few major features. One of them is the "water heritage" on which this article focuses, presenting a synthetic perspective of Bucharest, as a landscape between two founding rivers – Dâmbovița and Colentina, acting as native traits for this landscape. The paper shows Bucharest’s scenic urban and architectural space, in the mirror of the water landscape, as a potential of the city reconfiguration. Starting from this, the future development of Bucharest is discussed in terms of a landscape becoming, embracing the historical evolution of urban form, imprinted by the main spatial traces. The study uses comparative and analytical investigation of the essential structure of the city, and the case-study method, applied to Bucharest. The tools are observational and interpretive, aiming to put in connection spatial analyzes with those related to urban history.

Keywords

• landscape
• rivers
• heritage
• Dâmbovița
• Colentina
• projects