in—visible city Bucharest Candidate — European Capital of Culture Application This application has been prepared by — The Cultural Centre of Bucharest on behalf of the City of Bucharest. : Simina Bădică, Roxana Bedrule, Svetlana Cârstean, Raluca Ciută, Raluca Costache ( Associates Communication Group), Simona Deaconescu, Celia Ghyka, Irina Paraschivoiu, Ioana Păun, Oana Radu, Anamaria Ravar, Alexandra Ștef , : Claudiu Constantinescu, Alexandru Eduard Costache, Simona Fodor, Tim Judy, Lucian Zagan , : Alexandru Oriean, Radu Manelici (Faber Studio), Andrei Turenici & Ioana-Alice Voinea (Daniel & Andrew) : Archive, Andrei Bârsan, Irina Broboană, Adi Bulboacă, Călin Dan, Maria Drăghici, Andrei Gândac, Alexandru George, Guillaume Lassare, Ionuţ Macri, Gerhard Maurer, Iulia Popa, Ioana Păun, Claudiu Popescu, George Popescu, Rokolective Association Archive, Mircea Topoleanu, Thomas Unterberger, Cristian Vasile, Dan Vezenţan, Atelier Ad Hoc, Balkanik! Festival Press, Image Archive of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Meeting of Design Students Archive, National Museum of Contemporary Art Archive, National Dance Centre — Bucharest, Kaare Viemose Bureau Detours Archive, Dong Wong, One World Romania, Polycular, Alina Ușurelu, ZonaD : “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest : Master Print Super O set Bucharest, August , © Contents Setting the Stage 2 Contribution to the Long‑term Strategy 11 European Dimension 20 Cultural & Artistic Content 23 Capacity to deliver 54 Outreach 62 Management 68 Setting the Stage Bucharest’s paradoxical nature is the source of both its strengths and its weaknesses. It is what cyclically and abruptly interrupts its development and what makes for the city’s fantastic potential. A City Betrayed / ‘Rock This Country’ s of March 14, the death toll from the tragic night of October 30, 2015, when a fire broke out at the Explain briefly the overall cultural profile of your city. A Colectiv club, reached 64. Many others, having miraculously survived the hell, are making a slow and painful recovery, under medical supervision, in Romania and abroad. In many ways, the Colectiv fire has become a crucial moment for Bucharest, revealing the depth and complexity of the moral cri‑ Why does your city wish to take part ses confronting the city. in the competition for the title of European Capital of Culture? (see p. 8) Following the tragedy, over 25,000 people took to the streets across Romania, their message clear: ‘We don’t change a name, we change a system’. The messages on placards saying, among others, ‘Your corruption killed our children’ referred to everyday occurrences in the country where official permits to run places can be bought with little concern for safety measures, often regarded as unnecessary trifles. The establishment has reacted by clamping down on many venues, thus penalizing the cultural environment of the city and flourishing small businesses, without adopting a long term solution. The sit‑ uation has been compounded with closures of earthquake prone and dangerous buildings, which also reignited the citizens’ invisible yet alert anxieties over the city’s capacity to cope in the event of natu‑ ral hazards or accidents. During the days people took to the streets, partly in grief, partly in anger, the lyrics of the song The Day We Die by Goodbye to Gravity, the band playing at the club at the night of the fire, accompanied the Colectiv protesters in what sounded like a fulfilled premonition of a grief‑stricken city. The tragedy at Colectiv was shocking and seismic in scale. The protests against the immorality and corruption inherent in the public sector caused a government to fall. A temporary government formed by members from the civil society was appointed for one year, having the support of active groups all over Romania. The scarce cultural offer in the neighbourhood areas and the lack of cultural space are still unsolved. Bucharest is in a This is, in many ways, last call for a generation that has already felt betrayed. With many of the city’s permanent state of traumas in the recent past left unsolved or unaddressed, we never anticipated an event that would creative chaos due leave yet another scar on this city and underline the complexity of the In—visible City. Our bid has met a to its unresolved severe reality check; now more than ever urgent questions are being raised regarding Bucharest’s abil‑ contradictions. ity to cope with grief, absorb shocks, and build healthy partnerships to lay the foundations for a cul‑ ture of responsibility. A City in Transition aught between its Western logos and Balkan ethos, its rural and urban identity, its fascination with C the centre while overlooking the vitality of its peripheries, its over‑regulated socialist past and the neoliberal laissez faire present, Bucharest is in a permanent state of creative chaos due to its unresolved contradictions. With a population in pendular migration within EU geographical and cultural space, the city is enriched with these personal experiences, which are neither communicated nor shared enough. Bucharest is today a city that still balances the pre‑1989 socialist reality and the post‑1989 neolib‑ eral one. Two fundamentally opposed directions intersect and generate patterns and forces that form a state of extremes and a strongly polarised society. The invisible socio‑economic challenges the city faces are fast‑paced gated communities, suburbanisation, a strong seasonal migration and extensive privati‑ sation programmes. Urban policies revolve around re‑centring the city and are mostly image over sub‑ stance, discourse over action. Hence there is a total distrust of discourse and rhetoric. 4 Setting the Stage Between East and West ucharest’s hybrid culture has been shaped by its openness towards influences of other cultures — B Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, German and French. It was this feature of the city that left it totally exposed and unprotected in the face of Ottoman and Tatar attacks, which gave its inhabitants the unset‑ tling feeling of volatility. Located only 70 km north of the river Danube, Bucharest developed from a village located on the Dâmboviţa river to Wallachia’s seat of power and, later, to the capital of United Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. The city’s modernisation came late, in the 1830s, under the occupation of the Russian empire’s army. However, it was only in the 1930s that Bucharest caught up with the rest of Europe and became the Little Paris, a city with modernist architectural landmarks and a specific joie de vivre infused by its Balkan lifestyle. The communist rule abruptly cut Bucharest’s links with Western Europe down to the level of a total isolation in the 1980s, when the city became literally invisible. The opportunity for reconnection with its European identity came equally abruptly in 1989, and over the past 25 years Bucharest is still a city in transition, struggling to find its way back into Europe. Fragmented City: Bucharest Archipelago ragmentation is present in all aspects of the city: the physical space, the transport system, the dis‑ F connected institutional and independent sectors, the gap between authorities and the citizens, and also in the individual’s way of life. One could say it has become a state of mind, as well as a way of work‑ ing and communicating. The city’s current administrative and territorial structure is part and parcel of this fragmentation. The city is divided in six districts, each ruled by an independent mayor elected every four years. The city’s human scale urban planning and architecture was fractured for the first time at the end of the 19th century by the construction of monumental buildings under plans for modernising the capi‑ tal. In the 1980s, more than one third of the historic centre was demolished to make room for the gigan‑ tic House of the People (now hosting the Parliament). This traumatic fragmentation of the city’s urban tissue has irreversibly shaped the city, disconnecting the city centre from the neighbouring quarters and fragmenting the central area into isolated neighbourhoods. The trend of demolition continued after 1989, this time for commercial and speculative reasons. Preserving the heritage of the city has become one of the most important factors behind civic initia‑ tives such as ProDoMo and ProPatrimonio, which have nominated Bucharest for the 2016 WMF World Monuments to Watch.1 The Mahalale: Neighbourhoods and Cultural Diversity n important sign of a changing perspective is Bucharest’s Urban Master Plan (under revision) which A puts citizens and communities first in a visionary plan asserting a bottom‑up approach in urban planning, with 70 neighbourhoods (cartiere) as functional units. To make it work, the neighbourhoods, to which Bucharest residents are more emotionally attached than to the city's centre, will require both an administrative and a symbolic consolidation and empowering. In 2005, between 70–80% of citizens found the city dirty, poor, chaotic, uncivilised, yet 75% of them were totally satisfied with their neighbourhood. On the other hand, in the recent EU Barometer on Quality of Life in European Cities (2015), Bucharest scores lowest on the level of trust in the city, espe‑ cially in neighbourhood areas. These inconsistencies suggest that although people feel more attached to their neighbourhoods and ascribe a more identity‑affirming value to them than to the city, there is lit‑ tle interaction and sense of communality, resulting in a high degree of distrust. This paradox is one of the city’s most specific traits. In the 18th century Bucharest became a thriv‑ ing town at the intersection of commercial routes from the East and the West, a city that welcomed trad‑ ers and manufacturers coming from the Balkans and other parts of Europe: Greeks, Bulgarian, Serbs, Armenians, Jews, Albanians and Austrians. The mahalale (Turkish word for neighbourhood and periphery) became the nucleus of the city’s ethnic‑centred quarters that are still relevant today, such as Dudești‑Cioplea for the Bulgarian commu‑ nity or the Armenian quarter.