Urban Aggression by Ideological, Political and Economic Strain - Anthropic Hazards

Abstract Bucharest, Romania’s capital city, the 1977 earthquake, with more than 1900 victims and 2 million $ in economic loses, was used by the communist regime as a pretext for razing the urban tissue with a lot of monuments, followed by a large-scale remodeling project as a strategy for risk reduction. After 1980, more than 1450 hectares of the old land of Bucharest were demolished and the new East-West axis of the city and the headquarters of the communist public institutions were built. This is presently a large area of Bucharest Civic Center, with the Parliament Palace as a central item. For a while, part of the area was not rebuilt and in time it became junk space, just because of other priorities. The case of Bucharest as a huge urban trauma was approached, in the past, as a desperate appeal to the entire world (Giurescu, 1989) [1]. After the political changes of the 1990’s, the factories occupying a huge area were left partly as ghost-towns, although private property was regained. The case of Bucharest was studied in comparison with Paris, Moscow, Berlin and Rome, in the ages of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, where the major heritage was partly or totally affected (Cavalcanti, 1997) [2]. Succession of anthropic aggressions on the built area is identified, generated by an ideology that has ignored the heritage values, by resorting to: demolition without selection criteria, lack of maintenance due to abandonment or excessive use, value damage caused by interventions which have modified components or by destruction of the initial context caused by owner interventions. The real estate pressure acted randomly. The destruction of the perceptual-formative landmarks of space has lead to the dissolution of memory and of the "mental map" each of us is carrying. (K. Lynch, 1960, 1989 republished) [3] Conservation of the heritage values and their surroundings remains a dimension of stability with serious consequences on the development of the human being. This research aims to propose a methodology of evaluation for the built space and to identify intervention strategies for the reduction of the risk in protected areas posed by this anthropic hazard, to recover and preserve the stability of the communities.