“Urban ruins” The strategical importance of abandoned buildings in the process of urban reanimation

Abstract

Entire generations of people, separated by time, through history, are mentally connected through the memories stored in those buildings which had survived to become imposing reminiscences of our past, through which we are able to connect with our ancestors and, therefore, our history. Urban ruins are a natural urban phenomenon. They represent a consequence of time and space, and also the direct result of the rapid urban development of the city, shaped constantly by internal and external social, political and economic conditions. They are usually those abandoned buildings and constructions, who lost their physical integrity due to their advanced state of physical degradation, caused by the lack of periodic maintenance, due to the abandonment of their owners, mostly due to economic reasons. They are usually found in abandoned or contaminated sites, better known as Brownfields and Greyfields. These old abandoned industrial and large commercial urban sites had formed in time disused urban tissues which had caused morphological and technical problems to the entire existing urban fabric of the city. Their lack of activity and advanced state of decay parasitizes the space they occupy within the city, endangers the urban hygiene and the safety of citizens, and overall damages the urban image of the city. The current PhD thesis aims to document the presence of all urban ruins, by mapping all the abandoned buildings and constructions in Bucharest City and analyse their strategic value and importance, in order to establish applicable theoretical principles regarding the urban morphological peculiarities of other cities which also may constitute the subject of this global phenomenon.