- Integrated Development Plans in Romania: pure formalities or tangible steps towards the design of a new culture of planning?    click here to open paper content114 kb
by    Elisei, Pietro | pietro.elisei@uniroma3.it   click here to send an email to the auther(s) of this paper
Short Outline
This paper treats urrban regeneration in a post-communist country. It describes the need of designing strategic plans versus the attempt of maintaining laissez-faire logics.
Abstract
In 2007-2013 the Rumanian Operational Plan (ROP- ERDF structural funds) is going to invest 1,4 billions for designing integrated development plans: a tangible and outstanding investment in urban regeneration and renewal. The physical and the civic fabric of many Rumanian cities are in bad conditions. A good number of neighbourhoods don’t have basic urban facilities like aqueducts, electricity, paved roads or sewage. This is a unique occasion to re-design the frame of the Rumanian planning system and re-launch strategies for many cities.
After eighteen years of post-communist transition cities and their civil servants are still unprepared in managing an designing sound strategies capable to create conditions for a general good quality of life. After 1989 it was impossible to manage the demand for expansion and reconstruction. Nowadays, after entering EU and its financial benefits (ERDF, ESF…), it seems impossible to design viable and feasible strategies for cities that could take under control the effects of speculative real estate development and protect the public interest.
Thus the passage towards integrated planning is not completely painless in Romania. Real territorial and urban needs, the demand of defining a convincing set of projects where to invest structural funds, interest of politicians (local and not) inevitably connected to use of the EU funds, are not finding a way to escape from deadlock.
The European way of proposing integrated development plans, following the URBAN model, has been initially received by local politicians, but successively there has been an attempt to totally change this approach. Easy equations like infrastructures=development creep in. The idea of investing in few relevant growth poles is going to be counteracted by policies proposing a not strategic distribution of the structural funds. Some cities begin to understand the value of having strategic plans and not to proceed for uncoordinated individual projects. Many group of interest try to hinder this process of creating real strategic plans in order to maintain a laissez-faire situation.

Keywords

Integrated development plans, urban regeneration, structural funds, strategic planning

Keywords
Integrated development plans, urban regeneration, structural funds, strategic planning
Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2008: Urban Growth without Sprawl
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