Housing estates built during the post-World War II decades in many countries have followed diverging trajectories. These include maintenance and repair, demolition, 'doing nothing,' and demolition with mixed-usage replacements. Drawing on empirical and historical material from Bucharest, Romania, a city in which 80% of the housing stock consists of socialist era housing estates, we argue that such housing continues to be viable and is even enjoying a minor renaissance, mainly through the financial efforts of residents and, occasionally, through the allocation of a certain amount of public funds. The empirical analysis illustrates that it is neither the mass character of such housing, nor its high-rise nature that creates the problems and negative image often associated with housing estates elsewhere in the world. Rather, we outline seven challenges faced by such estates: ageing of their structure and resident population, networked connectivity, energy efficiency, densification, urban planning that favours real estate agents, neglect of housing policies and housing rights, and condominium governance. The housing estates and their problems are so much a part of everyday normality in Bucharest that the local administration tends to take them for granted and has not placed them on the public agenda despite the inevitability of their structural decay at some time in the future. More than anything else, the state and the owners need to gather data in order to preempt future emergencies or continuing physical decay of this valuable housing stock.

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The Dâmboviţa River was one of the key factors for the emergence of the city of Bucharest. However, with the hydro-technical works at the end of the 19th century, the successive stages of turning a river into a more artificial than natural element began. Now, Dâmboviţa and the boulevard along it are an axis designed almost exclusively for car traffic. Initiatives in recent years (including Bucharest’s application for the European Capital of Culture competition for 2021) aimed to change the perception of the inhabitants of the Dâmboviţa River. At the same time, a series of projects have been recently developed along the river, having different stages of maturity or even implementation, thus revealing the importance of the river’s axis in the evolution of Bucharest. The article analyses two examples of reconfiguration of public space in Europe’s watercourses (in the cities of Poznan and Lyon), highlighting elements of planning processes which could be adapted to Bucharest’s case. In this context, we propose the collection, in an online database, of the projects and of the specific transformation initiatives around the river, as well as the organization of professional debates aiming to formulate, in a participatory way, an action plan regarding the way in which this transformation could be made. This article is the result of a process of preparation for a process of participatory planning. We believe that the Dâmboviţa axis could be both a green corridor and a red thread through the city that could link places for culture to economic development spaces, through highquality public spaces.

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