Professor Keith Hitchins (1931-2020)

Obituary

The Agrarian Reform and the City: The Great Expansion of Sibiu during the Interwar Years

During the 1920s, the city of Sibiu expanded by approximately 250 hectares, with an area that was three times larger than its historical core. This great expansion was the result of the application of the agrarian reform, whose laws allowed and encouraged the creation of new building plots in the cities of Transylvania, Banat, Crișana and Maramureș. Although this was the largest territorial growth of the city up until that time, it was not controlled by the municipality and its Technical Office. In fact, the city authorities were excluded from most stages of the decision-making process. All the decisions were taken by the central and local institutions of the Ministry of Agriculture and Domains that were in charge with the application of the agrarian reform. The territorial expansion was not based on any large-scale studies regarding the needs of the city or the impact on its future development. In fact, the proportions and the directions of the city’s expansion were dictated mostly by the number of accepted requests for building plots and by the position of the areas that could be expropriated and that were suitable to be parcelled. The creation of the large new allotments was simultaneous with the efforts of the municipality to draft a systematisation plan that was now urgently necessary, given the rapidly changing situation of the city, and it was imposed by the new administrative legislation of Romania. So, shortly after the parceling plans were issued and the new building plots were distributed to those entitled, a preliminary systematization plan – drafted between 1926 and 1928 – proposed the revision of the new allotments and the modification of the procedure for assigning the building plots according to a system that would allow a gradual territorial growth of the city. Hence, during the second half of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s there were ample negotiations over the new urban territory, involving not only the Ministry of Agriculture and Domains, but also the Ministry of Interior and the Superior Technical Council. In the end, after almost a decade of negotiations, only minor adjustments were made to the allotments and the provisions of the systematisation plan were only partly applied.

Dan-Ionuț Julean, Dana Julean, Catedralele Unirii la vest de Carpați / The Cathedrals of The Great Union to the West of the Carpathians (Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2018)

Review

Urban Planning in the Area of Alba Iulia Fortress in the Years 1965-1988: Completed Projects and Abandoned Proposals

In the first decade after the establishment of the Communist regime in Romania, the fortress of Alba Iulia was in a lamentable state of conservation, as revealed by the correspondence of the Directorate of Historical Monuments (DHM) and the National Institute of Heritage (NHI) photo library. The fortress was used by a military unit, the Wine-Alcohol Enterprise, GOSTAT, together with the regional museum and the two bishoprics, Catholic and Orthodox, but none of them possessed any legal documents in this regard. As the only ones concerned about the ensemble, the museum’s representatives sent numerous notifications to the DHM, who eventually initiated a long process that sought to clarify first and foremost the legal situation of the fortress, before assuming the research and restoration of its gates. The festivities that took place in 1968 on the occasion of the Great Union’s semicentenary gave the preservationists an opportunity to take important steps towards establishing the fortress as a protected area and suggesting new deployments of its improperly used monuments, in the framework of the 1967 Urban Planning Sketch. Unfortunately, the DHM’s lack of authority in questions of urban redevelopment, along with the growing involvement of the local bodies, who only complied with the Party’s recommendations, led to constant disrespect towards the legal provisions and the further destruction of the fortress.

Daniela Maria Puia, Arhitectura urbană în Transilvania în perioada interbelică (București: Pro Cultura, 2020)

Review

Introduction

Volume dedicated to the selective publication of the revised texts of the papers presented at the conference Cities of Union: Urban Projects and Developments After 1918, organized in Alba Iulia, in October 3-5, 2019.

Addenda to an Exhibition: About Urbanism and Heritage in the City of the Union

The article presents the exhibition organized within the conference Cities of Union: Projects and urban developments after 1918 (Alba Iulia, 3-5 October 2019).

Decommunization of Symbolic Urban Space of Ukraine’s Megalopolises: Effective Local Government Capacity Building

The decommunization of urban symbolic space through the renaming of streets and settlements commemorating communist figures (toponymic remapping) has become a characteristic feature of the decommunization process across Eastern Europe. This paper provides an overview of the vigorous discussions over the toponymic remapping of urban space in the Ukrainian megalopolises of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa. These case studies illustrate the important role of symbolic efficacy in consolidating Ukrainian society around the idea of democracy and the country’s aspirations for European integration. The main focus of our research was to analyse the actions taken to fulfil Ukraine’s decommunization laws, particularly with regard to the renaming of streets and settlements. We focus on the actions taken by local governments, the content of public debates, the decisions taken by regional authorities to step in if local outcomes did not fulfil the stipulations of national decommunization laws, and litigations initiated by local community groups aiming to push back against the changes. Our analysis of these debates allowed us to identify four key models of discourse, namely: case-law or litigation; the use of open letters; the Deputy’s address; and recommunization. We also consider how demographic characteristics of cities (especially age and ethnicity) affect the decommunization process, and look at how attitudes towards decommunization varies across the regions of Ukraine, finding. We argue that a multiperspective approach to Ukraine’s history, leading to a shared vision of its past, is vital in order to promote social cohesion, peace and democracy, whilst building the capacity of individual cities.

Rudolf Klein, Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries of the 19th and 20th Centuries in Central and Eastern Europe. A Comparative Study (Michael Imhof Verlag, 2018)

Review

Chernivtsi’s Squares and Monuments in the Context of Distinctive Buko- vinian Identity, Cultural Heritages and Urban Historical Memory

Since the twentieth century, the interdisciplinary field of ‘memory studies’ has become especially topical and drawn upon a variety of theoretical perspectives, while offering a plethora of empirical case studies exploring the politics of memory and urban space, cultural heritage and cultural identity that mould a space’s distinctiveness. This study draws on a comparative analysis to theoretically prove and develop a multifaceted memory of Chernivtsi’s significantly transformed and enriched urban landscape through an interdisciplinary approach involving various methods and instruments for handling the essential societal resources of history, memory and identity. The city of Chernivtsi and the region of Bukovina, historically part of Central Eastern Europe and geo-strategically the heart of Europe, has recently strengthened its voice in becoming culturally and economically bound to the European Union. As a well-preserved city ruled, at different times, by the Habsburg Empire (1900-1918), Romania (1918-1939) and the USSR (1940/41-1991), Chernivtsi (Czernowitz, Cernăuţi, Chernovtsy) serves as a case study for exploring the human fingerprints of every epoch. The city’s architectural diversity offers testimony as to how Chernivtsi’s urban society preserved its unique landscape of identity, embodied in a patchwork of ethnic, linguistic and confessional affiliations, while integrating representational claims and moderating its space. This study analyses the policies and practices of these three epochs in Chernivtsi’s history, in terms of how the city attempted to promote, develop and preserve its cultural heritage, while preserving the collective memory and shaping supranational identity.