Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century

Integrating City and Nature: Urban Planning Debates in Sofia, Bulgaria

Integrating City and Nature Urban Planning Debates in Sofia, Bulgaria Sonia Hirt Modern city planning emerged as a profession to amend the deplorable conditions of the nineteenth-century Western city, appropriately labeled “the city of dreadful night.”¹ Conceived over a relatively short period of time as the unavoidable offspring of the Industrial Revolution, this city offered its inhabitants not only the promise of employment, but also crowding, dirt, smoke, noise, and darkness at nightmarish levels that were unknown to the inhabitants of preindustrial settlements, whether urban or rural. Of course, humans and all their artifacts, including cities—no matter how dreadful they may have been at certain historic periods—have always been part of nature. Yet, as industrial cities plunged into a state of misery, they came to be seen as the stark opposite of the “lost paradise” of pastoral rural life and the grim antipode of nature itself.² The city became defined by its lack of nature—lack of open green spaces, lack of clean air, lack of light—lack of all aspects of nature that humans believed necessary for their health and happiness. The story of modern city planning has thus in many ways been the story of trying to bring these desirable aspects of nature back into the city. Almost all city planning movements, which achieved international signi ficance during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, can be read as replays of the debate on the city-nature union. Since Western nations dominated the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and since Western cities were the first to experience a “lack of nature,” all influential planning ideas of how to remodel the city originated in the West (mostly Europe and the United States). From there, they were quickly diffused across the globe.³ Small Balkan states emerging from the centuries-long Ottoman occupation were among the most enthusiastic importers of such transformative ideas.⁴ Among these states, Bulgaria has not been an exception. 18 | Sonia Hirt Since independence in 1878, the country has consistently struggled to escape its ostensibly backward past and define itself as a “modern” “European” nation.⁵ To that end, Bulgaria has been remarkably eager to adopt Western planning ideas⁶—a trend that has intensified with the nation’s recent entry into the European Union. This essay traces planning debates about how to shape the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. The story of Sofia is significant in that it demonstrates the resilience of the planning dilemma of how to integrate city and nature. It also illustrates the tensions that arise when local plans addressing this dilemma are based on foreign models. The foreign theories developed as responses to the specific urban circumstances that prevailed in the countries where the theories originated (mostly in Western Europe). But Sofia’s conditions were different and often represented a stage of growth that Western cities had passed. To address this issue, Sofia’s plans relied on Western rhetorical postulates but often endowed them with alternative, local meanings. The foreign theories then acquired a vernacular flavor that sometimes ran contrary to their original intent. Sofia’s story is thus one of renegotiating and domesticating Western postulates of the city-nature reunion—a story that exhibits the multiplicity of meanings with which these postulates can be endowed. To present the history of Sofia, this essay uses a combination of primary and secondary sources. These include the series of Sofia’s comprehensive plans; scholarly, archival, and media accounts of Sofia’s planning; and related published interviews, protocols from meetings, and publications by the chief participants in the master-planning processes. To tell the story of postcommunist planning, the research also relies on several drafts of the new comprehensive plan, Sofia 2020, and on two dozen interviews with planners involved in its writing, conducted in person by the author. The essay is divided into several sections. The theoretical section reviews the evolution of planning ideas concerning the relationship between city and nature. It is followed by an account of the debates on Sofia’s form presented in three periods: the pre–World War II period (1879–1939), the communist period (1945–89), and the contemporary period (1990–2005). The conclusion discusses stability and change in the planning notions of city and nature , and the interplay between foreign ideas and their local interpretations. City and Nature, City and Region: An Overview of International Planning Ideas The...