ABSTRACT
The city centre of Bucharest is in disarray; its layout is dysfunctional and borders on the absurd. This situation is due to a series of planning violations to which the city was subjected during the 1980s, at a time when the power of the totalitarian regime came close to being absolute. The principal elements of these violent operations, ‘Ceausescu’s Palace’ and the ‘Great Boulevard to the Palace’, are by now legendary. Still, the scope of the project reaches even beyond these (in)famous instances, physically and psychologically. For, behind the appearance of these elements there are a series of complicated mechanisms that have created, or made possible, this very ‘appearance’. It is the purpose of this paper to study some of these mechanisms, their underlying causes and the appearances they produce.
