The nature of a space that is directly linked to dwelling, with communication and representation functions, is completely absent from the spaces transformed individually or by consensual ?building lot design? into agricultural terrain, destined to vegetables-growing. I think it is impossible to determine to what extent we are dealing not only with one of the subsistence mechanisms frequent at the time, but also with the persistence of some rural reflexes of an important section of Bucharest?s population, clearly unadjusted to an urban society.

The rest of the exterior space (the residual zones behind the blocks, or simply the portions that were supposed to have no owner) was either used for parking or for other individual activities or remained unused, degrading in a progressive and implacable manner.

As to the buildings before the regime ? the ?old? houses and blocks, the interventions were minimal, and, usually consisted of insignificant repairs or of placing temporary utility constructions. The permanent instability and uncertainty, due to the nationalisation, the coercion to lodge tenants, the permanent coming and going of dwellers, and during the past years, the perspective of almost certain demolition obviously could not lead to conspicuous transformations. Maybe only in the sense of an accelerated degradation, especially in the case of some districts (the case of Lipscani street, for instance) whose original community was gradually or rather abruptly replaced by a population with major adaptation problems to an urban lifestyle. A particular case concerning the evolution of the utilisation of the urban space is the nomenclature?s districts ? ex-districts of villas of a more or less high standing, transformed in closed privileged zones; but here, too, the lack of private property and the permanent uncertainty as to the stability of one?s dwelling place paralysed all individual actions of transformation of the buildings and afferent areas.

In the socialist period, the two types of dwelling (the ?old? and the ?new? one analysed above) obviously do not cover the variety of situations and the different conditionings. Between the injunction of a dwelling structure and of a continous control in all the fields of social life, on the one hand, and the private interests, the attempts of resistance and of finding some nooks of survival, on the other, the mechanisms of appropriation and individualisation cover a very large area. The transformations of the dwellers? relations to the public space are extremely inconspicuous within the physical space. The image of the town is overwhelmingly indebted to the succession of state-geared projects and operations. They barely allowed the changes in the social and mentalities? structure to become visible. For instance, nothing of the shape of the city or of the buildings as they were realised expresses the evolution of the population?s structure. An important section of the population recently emigrated from the rural space, due to the closely and rapidly orchestrated policies of industrialisation and urbanisation, never had the temporal, physical or social prerequisites that might pave their way into an urban acculturation. The way in which such a population adapted to a certain milieu and tried to transform it, the extent to which they identified with the town or rejected it (irrespective of the actual way they lived in it) is very different from that of some groups originating in an urban space or in Bucharest proper.