The old part of the town, freed from the perspective of planned demolition and from the stagnation of any free evolution, is faced with bigger and bigger pressures such as extended, slightly modified or completely new (if often profiteering) designs and buildings. One can conjecture that it is only the economic crisis, the reduced financial possibilities and the still uncertain status of the majority of building and lot-ownership that, to a certain extent, still keeps in check the radical transformations of these areas.

The background of it all is the total incoherence and inefficiency of the laws concerning the construction and protection fields. In fact, the common characteristic of most of the operations during the past ten years seems to be the more or less blatant transgression of some laws primarily regarded as interdictions, and not as rules based on social consensus. In this sense, the cultural area circumscribing the city of Bucharest has traditionally witnessed such instances of transgression. On the other hand, the evolution from a totalitarian regime to a society with normal rules, explains to a large extent the explosion of individual initiatives, the present impossibility of controlling urban growth and the lack of a global project.

Beyond the compliance with or transgression of some rules come ?from above?, we can still ask ourselves if we do not witness fundamental changes with reference to the dwellers? relation to the town. In opposition to the above mentioned ?transparency? of the antebellic town, the private or implicitly appropriated territories seem to articulate less and less both with one another and with the urban space. ?Everybody?s space?, a common space, consistently envisaged by the communist regime, turns into ?nobody?s space?, from which private zones are extracted. The phenomenon can be easily noticed in the case of the ensembles of blocks. The territories for display, clearly indicating habitation areas, are carefully delimited. The lot portions between them become residual spaces, used for numberless garages raised in the past few years, for kiosks along the streets, or for garbage depositing.

In fact, all over the town, the blocks of flats ? both the ones from the inter-war period, and the inhabitable barracks of the past regime -, have a tendency of transforming themselves into heterogeneous ensembles of individual houses. Each unit attempts to obtain and express full autonomy. The fragmentary renovations, the omnipresent signs and an infinity of individual changes are superposed on the previous architectural fond. If the irrepressible explosion of the individualizations seems to humanize the monotonous ?thoroughfares? of the 70s or the grand triumphal axis of the Civic Centre, that, thus, loose their oppressive integrity, the display of similar types of transformations in the antebellic districts, is rather saddening. The old houses, most of them of a conspicuous architectural quality, undergo changes that alter their identity, sometimes till the complete disappearance of the original character.