The center of the neighborhood is opposite to the ?Moghioroş? market place. For a communist to have his name outlive his own self in a space of free negotiation, i.e. the exact opposite of what the poor fellow had ?combated ? for ? that is really a hilarious sort of expiation. On the other side of the post office there is a waste ground where a neighborhood center was once planned to be raised ? one that would have hosted offices for commerce, administration, public services. One might well wonder how come the place was not ?adorned? with some giant ?Circus-dome of Hunger? where turnips and frozen carrots were to be sold by courtesy of the first architect of the nation. All interest in the place was exhausted by several diploma-projects at the Institute of Architecture.

            After the revolution, we were warned from time to time that the place was to become a sort of small-scale Luna-Park. But it remained the same old waste ground with its iron plate pubs where, beside meat rolls and fake rum, SC Tradiţia srlsells loose furniture. A workshop for plastic processing functions in a plank shuck. Several electric cars ? that is the closest they could get to the idea of a Luna Park: they only get to ramble around, as if bewildered, just like the whole nation. Iron plate, undulated plastic, forged fences, Gypsy music, vomit and mud ? all is there to stay. A huge bidonville, grown there out of the carelessness and stupidity of the former local administration and of the people with the district and/or city offices for urbanism. Everything looks like an itinerant circus. The location authorizations for these shanties, if any, are either provisory or fraudulent: no one exhibits any intention, however feeble, of getting things in order.

            Meanwhile, there is no sign of any parking area by the side of the ever extending market place. The town hall is somewhere by the railway station, out of view: why should it be where it belongs, in the very geometrical center of the district it claims to administer? Hidden in their offices, warming themselves around electric boiling rings, the sleeved pates of the local administration ? quite poorly paid, true ? sit there musing on the future of the nation, waiting for retirement or unemployment to finally happen and neither ever does.

This is the end of my fragmentary excursion into the urban realm of contemporary Bucharest and indeed Romania. There are, however, several cities in the country that do fare a lot better now than the capital city. Not so long ago (in the March 2000 issues), in my weekly column in Contemporanul, I made the case for the dismantling of the ?municipium? of Bucharest into a core city and several peripheral localities. The idea is to finally break the vicious circle of the highly centralized, unmanageable and undemocratic sprawl structure called Bucharest. Until this is to be achieved, with the decentralization of the local administration and the privatization of public services, there is no chance to solve the suffocating problems of the city. But that requires political will, open-mindedness and a coherent program for the future of Bucharest based on subsidiarity, liberalism, decentralization, wise public works, empowerment of the smallest communities (condominium associations) and so on. My feeling though is that such a program requires a new breed of politicians and public social workers. Who is going to train them for the foreseeable future?