Certainly, any pre-established founding plan of a city presupposes an incipient geometrical pattern of a more or less ideal (i.e. Platonic) or sacred nature. Such geometrical patterns are manifest in the make of certain cities that were founded as castrums: at the center of such cities there still survive both the cardo and the decumanus ? the rectangular system of axes of the cities in the Roman Empire. Even in the case of cities that knew a ?spontaneous? or ?organic? growth ? although these are terms that can hardly be said to describe the development of a city ? there is a primary set of structuring geometrical principles.

            One should not, therefore, unthinkingly dismiss any intention to identify such rigorous patterns that would underlie the organization of the urban space, even when it comes to such an unnerving case as that of Bucharest. I will not rule out the possibility that future rigorous studies, based on documents that remain to be discovered, may confirm one or another of the aspects suggested in Dana Harhoiu?s book, or that new working hypotheses may well appear. But for the time being, Bucharest?s rigorous geometry is just a fancy dream ? an undoubtedly daring, engaging and therefore stimulating dream, as they all are; but a dream that we are bound to abandon the moment we close the shiny book and go out into the reality of the city. I?m afraid that there is only an unreal (which is to say perplexing) and surrealist dimension to this city, rather than an ideal one ? no matter how much we might wish there weren?t.

            The other side of the coin, which comes in handy at this point of the discussion, is the Istanbul counter-model. The autochthonous maidan is, both in Dana Harhoiu?s book and in a number of more recent studies (3), a sub-product of the ?spontaneous?, ?organic? growth (no one dares to call it by its proper name: ?chaotic?) of the city. Given its lack of fortifications (due to its status of a vassal to the Ottoman Empire), Bucharest was deprived of that firm limit conducive to a tight interior urban structure, as was the case with the Central and West-European medieval cities. Instead, the city is organized around parishes and guild churches (4); it incorporates maidane and successive strata that violently made room for themselves while destroying the preceding ones, etc; as such, the city is more preoccupied with its molecular, rather than molar, structure. The whole is sacrificed or neglected, while major interventions on the details are preferred. None of the projects aiming at introducing overall urban coherence into the city was ever truly successful. The most frequently invoked motif is the Hegelian ?ruse of history?, or more exactly, the too short constructive respites between any two moments of massive destruction.

            Neither Dana Harhoiu?s book nor other studies in urbanism that use the term in the pejorative sense we have criticized earlier, take the maidan as a sub-product of an irrational and chaotic development typical of the city of Bucharest as well as of other cities in the extra-Carpathian area. Rather, the usual comparisons with the city of Istanbul are meant to transfer on the latter the responsibility of what is taken as an abandonment of the enlightened logic of (West-)European urbanism. The acromegalic growth of the city margins is present both here and there. The sprawling phenomenon is equally uncontrollable here as there, and, as far as I could see while traveling to Ankara among the hundreds of Istanbul?s marginal ?townlets?, there is no ?qualitative? difference between them and, say, the Bucharest upper-class ghetto called Zoo/Pipera/Iancu Nicolae. My belief, though, is that, even if the comparison between the marginal areas of both cities is tenable up to a point, a comparison of the two centers is undoubtedly to Bucharest?s disadvantage, and that is not the fault of Istanbul.