Everything about Drumul Taberei totally explained
Drumul Taberei (approx.
Road of the Camp) is a neighbourhood located in the south-west of
Bucharest,
Romania, roughly between Timişoara Avenue (south of Plaza România and the Cotroceni Railway Station) and Ghencea Avenue, neighboring
Militari to the North,
Panduri to the East and
Ghencea and
Rahova to the South and South-East. It is one of the few examples of successful urban planning during
Communist Romania, despite it being built in the Eastern European tradition of "dormitory neighborhoods". This success is mostly due to the unique approach of the architects and planners to the concept of high-density
urban living, an approach that wasn't used elsewhere in Bucharest.
History
The neighbourhood was built in the mid-to-late 1960s, on former agricultural fields and marshland, using an old road as a backbone. It was called
Road of the Camp because
Tudor Vladimirescu set there his
Pandur camp before entering Bucharest in 1821.
Urban planning
The central concept of the area was providing for a comfortable living environment in a high density urban area. The main concepts used were standardization of buildings (most of the residential buildings are standard Eastern European
tower blocks -
"cutii de chibrituri", literally "matchboxes"), providing for quick and efficient
mass transit to the center of the city but also inside the neighbourhood and creating large, green spaces to counterbalance the massiveness and bleakness of the standardized apartment buildings.
The heart of the quarter is
Drumul Taberei Park, a large
park, complete with an
artificial lake and a small, public
swimming pool. The main avenue of the quarter circles the park forming a "U" shape, extending outwards to the east, and linking the quarter to the center of the city. Immediately east of the park, a large North-South street (
Braşov Street) cuts across the U-shaped avenues in order to provide quick access to
Militari and
Ghencea. Next to the park, a large open-air market (Drumul Taberei) was built.
Public transport was constructed to be an integral part of the neighbourhood. As such, even today, the neighbourhood is extremely well connected to all parts of the city, even though it isn't served by the
Metro. Around each
trolleybus stop, commercial areas were planned and built, to include stores, restaurants and cinemas, to serve for each small community served by that stop (many of these commercial areas still keep their original names - "Favorit", "Orizont", "Drumul Taberei 34"). The design of the neighbourhood was influenced by the then-fashionable
brutalism, visible especially in the design of the commercial areas. This design, despite being very popular and very efficient, wasn't adopted anywhere else in Bucharest, partly because most other high-density neighbourhoods were built over a pre-existing layout, with old buildings being razed and rebuilt, and partly because the process of designing and planning such a complex layout all over again was rather slow (Drumul Taberei was completed around 1974). In all, 63,000 apartments were built.
Transportation
The design of the neighbourhood placed a great importance on mass transit. Trolleybuses connect all parts of the quarter with
Gara de Nord,
Eroilor and
Universitate, while
Light Rail 41 links the neighbourhood to
Ghencea,
Militari,
Crângaşi,
Ion Mihalache Herăstrău and
Băneasa. The network also features a number of
bus lines, serving additional routes inside the neighborhood. An extension of the metro to Drumul Taberei is planned, with work scheduled to commence in autumn 2010, and an estimated completion date of 2014. As the neighbourhood was heavily designed around public transport, parking spaces are rather scarce, and
traffic jams and
gridlock are quite common occurrences, especially at the
Răzoare intersection, where one of the three center-bound roads out of
Rahova meets two of the centerbound roads out of Drumul Taberei.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Drumul Taberei'.
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