Parcuri publice din România

Abstract

“Beginning in the nineteenth century, public parks became a global phenomenon that spread rapidly and was not only adopted but also adapted in various parts of the world. Known as The Park Movement or the Public Parks Movement, this trend—apparently simple, through the arrangement of spaces with pathways, street furniture, and vegetation—proved to be highly complex. Although conceived as spaces open to all categories of the public and now indispensable elements of the urban landscape, public parks were not originally designed and laid out in the form or with the functions we associate with them today. Initially, they served as urban instruments through which administrations sought, in a concealed manner, to achieve clear political and economic objectives that were difficult to attain by other means, such as gentrification and the increase in land value, the acquisition of greater political capital, and so forth.”
— Alexandru Mexi, excerpt from the Introduction

“The main thesis of the book is that the public parks of the Old Kingdom of Romania were part of a broad process of Romania’s Westernization and represented both an instrument through which this process unfolded within the geographical area and historical period under study and, at times, a symptom of the same process. Alexandru Mexi’s undertaking, with its distinctly interdisciplinary character, is situated primarily within the field of intellectual history and is supported by philological, historical, geographical, urban planning, and landscape architecture analyses. In developing his argument, the author draws upon a considerable body of texts accessed both in published sources and in archival documents—many of them previously unpublished—from public and private collections in Bucharest and in other cities in Romania and abroad (Paris, Versailles, Rome, London, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Kraków, etc.).”

— Vlad Alexandrescu, excerpt from the book’s Preface