One Page Summary

The 1990s brought about new spatial dynamics for Romanian cities, freshly emerging out of communism. The country experienced a period of weak legal enforcement and widespread corruption that led to increased spatial disparities, mass privatization, de-industrialization, informality in housing and property disputes. In this context of early transition, ideological attitudes and opportunistic powerful interests, as well as practices of outsourcing planning activities to the private sphere, led to a strong process of sub-urbanisation based on a plot by plot development. This sought to meet primarily the requirements of investors, maximising their profit and paid little to no attention to providing basic amenities. Consequently, the public interest was left with few advocates.

Developing innovative planning instruments for smart and sustainable transformation pathways, requires technical and conceptual innovation. The premises guiding RETROFIT is that only a process of capacity building can sustain a durable process in order to implement these tools. Spatial planning has always been challenged to trigger the individual citizen to participate in spatial policy making (i.e. on competences). Cultivating the flexibility of a system requires the collective action of both citizens, businesses, NGO’s and institutes. As such, the main objective of RETROFIT is to implement an operational framework that will support the building of collective capabilities, concerning the provision of smart residential ecosystems. Collective capabilities refer to the ability of a collective – consisting of citizens, businesses, NGO’s and institutes - to meet a set of predefined objectives. The point of departure is that building these capabilities is a process of joint learning. For this reason, RETROFIT proposes to experiment with location-based experiential learning methods to trigger this process.

A detached single family house in a residential peri-urban area became the most popular housing preference. However, the critique on these environments increases as they are facing major economic (e.g. overpriced real estate, decreasing of services), ecologic (e.g. car dependency, energy consumption), structural (e.g. decreasing services) and social (e.g. marginalization, dormitory areas, increasing aging population) challenges. As such, in this type of dwelling environment, the density is too low, the energy consumption too high, the car dependency too big, etc.

The RETROFIT project departs from the hypothesis that a durable transformation of residential subdivisions requires collective learning processes during which residents, local authorities and organisations develop alternative scenarios for their housing environment, that will lead to new coalitions and generate concrete projects. By organizing participatory processes, RETROFIT will strengthen peoples’ ability to reflect and act over their residential environment. The project RETROFIT will adopt the CAPA.CITY framework, adapt and implement it in Câmpușor. The CAPA.CITY project focuses on one transition challenge - the retrofitting of residential subdivisions – grounded in the believe that a systematic and durable transition requires the building of collective capabilities, such as the core capability (1) to commit and engage, (2) to carry out technical, service delivery and logistical tasks, (3) to relate and to attract resources and support, (4) to adapt and self-renew, and (5) to balance diversity and coherence. Adapting the CAPA.CITY framework to Câmpușor will generate alternative scenarios for spatial transformations that transcend the commonplace of what a residential area is.