Public space and urban landscape. Urban strategy. Reconnection, regeneration and redevelopment of pre-fabricated housing neighbourhood : panel complex, Trakia quarter, Plovdiv, Bulgaria

The project is looking to develop a possible solution to one of the most painful problems in the urban realm of the big Bulgarian cities, i.e. the redevelopment and regeneration of the so called panel complexes. It takes as a case study Trakia neighbourhood in the City of Plovdiv, Bulgaria - the third largest panel complex in the country. The current work is focusing mainly on the open spaces regeneration, reconnection and redevelopment. This is due to the fact that 95% of the buildings in the panel complexes are privately owned, and the initiative for their regeneration and energy efficiency is taken both by the inhabitants and the municipality. On the other hand the maintenance of the open spaces, and their general purpose with few exceptions, is left entirely to the municipality, but is highly discussed by the society. The project is developed in different scales with large research on different levels and in different aspects. First a general setting of the problem of the panel complexes in Bulgaria is made, showing that there are very common problems of disconnection, alienation from the city fabric, lack of identity and maintenance of the public open spaces. There are three general scales on which the project is carried out: city scale, neighbourhood scale and detailed local scale. The separation of scales corresponds both to the different stakeholders and their demands, and to the staging and the model of execution. These strategies can be carried out in different periods of time and in different order, but during the research I came to the conclusion that an intervention only on local level, which deals simply with the immediate design of Trakia’s open spaces, will definitely contribute to the qualities of the public spaces, but will be insufficient to solve greater problems inherited by the general structure of Trakia.