Urbanistica Informazioni

The Union of Bulgarian Spatial Planners – playing for fair practice

Scritto da A. Burov e E. Dimitrova.

Angel Burov and Elena Dimitrova – UI n. 311 – settembre-ottobre 2023 (ECTP-CEU)

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Intergenerational continuum and innovations in the planning profession

The Union of Bulgarian Spatial Planners (UBSP)[1] is the newest member of ECTP-CEU, joining in May 2023. UBSP is a non-governmental voluntary professional organisation focused on the development and promotion of professional activities in the field of spatial planning in Bulgaria and internationally.

Founded in 2010 by a group of graduates of the post-graduate programme in Urbanism at the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy (UACEG)[2], Sofia, Bulgaria, UBSP today has 24 members (full, associate and honorary) and partners with numerous institutions and individuals in the country and abroad.

To provide some context to the practice of spatial planning and urbanism in Bulgaria, it is worth noting that the academic traditions of urban planning and design in the country date back to the 1940s. At that time, the Department of Urban Planning was one of several departments within the Faculty of Architecture at the newly established Polytechnic School in Sofia.

As part of the Faculty of Architecture at the Higher School of Architecture and Civil Engineering (1967-1992) and the UACEG (since 1992), the department contributed to the training of almost all Bulgarian professionals in the field of urban planning and design in the second half of the 20th century. It was a period of rapid urban development and later the restructuring of the country from dictatorship and centrally planned economy to democracy and market economy. At the turn of the millennium, the country's first and to date only BSc programme in Urbanism was opened in 2002 as a result of a successful European TEMPUS project. The first Bachelors in Urbanism graduated in 2006 and an MSc programme was opened in the same year. The first graduates of the MSc programme entered practice at the beginning of 2008. Today there are more than 300 alumni of the BSc programme and about 150 alumni of the MSc programme in Urbanism.

The curricula of both urban planning programmes are multidisciplinary, flexible and adaptable, as the programmes serve a relatively small but diverse market and some, but limited, demand from the public sector. There are many positive stories of young planners finding their place in practice, but there are also some constraints on the profession. On the one hand, the severe demographic crisis in the country is a general factor for less urban development and urban decay. On the other hand, the periodicity of urban planning campaigns, rather than continuous planning, creates an unstable environment for the profession and other related professions. Public procurement of urban planning and design services is rarely accessible to young companies or independent professionals. There have been very few urban design competitions in the country for many years. Meanwhile, many territories lack actual, adopted and adequate planning instruments of high quality to ensure rational and predictable spatial development. Urban planning and design in Bulgaria remains fragmented and non-inclusive. There is a growing awareness in the predominantly urban Bulgarian society of the need for qualified and competent urban planners. However, the pace of more fruitful involvement of young professionals in practice is slow, leaving many issues and cases unresolved.

The Union of Bulgarian Spatial Planners defends the public interest in the spatial planning process. It expresses the professional position of spatial planners in Bulgaria and supports their professional development. The UBSP promotes the principles of sustainability, interdisciplinarity and transparency in spatial planning practice and governance. It contributes to the dissemination of good practice in the field of spatial planning and assists in its adaptation to the local context through the development of innovative approaches and tools.

In order to achieve its professional and social objectives, the UBSP operates in several fields of action. One of these is the establishment of partnerships with public authorities, businesses, civil society organisations and spatial planning professionals, both locally and internationally. Another field of action is the expression of public opinion on current urban planning issues, together with the consultation of various stakeholders and the provision of expert evaluation. A third area of activity focuses on the organisation of conceptual competitions in the field of urban planning and design. A fourth is to support education and training in urbanism and spatial planning through projects, courses, seminars, conferences, etc. Last but not least is the collaboration with academic and other institutions in the field of applied research and development, with the strongest link between the UBSP and the Urban Planning Department of the UACEG.

The main current priorities of the Union are related to building internal organisational capacity, initiating or being part of public debate and raising awareness of the pressing urban issues in the country. The UBSP is making considerable efforts to network with institutions, civil society, business, academic and international organisations in order to better recognise the role that territorial co-governance, spatial and urban planning and urban design can play in improving the quality of the living environment in Bulgaria. In addition, UBSP works to respond to urban challenges in Bulgaria and South East Europe by implementing innovative research and planning approaches, creating interactive content, encouraging design thinking and introducing monitoring procedures and tools.

Some of the UBSP’s successfully accomplished projects in the recent years are (see Fig. 1):

‘Share the Neighbourhood’ in 2016 - a collaborative project addressing the living environment of Sofia with the presentation of a liveable street and a nearby housing estate, whose urban quality was assessed through a set of open data and the intensive field work, together with the involvement of the community in the evaluation of visions and scenarios for urban transformation[3].
‘Urban Standard’ in 2017 – continuation of the “Share the Neighbourhood” project for the development of an urban monitoring and evaluation tool integrating GIS based multicriteria assessment using a diverse set of data from Earth observation, desk studies and field surveys[4].
Two interactive applications of the ‘Urban Standard’ developed in the period 2018 - 2021 in dynamically developing areas of Sofia, namely Manastirski Livadi[5] and the southern part of Lozenets[6] administrative area in Sofia.

A more recent project called “Co-creation of the Urban Environment: Learning from the Experiences of Rule-making and Place-making in the Netherlands and Bulgaria”, was dedicated to better directing the discourse on urban development related legislation[7] and placemaking policies[8] for the larger cities in Bulgaria.

Fig. 1 – Top left to bottom right – ‘Share the neighborhood’, ‘Urban Standard’, ‘Manastirski Livadi – Iztok’, ‘Lozenets’ and ‘Co-creation of the Urban Environment’ projects outputs

The Union also conducts its own research on air quality and the urban environment, housing and vulnerable groups, safe mobility and cycling, and other important urban development issues. The UBSP is also an active partner in many broader initiatives to share knowledge and visions in the form of discussions, forums, etc.

In this way, UBSP and its partners are creatively addressing the still fragmented practice in Bulgaria. Spatial development and planning legislation in the country is a mixture of concepts and elements from different eras, making it a hybrid between the earlier established traditions and the contemporary Europeanisation of the planning system. There are basic constitutional arrangements for spatial development, but an unstable regulatory environment with some of the most frequent legislative amendments in our field. The planning style is associated with the so-called 'comprehensive integrated approach'. Among the different styles and professional influences, urban and land use planning is a weaker strand compared to regional socio-economic planning. The latter is more closely linked to the programming of EU funds and the 'absorption' of European money through investment in (re)construction, cohesion and regional development. There is no explicit national urban policy, although there are more uniform national standards than local ones. This is controversial because control, monitoring and evaluation are weak parts of the planning and development cycles at national, regional and local levels, and thus there is a lack of overall accountability and checks and balances in the implementation of territorial public policies.

Two instruments are at the core of the traditional planning practice in place at the local level – the General spatial development plans and the Detailed urban design (regulation and construction) plans, described in the Territorial Order Act. There is a methodological and temporal mismatch between them and the instruments for regional and local (including spatial) development described in the Regional Development Act. Many other instruments are somehow missing - e.g. related to urban regeneration, land value capture, landscape preservation, etc.

In general, in the comparative EU context, Bulgaria has an unfavourable political, institutional and business environment for professional realisation in its fragile and formal democracy. This calls into question the basic professional principles and good code of conduct of most young and older professionals. The brain drain is inevitable and there is a migration of some professionals to other EU countries. Other types of challenges come from the larger professional group of architects, who show contradictory behaviour and question the very existence of planners. This is also in the context of a wider competition with other professions from the domains of Geography, Engineering, Geodesy, Law, Economy, Sociology, Ecology, etc. which are either more established or more numerous and thus become more dominant communities in the professional arena of urban development. The UBSP has relatively good working relations with the Bulgarian Chamber of Architects, which is the professional body with legal capacity in matters of urban and investment design. However, the very open access for all architects and engineers to enter the field of urban planning and design is very controversial in terms of available competencies, skills and knowledge. Nevertheless, the UBSP is open to all professionals associated with spatial planning and this is the reason why the Union gives the opportunity to associate members from other professional backgrounds to become full members after a certain period of contribution to the causes and projects of the organisation, which is itself a learning process. The demand for urbanists in emerging professions more closely related to the ICT sector (e.g. data engineering and science) is both an opportunity for realisation and for higher incomes. This trend can become a threat when combined with the unattractive image of jobs from the core of the profession, where gaps in human resources are becoming more apparent due to lower pay and strong political pressure.

There are many promising developments, albeit at a slower pace than expected and with many twists and turns. The Union of Bulgarian Spatial Planners, thanks to its committed members and colleagues, continues to support and reinvent the process of intergenerational development in the profession.

Urbanistica Informazioni

The Union of Bulgarian Spatial Planners – playing for fair practice

Intergenerational continuum and innovations in the planning profession

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