Social Behavior and Municipal Public Parks in the 19th and Early 20th Century in Romania
Social Behavior and Municipal Public Parks in the 19th and Early 20th Century in Romania

Summary/Abstract: During the 19th and early 20th century more than 50 urban public parks have been designed and built all over the Old Kingdom of Romania. They were all envisioned and designed by foreign specialists, most of whom came from France, Germany and Austria.For some of the parks they had created we find archival documentation that contains maps,sketches and drawings and even lists of plants. For some we find more. We discover written descriptions and correspondence which show big differences in the way that gardeners,architects and landscape gardeners envisioned public parks to look like and how they hoped people will use them and how they actually did – some used the lawns as places for their goats and pigs to graze on, lakes to fish from, flower beds to cut from, alleys, small plazas and gazebos to use as spaces for improvised markets etc.To this end, this paper aims to focus on the causes of these conflicts and to discuss about the impact that social behaviour had had on the process of designing and even redesigning municipal public parks in the 19th and early 20th century in Romanian cities north of the Danube and east of the Carpathians, on imposing visiting regulations in public parks and applying penalties to those who disregarded the rules, closing the parks during the night and patrolling them during daylight etc. The research is based on archival documentation(plans, pictures, written descriptions, legislation, newspaper articles and correspondence) as well as on recent studies on similar topics from Romania and abroad

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