Urban Resilience and Adaptation in Brăila: From Citadel to Socialist planning

This paper examines the long-term effects of past planning decisions in the city of Brăila, Romania, by analyzing two major periods of urban transformation: the post-demolition phase of the Ottoman citadel in the early nineteenth century and the socialist urban planning of the communist regime, culminating with the development of the Hipodrom neighborhood. While Brăila’s historical development was systematically examined, successive planning paradigms that have generated persistent morphological structures that continue to shape the city’s contemporary spatial challenges were not. This study addresses this gap by demonstrating how path-dependent urban forms produced during key historical transformations continue to structure present-day patterns of mobility, land use, and resilience.

The research adopts a diachronic urban morphology approach that integrates historical cartography, archival records, satellite imagery, and field observations. Morphological analysis focuses on the evolution of street networks, parcel structures, land-use patterns, and building typologies across the two periods, while planning policies and regulatory frameworks are examined to connect spatial transformations with their broader political and ideological contexts.

The findings indicate that the demolition of the Ottoman citadel around 1828 initiated Brăila’s transition from a fortified settlement to a modern port city integrated into European trade networks. The implementation of a radial–concentric street pattern continues to organize the historic core and influence contemporary mobility and heritage management. In contrast, the socialist period introduced large-scale residential expansion based on standardized mass housing and functional zoning, exemplified by the Hipodrom neighborhood, between the 1960s and 1980s. Although designed to address housing shortages, this model produced high-density residential clusters and monofunctional urban areas whose spatial rigidity and aging infrastructure present significant challenges for present-day urban regeneration.

Understanding these layered transformations highlights the importance of historically informed planning strategies capable of reconciling inherited urban morphology with contemporary demands for sustainable and integrated urban development.