The Park Massacre. How a community fights to save 12 hectares of green space lost by the municipality. „Don’t we have enough concrete?”

• You can read the romanian version here.

When she feels the need to disconnect from the world around her, Cesiana Cojocaru simply crosses the street and goes to IOR Park. There, she lies down on the grass, closes her eyes, squeezes the ground between her fingers and takes a deep breath. “I need nature,” says the 30-year-old.

We walk along a narrow path through the grass beaten by the footsteps of many passers-by before us, on the edge of the IOR Park, near the Titan metro station, on the stretch of green space that is now officially privately owned. In this area, the trees are so rare that, from where we are, we can see the tower of the Maramures church on the other side of Liviu Rebreanu Street in Bucharests Sector 3.

“It didn’t use to be like this,” Cesiana says.

The IOR Park, named after the lens factory of the nearby Romanian Optics Enterprise, has been talked about lately in terms of “before” and “after.” Before the destruction and after it.

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Trees felled, dried and burned

“Look, these were healthy trees,” Cesiana points to trees that were cut down. Some were cut from the root, others from the mid-trunk, but all are showing their old age through the wooden rings.

From the metro station near Nicolae Grigorescu Boulevard to the first alley in the park, the entire 12-hectare area between Constantin Brâncuși Street and Liviu Rebreanu Street looks desolate.

Of the cherry alley, praised by The Guardian, where the trees lean in pink arches, there is nothing left, almost everything is cleared. Black patches of ash and burnt wood are still visible on the grass, a sign of recent vegetation fires.

The 12-hectare slice of parkland out of a total of 85 hectares has been steadily deteriorating over the past year. Trees have gradually begun to disappear and, in addition to clearings, the piece of parkland has been hit by several fires, the worst of them last August, when about 5,000 square metres of dry vegetation and trees burned. But it’s been getting worse since the beginning of this year.

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And when they saw that the green space continued to be razed with chainsaws, people living nearby were alarmed.

Friends of IOR Park

Cesiana and the residents of Sector 3 call themselves the Friends of IOR Park. That’s also the name of the Facebook group where several hundred people have gathered to save the IOR from destruction in any way they can: sending petitions and open letters, speaking out in the press. And also organising civic movements in the park, as they did last week under the slogan “We won’t give away the IOR Park”. Their logo is colorful, in the shape of lungs, as the park looks.

The Friends of IOR Park group actually appeared before that, in 2012-2013, when the same park was first under threat of being destroyed. Back then, the mayor of Sector 3 Robert Negoiță wanted to build a 3 hectares performance hall on top of a hill.

“We fought for ‘Derdeluș’ and we won,” recalls 50-year-old Cristi Șoimaru. Tall, with glasses that he often pushes up his nose, Cristi is a lawyer by profession and one of the founding members of the group. Even now he is astonished by a statement he says Negoiță made at a protest by local residents to save the park: “We’re not a dormitory sector, we need investment”. In other words, Cristi explains, the mayor was suggesting that we need more elements that will make a profit to the local budget, so that Sector 3 is not just a living area.

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After regaining its “Derdeluș” at the end of several days of protests and pressure on the local authorities, the group continued to be vigilant, but was no longer very active. Until earlier this year.

“Before we started making more fuss, they used to come two or three times a week”, says Cesiana. She’s not sure who “they” are. She and the others speak about “them” as some faceless people.

We ended up being detectives in the park and keeping a lookout. We would take turns in the park to see who comes and what they were doing, where they were cutting. What we suspect is that representatives of the owner are sent here to destroy everything, so that in the end the citizens have nothing to fight for.

Cesiana Cojocaru:

Whose park is it?

The area covering about 12 football stadiums, where all this massacre happened, has been in a state of legal uncertainty for a decade. The land was retroceded in 2005, by a decision of the former mayor of Bucharest Adriean Videanu, under Law 10/2001 on the restitution of properties taken by the communist state before 1989. Since then, its fate has been debated in appeals and endless court cases. In October last year, the City Hall of Sector 3 and the Capital City Hall lost it before the supreme court. The High Court of Justice, which heard the appeal made by the administration, basically upheld the decision of the Bucharest Court of Appeal.

The rights to the land in IOR belong to an 88-year-old woman, Maria Cocoru. Several publications, including Pressone and ProTv, as well as state institutions have tried to find her in recent years, without success.

Maria Cocoru is the owner of several retroceded premises in Bucharest and, according to Pressone, Dan Băjenaru, who introduces himself as her nephew, is currently in charge of the one in IOR.

They couldn’t prove that the park is a park, even though you can see it from the satellite

The City Hall of Sector 3 lost the IOR land piece in the Court of Appeal trial largely because it couldn’t prove it was park land.

The court asked for an expert opinion to show whether the land is listed as a park in the deeds and whether it was physically developed as one in 2005, when it was returned to the owner.

This is despite the fact that on the 2005 satellite images consulted via Google Earth, alleys, trees and green space are visible. You can still see them on Google Maps in the 2023 images.

In PMB’s Green Spaces Register, which has not been updated since 2011, the retroceded portion of Titan Park is listed as green space.

“In view of the fact that there were no gas, electricity, water and sewage sources on the land in dispute and there are still none at present, the Court considers that the development of a recreational area is excluded, (…) which proves once again that the land was not part of the Titan Park and was not developed as a recreational area at the time of the issuance of the provision for restitution in kind” the Court of Appeal reasoned.

“I arrived in 1992 at the Titan Metro and saw so much green space”

“In our collective memory, this space is parkland. People walk their dogs, go out with their children. You walk around here and you realise it’s a park, you can’t say it’s not,” Cesiana revolts when she thinks about how the judges justified not returning the space to the city hall.

Mihaela supports her. An economist with origins in the mountains, in Brasov, she is “by definition pro-green spaces.” She has been one of the most vocal members of the Friends of the IOR Park group since its beginning with the “Derdeluș.” 

“I have the most beautiful memory of the IOR Park since then, when we made a human chain as a sign of protest against what the city wanted to do,” she says. “We gathered people we didn’t know and fought. I like that there are now many young people among us, in the group, I feel that we passed on the torch.”

Cristi Șoimaru’s first memory of the IOR dates back to 1992. “I was a poor student. I arrived on March 13, 1992 at the Titan metro station and saw so much green space…”. During the darkest period of the COVID-19 pandemic he spent nearly all his mornings  running around the now-retroced area, then still alive, thriving. Now, he runs through stumps and dry vegetation.

Intentionally poisoned with petrol or salt water

Prior to last year’s series of fires, and again this year, several trees had been drilled at the base. The holes are large, perfectly round, and point deep into the roots.

“I know this practice from some foresters. It is used in forests to kill trees, they are infected from the base and left to dry out in order to be cut down,” says landscape architect Corina Trancă, from the Văcărești Nature Park Association. For her, although only a laboratory analysis can confirm with certainty, the holes in the roots show a clear intention to harm the trees. A strong herbicide used to eradicate vegetation, petrol or salt water, is usually poured on them, she explains. They all achieve the same result: drying out the tree until the bark starts to fall off.

And the effect is a knock-on effect, because destroying the tree also means destroying the wildlife, says the specialist.

Penalty: 100 lei per tree cut down

The local police Sector 3 fined those who cut down trees over the past three months  after being called by local residents. But the fines were only 100 lei per tree (EUR 20) as the law stipulates that they needed a permit. There were 18 fines in total, accounting for 1,800 lei (EUR 364), according to Hotnews. No one was fined for last year’s fires because no one was found guilty. Firefighters concluded that negligence was to blame for the “burning of the wasteland.”

In August last year, the local sector police spoke about the intentional destruction of trees and vegetation: “The reclaimed area of the IOR Park is in full decay due to the destruction of vegetation, through repeated arson and drying of trees with all kinds of substances, all these actions having one purpose: instaling on the reclaimed area of numerous buildings for recreation and commerce”, says the police in a press release. However, no one knows who really are those who destroyed the vegetation and if they have any relationship with the land owner.

Just a month later, a sign was up at the entrance to the park from the Titan metro station announcing the construction of a “Disney Mania” amusement park, according to Pressone. As it turned out, the amusement park was never built.

Bucharest has lost over 300 hectares of green space in the last 10 years

One of Romania’s busiest cities, Bucharest is among the European capitals with the least green space in relation to surface area: 6%.

According to the National Institute of Statistics, Bucharest has lost more than 300 hectares of green space in the last decade, parks, trees, gardens, forests, flower squares. It is not clear whether the figures reflect only green areas declared as such in administrative documents, or whether they also include those that are physically landscaped as such, but are listed as buildable spaces.

A report by the Environmental Platform for Bucharest shows that Bucharest has only 0.88 trees per resident, a calculation based on a population of 1.9 million, according to the 2011 census, which only includes those who have the city as their official residence.

Bucharest’s large parks and green spaces between blocks of flats have been systematically destroyed in recent years by the very local administrations that are supposed to protect them. In place of grass and trees, parking lots and amusement parks have sprung up. And since 2014, Robert Negoiță has launched an extensive “urban redevelopment” drive in Sector 3, destroying gardens between blocks and concreting them over, because, he said a few years ago in a statement to Libertatea, “land and grass are not green space”. The campaign continues now.

Verification to see if the retrocession was done legally

“I told people to call me if someone from the town hall comes to destroy their gardens next to the block. Whoever comes never has a permit for clearing,” says the deputy mayor of Sector 3, Lucian Judele, in an interview with the newspaper.

The deputy mayor from the USR-PLUS wing has spent the last few weeks between Facebook live interventions from IOR Park and blocking bulldozers in the gardens of blocks. Last week, he met with the city mayor Nicușor Dan to work out together what they can do to reclaim the retroceded land. He obtained a promise from the mayor: several lawyers will study the city hall’s documents from 2005 to see if the then administration legally retroceded the piece of Titan Park.

“If it wasn’t done legally, then we have a chance to get it back. We will sue the owner and win the park in court,” Judele explains. If it was legal, the second option is for the administration to somehow convince the owners to buy back the land. Basically, buy it back with money from the local budget.

IOR Park is not the only one involved in a case of retroceded green space. Like it are also Verdi Park, bought back in the meantime by Bucharest City Hall, Plumbuita Park and King Mihai (Herăstrău) Park.

Also, of the eight hectares of Grozăvești Park in Sector 6, only two now belong to the citizens. The remaining six have gone to real estate companies and the Romanian Intelligence Service. Grozăvești, like the IOR, is also listed in the PUG with the areas retroceded as buildable zones. Which allows those who own them to build buildings and blocks.

Changing the land use in the PUG is a step towards protecting them, admits deputy mayor Judele. But it takes “too many years” to do that, during which time the IOR disaster could be repeated.

There is a law to protect green space

In the meantime, he says, he has proposed to mayor Negoiță that he install a few surveillance cameras in the park. “You don’t need a security point here, it’s enough to have some video cameras,” he says. But he received no response to his suggestion. “I can only speculate that someone allowed this destruction,” Judele adds, avoiding naming a culprit directly.

Robert Negoiță says he is a big supporter of saving Titan Park, but the community around it accuses him of tolerating the destruction of the green space precisely because he does not take any protective measures.

One such lever lies in a 2007 emergency ordinance on environmental protection.

The article has been attacked in the Constitutional Court, mainly by property developers who have invoked their right to property. But the CCR ignored them. The judges even argued with a text in the Constitution that talks about the right to a healthy environment:

“Art. 35 – Right to a healthy environment

(1) The State recognizes the right of every person to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment.

(2) The State shall provide the legislative framework for the exercise of this right.

(3) Natural and legal persons have a duty to protect and improve the environment.”

Contacted by Libertatea, Sidonia Zamfir, a lawyer for the owners of the land in IOR Park, refused to talk about the destruction in IOR. “Don’t call me for this issue,” she said, before hanging up the phone.

Home in Titan

Cesiana Cojocaru believes that, beyond what the authorities should do, the owner has at least a moral, if not a legal, responsibility.

“They should feel remorse for what is happening to this area. Don’t we have enough buildings?,” she says.

After 12 years travelling the world, she returned to Romania in 2016 and has lived in Bucharest for five years. He has always been a “go-getter” and used to say that home is “where I put the toothbrush and the cats”. But she has found a tight-knit community near IOR. With her “park friends”, Cesiana goes out biking, rollerblading, boating on the lake and playing basketball in the evenings on the sports courts.

“I can really call this neighborhood home,” Cesiana adds.

But Cristi Șoimaru points the finger at the authorities. “Some people stole from us with papers. And they make a mockery of us,” he says. He raises his voice slightly, outraged, and gestures to reinforce his claim. He gets teary and chokes up. “It’s written in the Constitution, our right to clean air. And no one guarantees it!.”

In part two, Libertatea will show what a 12-hectares of land full of vegetation, such as IOR Park, actually means, and what the effects of the loss of green spaces on health and the environment in a polluted city like Bucharest are.

*This article was written with the support of Free Press Unlimited and European Excellence Exchange in Journalism, following a fellowship and course on climate change, attended by 10 journalists from several European countries in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

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