“Sofia – a City for the People” Report
On October 4, the Architecture and Urban Development Department of Sofia municipality, presented the “Sofia – a city for the people” report, in the presence of the mayor Yordanka Fandakova.
The project, which started a year ago, aims at building and implementing a strategy for development of public spaces in Sofia. The presentation of the report was also attended by the well-known Danish town planner Jan Gehl, who is a consultant of Sofia municipality in the process of drawing up the report and implementing the targeted decisions.
Sofia is among cities such as Zurich, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, New York, Istanbul, Moscow, Shanghai and Bern, which have also worked with Prof. Gehl in the last 10 years.
The report describes in details the challenges Sofia municipality has to deal with. “We are already working on some of the measures described,” the mayor Fandakova said, listing five measures which are currently being implemented:
- Pedestrian zone expansion and introduction of traffic restrictions of small streets in the historical center of the city. The measure was adopted at a session of the municipal council. The next step is the expansion of the pedestrian zone from Vitosha blvd. to the City garden and the Largo.
- Discovering and exhibiting the cultural and historical heritage and its transformation into well-used public spaces like St. Nedelya Square so that the archaeological site revealed there could fit into a convenient city square.
- Connecting bicycle lanes into a common network
- Removing transit traffic from the city center – this means finishing both the inner city ring and the ring road
- Amendments to the Building and Construction Act of Sofia Municipality, which should provide good solutions for both citizens and investors. A limit of up to 75 m is proposed for the height of the buildings in the area in front of Vitosha mountain – between Tsar Boris III blvd, the city center, Dragan Tsankov blvd and Al. Malinov blvd as well as a height limit of 15 meters after the Ring road – in a move to keep the view towards Vitosha mountain
The full text of the report is available here.
