I worked for over a month as a volunteer trying to help Ukrainian refugees in Bucharest, and this is what I discovered, published in Scena9 I am talking with a friend of mine. She volunteers in a transit camp in Bucharest’s main railway station, Gara de Nord, for Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian attack. I […]
Category Archives: Cities
Welcome to the Romanian region that expects its residents to live and work abroad. A feature written with Vlad Odobescu, and published in DoR in Romania and Internazionale in Italy In the center of the northeastern Romanian city of Botoșani is a 1980s housing block, next to an awning for the country’s most popular beer, […]
After a childhood of drug addiction on the streets of Bucharest, a former addict finds an alternative solution for users to recover An English version of a confession published in DoR Interview and editing by Michael Bird, and Ionut Dulamita. Illustrations by Ionut Dulamita It is evening. I am in the room where every Monday […]
How the Romanian capital still kills me—a version/preview for an article in Vice I first came to Bucharest as an English teacher in the 1990s, subsequently visited several times as a tourist, returned as a journalist, and then started a family in the Romanian capital. This is what has changed: When I was here in […]
What happened to the ideal Modernist city on the edge of Bucharest, written with Vlad Odobescu and published in The Black Sea and DoR With the air rank with dust, thick with exhaust and deafened by the burr of drills and car-horns, Bucharest’s western district of Drumul Taberei is a typical zone of the Romanian […]
How the planning of Communist blocks in Bucharest changed from a western vision of functional housing to a sabotage of the city – a micro-history of a megalopolis: published in The Black Sea, co-written with Vlad Odobescu To an outsider, Bucharest is a sea of uniform blocks that hustle and crush a pre-World War II city […]
While grand residential projects help regenerate the outer centre of the Spanish capital’s district of Delicias, Romanian beggars build shanty-huts in the dirt – a short report written with Vlad Odobescu for The Black Sea Delicias. In English this means ‘Delights’. A district in outer central Madrid. A warm Wednesday. Huge new apartment complexes of brick […]
A profile of Bucharest Mayoral candidate Nicusor Dan, published in CityMetric, part of the New Statesman group Standing behind 45 year-old doctor in maths Nicusor Dan is a wire shelf piled with hundreds of loose leaved files and cardboard folders. These are cases Dan and his team from NGO Save Bucharest! have brought against the […]
A comment piece on Bucharest’s northern district Baneasa, published in English and Romanian in Jug Before the financial crash of 2008, Bucharest’s northern zone of Baneasa wanted sex appeal. Real estate agents targeted citizens living with their parents in Communist high-rises with the dream of a home that could be secure, fashionable and seductive. Adding the […]
A comment piece published in Romanian on Contributors.ro In the Icoanei garden in Bucharest’s 19th century centre, there is a fountain which gushes out water and tumbles into a stream that winds to the other end of the park to meet a large pond. Children play here. They jump over the stream. Sometimes they kick […]
Michael Bird Writer & Journalist 