Bucharest’s Living Museum opens without a building or entrance fee

The new Living Museum opened in October with a permanent collection of 68 places. Bucharest residents can discover and visit them for free using the map available on muzeulviu.ro.

The museum is meant to offer a new perspective on the capital, starting from places that are part of the city’s everyday life. The collection includes a wide range of projects from gardens, meadows, and urban habitats to spaces reclaimed for the community and initiatives through which resources are reused.

The exhibits in Bucharest’s Living Museum are not kept in display cases but outdoors, where they grow, change with the seasons, and need care. Bucharest residents can follow the transformations of each project, and at some of them they can even lend a hand through planting, gardening, or building shelters for birds, hedgehogs, and insects.

The digital map available on muzeulviu.ro serves as the museum’s catalog: it provides information about each project and suggests recommended thematic routes for a few hours or a full day of exploration in the city.

“Bucharest’s Living Museum is a collection that showcases precisely this urban energy, without being a museum in the institutional sense, but rather an invitation to look at the city itself as a museum. The 68 ‘living exhibits’ show what happens when Bucharest residents are determined to care for their environment and make the city a better place to live through their own efforts. It is an open museum that celebrates not relics in display cases, but every project that proves Bucharest is changing for the better,” says Alina Kasprovschi, executive director of Bucharest Community Foundation.

The 68 projects included in the collection of Bucharest’s Living Museum are projects supported by Bucharest Community Foundation and ING Bank Romania through the Environmental Platform for Bucharest. The program connects research into environmental problems with the funding of solutions and the collaboration needed to implement them, bringing together those who can contribute to these interventions, from organizations and civic groups to specialists, academia, companies, and public administration.

The priorities of the Environmental Platform for Bucharest are based on research into the state of the environment in Bucharest. Data on air quality, urban nature, climate change, waste management, and mobility help identify the city’s problems and establish priorities. Funding totaling nearly RON 22 million to date supports the development and continuation of initiatives, while collaboration connects resources, expertise, and the communities involved.

The support provided covers interventions at different scales, from large-scale projects dedicated to conserving urban nature and regenerating public spaces to initiatives developed by communities at the neighborhood level. These address different needs but share a focus on places and the people who use them, and Bucharest’s Living Museum connects them in a network accessible to Bucharest residents.