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The Romanian capital is getting a facelift, which has some residents frowning.

A pedestrian walks past the uncompleted House of Radio in Bucharest
© AFP/File Daniel Mihailescu

It's not that they like the old wrinkles, they're just worried about the surgery.

"Since 1990, we've only been talking about the stray dogs and the garbage that poisons the lives of Bucharest residents," grumbled Mayor Adriean Videanu, citing two embarrassing problems that have gotten much press play for a country often dubbed the slow starter of former communist East Europe.

"Well, the time has come for major work to modernize the infrastructures of the capital," he said.

The most ambitious project is undoubtedly a 1.9-kilometer (1.1-mile) Basarab elevated highway in the heart of Bucharest, a city of two million where the number of cars has doubled in 15 years.

The project, being built by Italian-Spanish consortium Astaldi and FCC Construccion, is designed to unclog horrendous traffic jams near the main train station, whose tracks form a barrier to easy movement across the capital.

The highway's cost is estimated at 130 million euros (165 million dollars) and it should be ready by the end of 2008.

"It's a spectacular plan, and will quickly become a tourist attraction in the capital," said a proud Videanu, undaunted by groaning over the dust, disruption and noise.

The drive to modernize parallels Romania's determination to move into the European Union in 2007 -- a step not yet confirmed by the EU's executive body. Its inability to hasten EU-standard reforms saw it left out of the "big bang' enlargement in May 2004, when the bloc grew from 15 to 25 member states.

Still hampered by poverty, corruption and red tape, this Balkan state's strategic location on the Black Sea brought it into NATO in 2004. But lagging economic development has only recently seen an emergent middle class -- 17 years after the collapse of communism -- and made its image as a backwater cling like lint.

Romania may still be better known abroad for Count Dracula, the mythical vampire of Transylvania fame, and the real-life gothic legacy of Stalinist despot Nicolae Ceausescu, whose blood-stained, 25-year reign ended with his own televised execution in 1989.

For Videanu, the development plan is a must to shed the old image. "This is not some sort of megalomaniac project, like the opposition has accused me of mounting, but a necessity," he said.

Today an eclectic mix of drab and trendy, old and new, Bucharest was called the "little Paris of the east" in the 1930s when an oil-rich economy fueled a building craze modeled after Parisian elegance.

It was heavily bombed by the Germans in World War II, then Ceausescu wrought more damage, razing picturesque old districts to erect drab communist blocs -- and white elephants like the People's Palce, dubbed the world's second biggest building, after the Pentagon, built in the 1980s in what had been one of the nicest neighborhoods, Uranus. It now houses the national parliament.

Videanu also plans to build five underground highways, several multi-storey parking lots, widen several boulevards, and during 2006 to asphalt at least 200 of the 1,850 damaged roads in this city, which now counts 900,000 cars though its road network.

Another much-vaunted project is a metro line to the Baneasa and Otopeni airports. Estimated to cost 900 million euros, it is expected to be inaugurated in 2014.

The simultaneous start of several construction sites has annoyed residents who say it now takes twice as long to cross the city.

Others say the projects are advancing too slowly and fear the city will be far from the showcase its leaders hope when it hosts 60 heads of state and government at the 11th biennial Francophone summit in late September.

"There is absolutely nothing to fear, the 39 major boulevards now being modernized will be ready before the start of the summit," insists the mayor.

Last year brought another setback when Bucharest became the only European capital hit by the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu, which resurfaced in Romania again in May.

Worried officials threatened to ban poultry raising in the city and addressed another problem - promising to link up several thousand dwellings still not connected to the city's water and sewer systems.

"We're living like we're in the Middle Ages," complained Aurelia Anton, a pensioner living on the city's southern edge. "The slightest rainfall floods our houses and turns the road to mud, up to our ankles.

"And to think we live in Bucharest," she lamented.

But Videanu won't bend. "The city is changing, foreigners who come here say so every day.

"By 2008, Bucharest will be a real European city," he said.

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