Local Voices

Meet the people shaping PlaceCRAFT's pilot regions. Through Local Voices, we introduce inspiring local people and explore their work, their connection to place, and their perspectives on local development.

• Berzasca Municipality | Petru-Nicolae Furdui •

Petru-Nicolae Furdui is the Mayor of Berzasca Commune, in Caraș-Severin County, in Romania's Danube Gorge area, bringing extensive experience in local administration and rural development. The commune includes Bigăr, the Czech village selected as the Romanian pilot site within PlaceCRAFT, placing him at the centre of decisions shaping public services, infrastructure, cultural facilities and development across the area.

Mayor Furdui's connection to PlaceCRAFT comes from his role as a representative of the local administration, supporting initiatives that touch on planning adapted to local identity, tourism built on local assets, and small interventions that help people better understand and navigate the territory. A key example is the commune's General Urban Plan, developed with an interdisciplinary approach through the initiative "Right to the Danube – identity and development in vulnerable areas." Rather than applying a uniform model, the plan recognised that each village needed its own strategy: while riverside tourism could focus on recreation and waterfront activities, Bigăr required a more sensitive approach centred on its Czech cultural identity, traditional architecture and natural setting.

The municipality has also supported tourism development around the Egreta lacustrine complex, helping identify investors while safeguarding public access to the Danube waterfront as a shared local resource. Alongside this, relatively small-scale investments in tourist signage and information panels, including along the route through the Sirinia Valley towards Bigăr, connect villages and points of interest into a more legible, coherent local tourism network rather than promoting isolated attractions.

Together, these efforts reflect values at the heart of PlaceCRAFT: planning that provides the framework, tourism investment that creates new opportunities, and small-scale visitor infrastructure that connects those opportunities with the wider territory. This experience creates a natural link with the Bigăr pilot, which builds on the same idea of small-scale, context-sensitive interventions that respect a village's cultural and natural identity while making it easier to experience and understand.

This approach also reflects the importance of cooperation between the municipality, residents, local organisations, designers and external partners – ensuring that interventions respond to real local needs and remain sustainable well beyond the life of a single project.