The initiative emerged in 2012, from the need of an interdisciplinary group to find a common space for daily activities, cultural and collective events. In this search we discovered a significant number of unused spaces, absent from the map of city activities. To draw attention to their potential, we started CALUP for developing solutions to reuse vacant buildings, working with local challenges in the current economic context.

Projects like Dark Matters, Antumbra or Paralel Worlds are some of the initiatives that have relied on the potential reuse of existing structures. By promoting pop-up activities, we have reinstated unused historic buildings, highlighting their economic and cultural potential.

Discovering in vacant spaces a resource with significant potential for improving the quality of urban life, we started collecting information on their number, location and legal situation. In May 2015 calup.ro beta platform was launched, which allows collaborative listing of unused spaces in Bucharest in the form of an online database. Its purpose is to facilitate their reactivation through innovative projects and ideas, which highlight both their importance for local communities and their potential role in the sustainable development of the city.