The efficiency of polycentric development strategies in the context of economic crisis. Case study - the development of Southwest Oltenia region - Romania

Romania's polycentric development model was elaborated by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Researches on Territorial Dynamics within the University of Bucharest and by Urbanproiect SA. The elaboration of the polycentric development strategy is based on the human settlements' classification depending on their polarisation capacity and the designing of a polycentric network, able to ensure the territorial complexity necessary to the attenuation of negative impulses from the suprasystems' level. The world economic crisis may be considered the most powerful negative impulse after the Second World War, generating major disfunctionalities at the level of fragile territorial systems. The elaboration of some specific strategies, able to take into account the new challenges given by the global world, is an important preoccupation of the decision factors in order to increase territorial competitiveness

THE REORGANIZATION OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES AND THE PERSPECTIVES OF THE ENDOGENOUS DEVELOPMENT IN THE MINING AREAS FROM GORJ COUNTY

In the strategies of regional development, a bigger and bigger importance is given to identifying the possibilities of endogenous development which, besides the exogenous impulses, contributes to an optimal development of local economies. Gorj County is one of the counties which registered a major economic decline following the restructuring processes of the economic activities. These counties need interventions at the strategic level, in order to identify the development alternatives, based on the capitalization of localresources. Following the analysis of the relation between the enterprise initiative and development, the way in which it has become fundamental for the development of a geographical space was clearly underlined. The analysis of this determination offers a well documented scientific support to the local and central authorities; this support regards the development of the enterprise initiative in territorial profile and, on this basis, it offers concretesolutions, based on decisional chains, which will have as a result the attenuation of the disequilibrium within the territorial profile. The endogenous development of the territorial systems may contribute to the sustainability of the cohesion process at local, regional andnational level

Changes in the forest ecosystems in areas impacted by aridization in south-western Romania

BACKGROUND: In the past few decades, global climate change has accentuated the intensification of aridization in South-Western Romania, with direct and indirect consequences on the quality of forest ecosystems. In addition to qualitative deterioration, the quantitative changes brought about by intensive anthropic deforestation have created the conditions for a decline in the size of forest areas on vast tracts of land. The paper aims to analyze the qualitative and quantitative changes in the forest ecosystems in South-Western Romania, changes due to the synergic context of the global climate changes and the anthropic pressures of the past three decades. In order to capture the evolution of aridization in the study area, specific aridization indexes have been calculated, such as the De Martonne index and the UNEP aridity index. 1990 and 2011 satellite images have been used in order to quantify the qualitative changes. RESULTS: The results obtained indicated that, in the past two decades, the quality of the biomass declined as a result of the increase in the climatic aridity conditions (De Martonne si UNEP aridity index, indicating in the last decades, annual values under 15 mm/°C, and under 0.5 mm/mm, that means that the values situated under these thresholds, describe arid and semi-arid climate conditions). Also, the uncontrolled logging across vast surfaces caused the loss of forest ecosystems by 7% in the overall study area, during the last three decades. CONCLUSIONS: The severe effects of aridization meant, first of all, a significant decline in the quality of the ecosystem services supplied by forests. In the absence of viable actions to correct the present situation, the extremely undesirable consequences of an ecological and social nature will arise in the near future

Management elements of the emergent metropolitan areas in a transition country: Romania, as case study

Complex processes, specific to the countries in transition, have had major impacts on restructuring the territorial management systems. The removal of restrictions of limiting urban expansion, imposed by the totalitarian regime, has allowed the rapid expansion of cities, beyond administrative boundaries, since 1989. The concept of emerging metropolitan area is explained by the multitude of problems posed by the sketching of these areas and especially by their functioning. Synthesizing, there are presented some managerial experiences considered inchoate, of some emerging Romanian metropolitan areas, with an emphasis on Bucharest’s metropolitan area. The conclusions of these descriptive analysis show the complexity of the problems that can occur during the process of building of the metropolitan areas under the circumstances of lack of an inter-municipal cooperation culture. Integrated management takes into account two realities: firstly, that the management of emerging metropolitan areas is trans-scalar, achieving the partial mergence of the management types (including the collegiate one), and secondly, that insuring a multi-level governance without implementing a polycentric intra-metropolitan development policy, is not sufficient

Structural dynamics of tertiary activities in industrial parks in Bucharest, Romania

The study is an analysis of tertiarization in Bucharest, a process that tends to become dominant inside an economic system that has faced the hardships of transition and reorganization. The study deals with tertiarization inside the industrial parks in the capital city, in close connection with deindustrialization and industrial delocalization. The study highlights the forms tertiarization has taken inside those areas, former industrial platforms of the utmost importance for the industry of the Communist era. The trends in the evolution of tertiarization are analyzed in comparison as well as from the perspective of the evolution of the companies inside the three industrial parks; in addition, two scenarios for the future course of tertiarization are included

THE ROLE OF POLYCENTRIC NETWORK IN THE DEMOGRAPHIC DYNAMIC OF HUMAN SETTLEMENTS

The present study is a concise form of some of the researches conducted within the Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Researches on Territorial Dynamics of the University of Bucharest, which had as an objective identifying the relationships between the development of the poles network and the evolution of demographic indicators. The study’s objectives are related to identifying the role of decisional impulses from the development poles level in the functional structuring of the local settlements system. The analyses were done at each census level, and the measures adopted by the decision makers in order to stimulate the economy of development poles were underlined. A special attention was given to the communist period, when decisional impulses were followed by immediate effects at the level of dissipative capacity of towns, towards which the investments allocated in order to develop industry were oriented

Qualitative changes in the entrepreneurial sector in emerging territorial systems – Craiova case study

The goal of the present study is to analyze the complex economic processes within emerging territorial systems, developed around big cities. Economic ventures concentrated inside these urban clusters in a short span of time, and they registered a spectacular evolution, compared to the neighboring areas. Intensification of the linkages between cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants in Romania and the surrounding areas led to the individualization of territorial systems apart, with a spectacular evolution of economic-social processes, which turn those systems into the most dynamic territorial structures. The present study means to identify the causes of those complex processes within emerging territorial systems, the manner of functional organization of the space, and the causes that determine the spectacular evolution of the economic processes within emerging systems

Using fractal analysis in modeling the dynamics of forest areas and economic impact assessment:Maramureș County, Romania, as a case study

This study uses fractal analysis to quantify the spatial changes of forest resources caused by an increase of deforested areas. The method introduced contributes to the evaluation of forest resources being under significant pressure from anthropogenic activities. The pressure on the forest resources has been analyzed for Maramureș County, one of the most deforested counties in Romania. In order to evaluate this, the deforested areas were calculated for the period of 2001–2014, by using the Global Forest Change 2000–2014 database. The Fractal Fragmentation Index (FFI) and Fixed Grid 2D Lacunarity (FG2DL) were used to quantify the degree of fragmentation and dispersion of the forested areas, and thereby the extent to which a forest area is affected by deforestation. The process of quantifying the pressure on forested areas included the creation of a database for the period of 2000–2014 containing economic activities (turnover) related to woody recourses, important indicators of forest exploitation. Taken together, the results obtained indicate a dramatic increase in deforested areas (over 19,122 ha in total for the period of analysis), in Maramureș County

TOURISM AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT. STUDY CASE: BĂILE FELIX-BĂILE 1 MAI TOURISM SYSTEM, BIHOR COUNTY, ROMANIA

The study presented has the purpose of highlighting the role and importance of tourism in the development of the local economy of the touristic system Băile Felix – Băile 1 Mai, Bihor County, Romania. This fact is concluded from the results of several analyses and corelations between the following factors : the numbers of companies, employees, fiscal value and recorded profit between the years 2000-201

Use of Fractal Analysis in the Evaluation of Deforested Areas in Romania

Spectacular spatial dynamics of forest areas is one of the biggest challenges for the scientific world, concerned with completing the methodologies devoted to new methodological approaches, to provide new information that is indispensable in assessing the impact of deforestation within the ecosystem. In this study, we analyzed the evolution of the deforested areas, using the fractal fragmentation index (FFI). The research is based on high-resolution satellite images of forest areas between 2000 and 2017. The use of fractal algorithms allowed the modeling of the grinding patterns, identifying obvious differences between compact and fragmented cuts. Information is needed especially in the evaluation of the areas cleared because of illegal actions. Research has shown spectacular increases in deforestation in the mountain area, the northern and central groups of the Eastern Carpathians being the most fragmented geographical regions in Romania. The study showed that deforestation led to the fragmentation of forests, which generates major natural changes. The results obtained can contribute to the identification of new approaches in national forest fund management policies by establishing a critical fragmentation threshold