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

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 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

Health Tourism Contribution to the Structural Dynamics of the Territorial Systems with Tourism Functionality

AbstractThe study aims to identify the role of health tourism (SPA) in developing the territorial systems, characterized by the tourism functionality, in Romania, for the period 2000-2012, a period marked by spectacular transformations, especially for this economic sector. Tourism has now become a true economic engine, generating an increase in the functional complexity of the territorial system, which is based on exploiting tourism resources. To quantify how tourism has contributed to the economic development of these territorial systems in Romania a database of NACE codes was set up, specific for the tourism activity, for the period 2000-2012, for territorial mainframe systems with functionality resort. Based on this statistical support analyzes on the evolution of the number of companies, number of employees, turnover and profit were made. The results show the important role of health tourism in generating multiplier effects on other components of the economic subsystem. They were defined two categories of territorial systems: territorial systems where tourism plays a complementary role function and territorial systems in which health tourism has a preeminent role in the local economy

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

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

Vulnerability Analysis of the Cultural Heritage Sites—The Roman Edifice with Mosaic, Constanta, Romania

Heritage monuments are religious, historical, strategic, or civil edifices and could be deteriorated or even damaged due to their exposure to natural and anthropogenic hazards. The Roman Edifice with Mosaic (II-IV A.D.), the largest civil edifice (2040 m2) in Eastern Europe, is an ancient civil edifice built on the steep cliff in the western part of the Black Sea, Constanta, Romania, and is exposed to geomorphological and hydrogeological processes, which are affected by degradation. The main objective of this paper is to assess the current state of this ancient historical site in relation to environmental instability and offer scientific support for the rehabilitation process through interdisciplinary and non-destructive methods. Geophysical methods had been applied to comparatively analyze the spatial variations and flows of groundwater around the Roman Edifice with Mosaic in 2008 and 2019. Geomorphological hazards had already been inventoried and mapped. The results emphasize the state of degradation of the Roman mosaic pavement and ancient walls, mainly through high variations in the deposits’ moisture due to poor maintenance, which caused suffosion, and slip processes, bringing the mosaic into a high vulnerability range. The vulnerability map of the Roman Edifice with Mosaic environment is a necessary tool for continuously improving risk management because it clearly emphasizes the sectors that still have hazards

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

Assessment of textural differentiations in forest resources in Romania using fractal analysis

Deforestation and forest degradation have several negative effects on the environment including a loss of species habitats, disturbance of the water cycle and reduced ability to retain CO2, with consequences for global warming. We investigated the evolution of forest resources from development regions in Romania affected by both deforestation and reforestation using a non-Euclidean method based on fractal analysis. We calculated four fractal dimensions of forest areas: the fractal box-counting dimension of the forest areas, the fractal box-counting dimension of the dilated forest areas, the fractal dilation dimension and the box-counting dimension of the border of the dilated forest areas. Fractal analysis revealed morpho-structural and textural differentiations of forested, deforested and reforested areas in development regions with dominant mountain relief and high hills (more forested and compact organization) in comparison to the development regions dominated by plains or low hills (less forested, more fragmented with small and isolated clusters). Our analysis used the fractal analysis that has the advantage of analyzing the entire image, rather than studying local information, thereby enabling quantification of the uniformity, fragmentation, heterogeneity and homogeneity of forests