Are Romanian urban strategies planning for green?

ABSTRACT

Faced with growing economic, social and environmental challenges, urban settlements increasingly use green areas in the search for achieving sustainability and resilience. The first step is typically the development of policies and strategies that include a significant green component. This present study analyses the development policies and strategies of 213 Romanian cities and how they approach urban green areas as well as applied means of development and management. We constructed a database with information extracted from these documents, applied descriptive statistical analysis and mapped the resulting distribution of indicators. Results indicated the preference of local urban administrations for simple objectives such as increasing or maintaining surfaces of green areas but lacking activities for achieving identified targets in improving the multifunctional benefits of green areas. We concluded that there are no differences in approaches using geographical settings or urban ranks. We determined that further research is required to connect policies and strategies with their subsequent implementation at a local level and the ensuing perceived effects. Results are critical in analysing the performance of local authorities in weak planning systems common in south-east European countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban planning
• green areas
• development strategies
• urban policies
• local administration

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Edward F. Rozylowicz for proofreading and providing valuable comments on the manuscript and the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for the feedback that helped improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mihai-Razvan Niță http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3420-2204

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-0434 – Developing a model for evaluating the potential of urban green infrastructures for sustainable planning.