Housing dynamics around Romania’s developing cities: the high demand for specific planning instruments in functional urban areas

ABSTRACT

Metropolitan planning has been a dominant trend in spatial development for decades. In this context, Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) have emerged as a concept to illustrate the economic interdependencies between an urban core and its hinterland, being typically determined by commuting patterns or accessibility criteria. In Romania, FUAs were defined for the county capitals (40 cities) as areas where urban development projects could be financed from regional development funds. This paper analyzes the territorial dynamics in one of Romania's fastest-growing functional urban areas, Cluj-Napoca, using a comparative analysis of satellite images and selected indicators. The results demonstrate the spatial impact of economic development in the past 20 years, revealing expanding boundaries of artificial surface and housing units in FUAs. Unfortunately, the current fragmented territorial configuration is unable to manage the new functional relationships generated by real estate dynamics. Therefore, we support the need to introduce a normative territorial plan at the intercommunity level to correlate the spatial development vision between the main city and its fast-growing suburban areas. Such an instrument will not only support an efficient land-use management and enhanced living conditions, but it will also provide a framework to systematically integrate territorial investments around major cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Territorial dynamics
• urban sprawl
• change detection
• land-use management
• magnet cities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ESPON Programme aims at substantiating European policies by providing evidence-based research of the European territory, having geographical coverage limited to the territory of the 28 EU member states, together with the four partner states of the program: Iceland, Norway, Lichtenstein and Switzerland. The undertaken ESPON studies are focused on providing comparable, systematic and reliable spatial evidence for the foundation of pan-European policies, promoting and fostering the paradigm of balanced competitiveness, based on social, economic and territorial cohesion.