Abstract
Currently, in Romania, nearly 7,500,000 inhabitants (34% of the country total population) live in the metropolitan areas. Following the political and socio-economic changes which came after the post-communist period, the metropolitan landscape witnessed significant transformations, mainly related to urban sprawl (suburbanisation), in terms of land use/land cover changes and conversion to residential, commercial or services areas triggering both deconcentration and spatial redistribution of the population. The authors intend to assess the main urban sprawl-related housing dynamics in connection with some triggering driving forces in terms of the spatial transformations of built-up areas, changes in population patterns, residential expansion, etc., while focusing on the most important Romanian metropolitan areas: Bucharest, Oradea, Iasi and Constanţa. Therefore, using GIS computer mapping techniques, statistical data and field surveys, the current study seeks to provide an insight into the connections between the main patterns of change and the residential development pathways in the Romanian metropolitan areas.
Highlights
The first decade of the 21st century brings about the most extensive urbanisation share ever reached with more than half of the world's population living in the urban areas
Given that the rest of Romanian towns have less than 400,000 inhabitants each and polarise spaces under 1 million inhabitants, the metropolitan development was supported by some legal instruments according to which a metropolitan area is to be established based on the joint association of the administrative-territorial structures (Grigorescu et al 2012a)
The urban sprawl-related trend together with housing dynamics enable to outline the main residential patterns: irregular residential development characterized by individual houses which vary in size and architecture according to the availability and affordability of land, often located in the city’s outskirts; small-size residential projects made up of high buildings or villas, sometimes providing luxury apartments, usually developed within the city limits and their surrounding areas and residential complexes/projects which, according to their affordability and accessibility could be divided into open residential projects – residential areas with access to all the necessary environmental facilities and other services and gated communities – for high-income groups
Summary
The first decade of the 21st century brings about the most extensive urbanisation share ever reached with more than half of the world's population living in the urban areas. The classic cyclical urbanisation model built by Van den Berg et al (1982) is broadly accepted as a pattern of the past and present population changes in both urban cores and surrounding fringe areas, triggering both urban growth and decline periods in Europe in four stages: urbanisation, suburbanisation, desurbanisation and reurbanisation. Suburbanisation sometimes turns into counterurbanisation based on the population shifts from the urban periphery towards the small and medium-sized towns of less urbanized metropolitan surroundings During this process the core areas lose more people and jobs than the suburbs gain. In most post-communist Central and East-European metropolitan areas the urban sprawl has been understood as a process of urban development triggering population deconcentration and territorial transformations related to the restructuring of the physical shape, land-use patterns and socio-spatial configuration (Sykora and Ourednicek 2007; Leetmaa 2008). Assessing urban sprawl-related housing dynamics in the Romanian metropolitan areas
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