No abstract

The paper highlights the impact of excessive industrialization during the centralized economy era on urban spatial identity, as well as the disruption of this identity through political-administrative decisions, a phenomenon characteristic of the Central and Eastern European region during the era of centralized economies. The tendency to rebalance urban territorial systems is achieved through deindustrialization, together with reindustrialization and tertiarization. All these changes affect functionality, physiognomy as well as urban culture, and can be quantified through the changes in the memory of places. Urban toponyms related to industrialization are disappearing and are replaced by toponyms that illustrate the historical past of the city and, in general, its spatial identity. The paper aims to contribute to the development of research on the impact of oversized industrialization on the memory of places, in the context of the transition from industrial to service-based economies, a process that affected the states of the former Communist Bloc after 1990. Based on bibliographic sources and field research conducted between 2008 and 2020 in two cities in Romania (Bucharest, the country’s capital, and Galați, the largest river and seaport and the main centre of the steel industry in the country), we have evaluated quantitatively these changes with the help of indices resulting from the toponymic changes resulting from these processes. The study shows that the functional disturbances due to the oversized industrialization that characterized the communist period only managed to a small extent to affect the correlation between the spatial identity of the two cities and their toponymy.

abstract. Romania's local administrative-territorial organisation shows a high degree of fragmentation. The situation tends to worsen as some villages break away from the parent communes and form new administrative-territorial structures. Since their area is fairly small and adequate financial resources to sustain some coherent, long-term development programmes are missing, a solution would be for them to associate freely into inter-communal cooperation structures, which is a basic prerequisite for attracting European structural funds. Such a type of cooperation practice was experienced in this country at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, inter-communal cooperation could be achieved in two ways: by an association of local communities patterned on historical 'lands' (after the French model) and by the establishment of a town, of the metropolitan type, to polarise cooperation structures.

The industrial development policy focusing on heavy industry, mainly the steel and machine-construction branches, was a characteristic feature of the socialist-type political systems of Eastern Europe. Its notable consequence for the system of human settlements translated into forcible urbanisation, but only insofar as quantity was concerned (artificial multiplication of towns and of the town population). As industrial units set up, some villages, functioning as dormitories, would be turned into towns: other would be integrated into the urban administrative territory; on the other hand, some dominantly rural residential districts would be attached to the town and a new type of settlements, connected with the construction of big industrial estates, would be built on empty terrain. As a result, a new type of town-integrated settlements would emerge, but the quality of their urban-type infrastructure falls far below that of traditional centres. Their individual character is marked by a fluctuating evolution, in the majority of cases much closer to countryside, that is, decreasing population and growing vulnerability connected with the units they had been engendered by. Considering the foregoing, we could say that these settlements, now part of the town, represent a distinct, intermediary category between the urban and the rural system and should be designated as such. The state capital determines a specific organisation of the state territory, as materialised in a certain pattern of communication routes and a specific layout of the other urban nuclei with macro-territorial functions. Bucharest’s peripheral position within the national territory calls for the decentralisation of its functions concomitantly with remote regional metropoles becoming more important as spatial structuring nuclei. Bucharest’s high degree of hypertrophy compared to the second city in the urban hierarchy, together with its distinct position within the Romanian urban system, asked for a distinctive organisation of its built-in area as early as the beginning of the 20-th century.

Infrastructure, particularly technical one, is basis of economic activities both in urban and rural areas. The Romanian sector of the Danube Valley covers a large area, in which the life of resident communities is shaped by the River (1,075 km long). At present, 266 local administrative units (LAU2) in the Romanian Danube Valley number 238 communes, 28 municipia and towns and a population of 1.7 million inhabitants. The study relies on the data provided by the National Institute of Statistics, the results of the Population and Housing Census (2011) and TEMPO Online Database (Internet 1). Hierarchizing LAU2 in terms of the technical-urbanistic infrastructure was made by the Hierarchical Ascending Classification (HAC). The aim was to group together territorial-administrative units by their parametric variables. There are many Danube Valley communities still unconnected to local drinking-water and sewerage systems, a restrictive factor in drawing potential investments into local economies. The study points out that the large Danubian port-cities also have the longest water and natural gas supply networks, as well as the greatest proportion of dwelling-houses connected to these systems. A fairly good situation have also some rural settlements lying close to big municipia or to tourist towns (in Danube Gorge and Danube Delta).