Fluctuating geographical position within a geopolitical and historical context: Case study: Romania

Abstract

The geographical position of a territory is a statically element strictly determined by mathematical landmarks and by those of the natural background. For all that, different historical and geopolitical events that happened in the course of time, can make the geographical position fluctuate by including a territory / state into territorial aggregates established on less arbitrary criteria. Thus, many interwar authors placed Romania, by geographical criteria, in Central Europe; after 1945 they would include it in Eastern Europe, or in short, in the East, a political-ideological homogeneous territory, but heterogeneous geographically, historically and cultural. With the downfall of political-ideological barriers and the deep-going mutations in the geopolitics of Central and Eastern Europe, Romania's geographical position should be reconsidered based on objective criteria: geographical, mathematical and last but not least, cultural and economic. This study is also important because some recent works place Romania erroneously in South-Eastern Europe, either in Eastern or in Balkan Europe. The work concludes that Romania in a state situated in the south-eastern part of Central Europe. The arguments brought in favour of it have in view to push forward the current stage of knowledge on Romania's geopolitics.

Deindustrialization, Tertiarization and Suburbanization in Central and Eastern Europe. Lessons Learned from Bucharest City, Romania

“…In most cases, development policies have directed new industrial investments to small towns with predominantly agricultural or commercial functions (former fairs) or even to rural settlements, which has led to their explosive population growth based on migratory flows followed by the lending of an urban status to these settlements. Thus, there appeared workers' replicas of museum-cities, old cultural, historical or religious centers, seen at that time as "aristocratic", in order to change their image in the minds of the inhabitants [20]. Thus, Krakow, Poland's historical and religious center of tradition, was "doubled" by Nowa Huta, which styled itself as its "proletarian" counterpart [24].…”

“…New suburbs appeared, some even gaining a city status: Novi Beograd (1948), Nowe Tychy (1950), Novi Zagreb (1953), Halle-Neustadt (1967) [20], or in the suburban areas of Berlin [25], Prague [26], Bratislava [27], Budapest [28] or even the New Bucharest district, integrated in Bucharest in the 1950s, virtual cities within a city, working-class neighborhoods of traditional urban centers. For example, Militari district, which became part of the Romanian capital in 1950 2 , numbered over 125,000 inhabitants and about 40,000 apartments in 1983, which is comparable to the big cities of Romania.…”

“…From a spatial point of view, the study was documented through representative case studies regarding the particularities of the urbanization and suburbanization of regional metropolises in central and eastern Europe located both west of the former Iron Curtain (in Germany-Berlin [25,70], Munich [71]; in Austria-Vienna [72]) as well as east of it (in the Czech Republic-Prague [26]; in Slovakia-Bratislava [27]; Poland-Warsaw [73], Krakow [24,74], in Hungary-Budapest [28,75]; in Romania-Bucharest [12][13][14]76], Cluj-Napoca [58], Bras , ov [58], Ias , i [3,58], Galat , i [77], Timis , oara [78]) or in the former Soviet area (Moscow [20]).…”

“…We include in central Europe the geopolitical ensemble composed of Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Switzerland (central-western Europe), and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, Belarus, Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and Romania (central-eastern Europe), and in eastern Europe, the European sector of the Russian Federation [20]. Here, the construction of the apartment buildings started in 1962 as a response to the construction of the industrial platform to the west of the Romanian Capital.…”