Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Post-communist land use changes related to urban sprawl in the Romanian metropolitan areas

2012; University of Bucharest; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5719/hgeo.2012.61.35

2067-2284

Ines Grigorescu, Bianca Mitrică, Gheorghe Kucsicsa, Elena-Ana Popovici, Monica Dumitrașcu, Roxana Cuculici,

Remote Sensing and Land Use

The landscape pattern of the Romanian urban system has experienced significant transformations as a result of the rapid and irreversible changes undertaken after the fall of the communism. In Romania almost 34% of its total population are living in metropolitan areas. The paper is aiming to analyse the landscape-related challenges land-use/land- cover changes in the Romanian metropolitan areas in relation with the main factors involved in the patterns of change: demographic, political and natural. Based on the investigation of relevant cartographic supports of the last 20 years, the authors are making use of different GIS methods in order to conduct a series of complex analysis of the spatial-temporal landscape challenges. The paper will mainly focus on four metropolitan areas considered as case-studies: the capital-city (Bucharest) and the three functional metropolitan areas (Oradea, Iasi and Constanţa), each metropolitan area is facing different patterns and causes of change.