Functional rural areas in Romania - A methodological investigation

The intermediate steps, such as the data collection, the analysis of the rural space from a functional perspective and the projections of the natural threats and risks for the functional rural areas, demanded a sound management of different set of indicators and geometries, in a particular context – the pre-census period. [...] In many regards, the aggregation of administrative units in intermediate geometries is a relatively recent topic in the Romanian planning initiatives, with three major directions – aggregation of NUTS3 in NUTS2 regions, local collaboration be- tween the urban and the rural LAU at the scale of the metropolitan areas and the experience re- lated to the cooperation between the rural LAU in the frame. [...] In the case of the county of Iași, for example, the intensity of the relation between the distance to the nearest city with more than 50.000 inhabitants in 2020 and the number of companies in 2020, located in a rural LAU, has the shape of a classic power func- tion, with a slope of -1.47 and a coefficient of determination of 0.38, high enough to sustain the existence of this association. [...] The two investigations of the recent transformations in the agricultural landscape of the Romanian rural space show that the market logics and the economic pragmatism become the main drivers of the economic functionality, at local scale. [...] The analysis of the accessibility of services of general interest continued with the evaluation of the reachability of hospitals in the territory, selecting only the emergency sections of these health facilities.