Long-term challenges of Romanian urban network: Planning for regions with different background

Romanian development policy and planning always had a major goal, namely turning Romania from a rural country into a prosperous urbanized one. Rurality is associated with backwardness, poverty and with a not really proudly accepted past. In the present paper I try to identify the main periods of Romanian planning, and I also use statistical demographic time series in order to describe the present state and the trends of urbanization in Romania. Planning, when it was applied, had a decisive effect on Romanian urbanization, while lack of planning or inappropriate planning is marked by stops in increase of urban share.