Exploring the Urban Strength of Small Towns in Romania
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Exploring the Urban Strength of Small Towns in Romania Ilinca‑Valentina Stoica1 · Antoni F. Tulla2 · Daniela Zamfir1 · Alexandru‑Ionuț Petrișor3 Accepted: 5 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Small towns have long been overshadowed, but in recent years, there is a growing recognition of their territorial role, both on the research agenda and on the European Union level, simultaneously with an increasing awareness of their heterogeneity. In spite of this, studies focused on small towns in Eastern Europe are few in relation to the large numbers in the area and the role of this paper is to contribute at filling in this gap. In Romania, there are 225 small towns (under 20,000 inhabitants), which constitute 70% of the entire urban system. In order to measure their urban characteristics, a multi-dimensional (composite) index was developed, called Index of Urban Strength. For the index, 22 relevant indicators were selected and grouped in three dimensions under the form of secondary indexes (demographic, socio-economic, infrastructure and land-use). Then, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) method was applied for each dimension, and the influential variables were identified. Finally, the index was computed allowing the assignment of different levels of urban strength (very low, low, medium and high) to Romanian small towns. The paper provides new insights related to the uneven development of small towns, allowing for comparative analyses and advocating the need to develop specific policies for each of the identified categories. The results indicate a spatial differentiation at the macro-region level, with the small towns with very low or low index of urban strength more prevalent in the East and South of the country than in the Centre and the West. Keywords Urban strength · Small towns · Hierarchy · Political will · Urban status · Romania
1 Introduction For a long time, small towns have been neglected (Bell and Jayne 2009; Vaishar and Zapletalová 2009; Steinführer et al. 2016; Knox and Mayer 2009; Servillo et al. 2017), both as subjects of research and by public policies, at the national and the EU level, attention being given mainly to large cities and metropolitan areas, or exclusively to rural areas (Servillo et al. 2014a; Vaishar et al. 2016; Filipović et al. 2016). One reason for their “invisibility” * Daniela Zamfir [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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(Bell and Jayne 2009) seems to be the heterogeneity of small towns and the different administrative definitions of what “urban” means in different European states (Servillo et al. 2017; Smith 2017). However, this lack of interest is somewhat paradoxical, especially considering the existence of thousands of small towns that are home to millions of people. It is estimated that 16% of the population of Europe lives in very small towns of less than 5,000 inhabitants (Servillo et al. 2014b). Small towns
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