Territorial competitiveness, cohesion and sustainability in Romania’s urban border areas

ABSTRACT Following the expansion of NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007, Romania has become the Eastern frontier of these structures, which lends Romanian borders a strategic role. The territorial development of a border area is influenced by the political, economic, socio-cultural, demographic characteristics of the neighbouring countries sharing the same border. The border areas of Romania include 898 Local Administrative Units (LAU), of which 88 are urban. Romania has a border line (2956.4 km, of which 63.5% is non-European Union border) with the following countries: Bulgaria, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Ukraine, Hungary. The current paper seeks to identify the territorial disparities in the urban development of the Romanian border areas by 3 secondary indexes in order to reflect the main territorial development aspects: competitiveness (TComp), cohesion (TCoh), and sustainability (TSust). Lastly, the authors were able to establish the Index of Territorial Development (ITD) revealing the levels of territorial development. Assessing the competitiveness, cohesion and sustainability levels of urban centres is a useful and necessary stage, done through this study, for establishing those socio-economic fields, those towns and border sectors which are less developed, requiring attention from the regional, national and local administrations, reflected in investments.