Operational Structures in Urban and Rural Strategic Development 

Vasile ZOTIC1, Diana-Elena ALEXANDRU1
1 Babeș-Bolyai University, Faculty of Geography, Centre for Research on Settlements and Urbanism, Cluj-Napoca, ROMANIA
E-mail: zoticv@geografie.ubbcluj.ro, diana.alexandru@geografie.ubbcluj.ro
Pages: 107-120

Abstract. Settlements development is an ongoing process and besides being conditioned by extrinsic and intrinsic factors it is also conditioned by the evolution of a set of parameters that should call for a selective adoption of specific development actions. When designing a strategy for the development of urban/ rural settlements it is not enough to just perform an overview of the status of constituents, subsequently revealing dysfunctions and problems, which would be later covered by the strategy through a set of proposed programs, measures and projects. This type of approach can be regarded as outdated and limited. Therefore, due to the inconsistencies between the written measures and the practical results in the field our aim was to develop an integrated logical scheme, containing parameters, indices and threshold values to methodically address the highly complex systemic structure of settlements in the process of development. This should represent the foundation for the diagnosis and for further simulations of development depending on the changing development parameters. This proposed logical scheme, consisting of assessment units and their parameters, would help specialists improve the quality control of development strategies and know real-time changes occurring in the settlement system due to changes registered in the values of parameters. We debate on the need to develop a multi-criteria assessment tool useful in designing the future development of settlements and the results show a possible model of logical scheme and its inner structure.

K e y w o r d s:  settlement geosystem, development strategy, informational ranking, logical scheme, threshold value, assessment unit