MAPPING THE SPATIAL PATTERNS OF THE URBAN SPRAWL IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE. WHAT PARTICULARITIES FOR THE POST-SOCIALIST CITY?

After the fall of Communism in 1989-1991, the cities from the Central and Eastern Europe have recorded important changes in what concern their land-use patterns due to the transition from an urban central planning to a capitalist one, as they are searching for a model of economic and social development. The most important particularity of the urban evolution of these cities is defiantly the transition from a compact city to a more dispersed urban form. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to identify the spatial pattern of the urban sprawl that took place in the main urban areas of the former socialist countries from Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on finding the land-use types that suffered the biggest degree of conversion to a discontinuous urban fabric. The paper tries also to identify a pattern concerning the spatial extent and types of the urban sprawl. In what concerns the methodology used in order to investigate the urban sprawl in the Central and Eastern Europe, a mix of techniques from GIS, as well as statistics was used. The analysis has been carried out for the period between 1990-2012 using the CORINE Land Cover database. The main results show the fact that the main land-use changes that took place in the urban areas of post-socialist Romania are the intensive land - artificialization to the detriment of green urban areas as well as to the detriment of semi-naturals peripheral area, in order to make space for the new tertiary activities, as well as new residential zones. Similar patterns of urban sprawl may be observed in the urban areas that have the same functional particularities, as they were submitted to almost the same problems concerning the transition from a socialist era to a post-socialist era.