Organic and Rational Spatial Interaction of Romanian City Regions

This paper aims analysis spatial interaction of Romanian Cities from 1948 until 2021 trying to perceive if along seven decades of quite different political regimes – from Central Planning to Market Interaction– there have been changes in the features of spatial interaction. The analysis looks into the economic-demographic evolution of Romanian city regions and test whether, throughout time, their evolution follows an organic maximization of their size, or a rational maximization of their interaction flows subject to the spatial structure of Romanian cities. Results show that the economic base of the last period are the main drivers of regional demographic and economic growth. Notwithstanding the importance of the economic base in regional demography and economy, with the exception of the first periods from 1948-1956-1966, the evolution of the spatial evolution of Romanian City Regions is better explained by the organic formulation, either in the period of Central Planning (1966-1992) or in the period of Market Interaction where the population of the previous period has strong effect indicating a maximization of the population of each city region rather than a maximization of the interaction between city regions assuming a predefined weight of each city region, implicit in the rational formula