Space justice, demographic resilience and sustainability. Revelations of the evolution of the population hierarchy of the regions of Romania from 1948 to 2011

Abstract

The article studies the evolution of the population hierarchy of the NUTS3 regions of Romania from 1948 until 2011, to understand how this hierarchy, and related resilience and sustainability proposed indicators, changes due to the influence of historical events and related political and economic features. With the support of the instrumental Zipf’s Curve - that relates regional hierarchy with their population weight – the analysis shows that there is a growing population concentration and that the capital region of Bucharest and its neighbours gain at the expense of depopulation of second rank and more remote regions. The integration in the socialist block and the recent integration in the European Union have created winners and losers, but did not decisively change the path of increasing concentration in the capital region and few other large agglomerations.

Keywords

• population hierarchy
• romanian regions
• zipf’s curve
• spatial justice