Urban Aging in Romania – Dynamics, Trends and Explanations. A Geographical Perspective

Urban aging is a generalized phenomenon in developed countries and Romania is no exception. Romanian cities, marked by alert urbanization during the communist period, against the background of forced industrialization policies, have rapidly joined the path of inevitable ageing in the post-1990. The territorial or hierarchical disparities that have emerged are based on connections with the specific evolution of demographic transition trends or with how society has adapted to the post-communist context (the transition to a market economy, integration into the European Union). This demographic process was favoured by the coincidence of three essential phenomena specific to this context: fertility decline, massive emigration and increased life expectancy. By using official data, processed from the perspective of both descriptive and multivariate statistics, this exploratory study points out the existence of distinct patterns of evolution, explainable by variables such as demographic size, geographical position, the existence of regional or local specificities, etc. The explanatory value of the variables tested to capture the context in which this process evolves in Romanian cities was validated, both from a general and from a regional or hierarchical perspective. The obtained results create a solid basis for deepening the studied process at the local level through case studies that can more accurately reveal how Romanian cities have adapted to the new social-economic context.