FROM HOUSE TO "RESIDENCE". PERIPHERAL GROWTH IN POST-SOCIALIST CLUJ (ROMANIA)
FROM HOUSE TO "RESIDENCE". PERIPHERAL GROWTH IN POST-SOCIALIST CLUJ (ROMANIA)

Summary/Abstract: This paper addresses the recent evolution of the physical environment at the peripheries of Cluj, a secondary city in Romania. It focuses on the issue of housing and it tries to explain the typological and scale differences that occurred at different stages of recent peripheral growth. The first part of the paper is an argument for the approach: the analysis of physical urban forms is relevant for reading the transition process in its local specificity, as a particular post-socialist situation. The second part analyses the notion of suburbia, as the dominant form of developing the cities' peripheries in the industrialized world, in order to put the post-socialist experience into a historical and geographical perspective. The third part presents in more detail the case of recent residential growth at the peripheries of Cluj. The conclusion is that in this smaller secondary postsocialist city, the trend to suburbanization is less clearly present so far; future suburban development is however probable, in more fragmented forms, depending on the regional infrastructure supply, and more generally, on the success of urban-regional governance.

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