The concept of territorial organisation of Adriatic Croatia

In this work, the author’s starting point is a maximum quality and functional territorial organisation of Croatia, especially its littoral area. Adriatic Croatia, as well as Eastern (Pannonian) and Northwestern Croatia, is one of the three defined (future) Euroregions NUTS II in Croatia. It was suggested in its current territorial coverage by the Republic of Croatia, and accepted by Eurostat in 2007. It includes all littoral counties (7) of Croatia, covering 24.7 thousand km2 with 1.4 million inhabitants (2011). The paper discusses a possible differentiation of this strategic littoral Adriatic area on three functional (gravitational) regions of the third level (NUTS III) according to the criteria of the Croatian Government on efficient decentralisation and new regionalisation of Croatia. Namely, some littoral counties do not meet the European demographic criterion for statistical NUTS III region (150-800 thousand inhabitants) although, in general, Croatian counties meet this criterion. That is why the author, applying demographic, geographic, economic, administrative and other criteria, stresses the need for defining the demographically maximally coordinated three nodal-functional, i.e., gravitational regions with their centres in Rijeka, Zadar and Split. So, the Rijeka region would potentially cover Istria, Kvarner and Gorski Kotar areas with 505,000 inhabitants (2011), Zadar region would cover North Dalmatian and Lika areas with 330,000 inhabitants, and Split region would include Middle Dalmatian and Dubrovnik (South Dalmatian) areas with 578,000 inhabitants. The area of Lika is functionally and economically most optimally oriented towards Zadar, with regard to new processes of highway linking and the recent fast development of Zadar.