Advocacy for the Romanian “Lands” as Project Territories

The present study aims at becoming a manifesto in favour of the setting up of the “land”-type Romanian areas as project territories following an emergent sustainable spatial development. The “lands” are regional areas specific to Romania, with geo-historical peculiarities that enforce them as archetypal mental spaces of the Romanian people. Territorial cohesion, one of the distinctive particularities of the Romanian lands, is not valorised at all in the territorial development policies in Romania, although at European level it represents one of the objectives of regional policy. We consider that it is the duty of the regional geographers who studied these areas and worked out extremely valuable studies of territorial diagnosis to draw the attention of the practitioners dealing with territorial development on their usability. Thus, the main objective of this study is the scientific demonstration of the opportunity of such an approach, the theoretical support being given by the concepts of endogenous development, local development, “land”, mental space, project territory. In order to achieve this aim we started from bringing arguments for the role of regional geography and of the geographers themselves in the support and scientific validation of the territorial development, followed by demonstrating the distinctiveness of the Romanian lands and the opportunity of turning them into project territories, by comprising the aforementioned theoretical concepts. Last, but not least, we analysed France's expertise which provided the legal framework for the establishment of the “pays”-type areas as project territories and which, we believe, is worth being considered also in the case of the Romanian lands.