SMALL TOWNS AND INTERCOMMUNAL CONSTRUCTION. CASE STUDY: BIHOR COUNTY, ROMANIA

The present study intends to highlight the way in which the small towns in Bihor County, Romania are trying to find again their place and part in the upsetting territorial construction, through various mutations of their functions, after the fall of the communist regime. The setup of the Territorial Planning Units (TPUs) in the effort to optimize the territorial development through construction of structures of intercommunal cooperation, turned some small towns in Bihor County into poles of local development. The question that this study intends to answer is: Are these towns capable to assume this role, considering the relict structures inherited from the communist past? In order to answer it, we considered the development potential of the small towns as a tool of assessment and validation of the viability of the poles imposed by the intercommunal construction. Thus, we carried out the comparison between the real development poles, highlighted by the analysis of potential, and non-viable development poles, imposed by the intercommunal construction, thus resulting in a typology. The suggested typology identifies three types of development poles: viable, vulnerable and non-viable. Applied to other counties as well, this typology can become a tool of assessment of the functionality of the intercommunal construction.