Metropolitan Areas - Realities and Perspectives

Through its objectives, the paper presents real interest from a scientific point of view, as it highlights conflicting issues existing at both theoretical and practical level. From a legislative perspective, in Romania there is no coherent legal framework regarding intercommunity development associations of metropolitan areas, the law is contradictory; we present the different legal statuses that apply to intercommunity development associations of metropolitan areas. Also, the regulations regarding the conditions to be met in order to gain the status of metropolitan area are not provided for in a special law. On the other hand, although these legal provisions are to be found in disparate normative acts, they are rather ambiguous, so that, at the moment, in our country, there is no uniform practice with respect to a particular model type of institutional metropolitan area. From an institutional point of view, metropolitan areas are governed differently at the legislative level. Also, from the analysis of documents of incorporation of intercommunity development associations of metropolitan areas in Romania, we notice various institutional structures. Taking into account the social and economic prospects that will be addressed in the present research, we are attempting to identify a viable model of metropolitan areas, which corresponds to Romanian realities, but also to all the malfunctions of existing arrangements. In this regard, the research aims to analyze, from a comparative point of view, the existing legislation in the other states applying the metropolitan model, in order to identify the proposed normative framework that corresponds to Romanian realities and that needs regulation, taking into account the degree of development of metropolitan areas in Romania so far