The making of Knowledge Cities in Romania

AbstractThe ‘Knowledge City’ can be considered first the supreme objective and then an instrument of knowledge society with its own principles and its distinguishing characteristics and processes. One of the main question remains as how close is the position of Romanian urban areas to the category of knowledge city. Given the characteristics of Romanian cities on culture, science, technology and innovation, and policies in urban, economic and social development, I conclude that Romania must adopt firstly a unified and coherent long term development strategy for a “healthy” economy. The paper will try to emphasize the position possibility of Romanian cities in the category of knowledge city based on the concept of knowledge city, the principles, characteristics and processes of a knowledge city, taking into account the theoretical approach and empirical evidences. In this regard, I will use the background offered by literature and the official statiscal data for analysis to identify the key success factors of few Romanian urban areas which explain the posible ‘candidature’ to the quality of knowledge city. I estimate the analysis to confirm the hypothesis that there are good aspects, but also deficiencies that require major solutions and policy options for designing Romanian cities as emerging knowledge cities. We consider that the paper can be a useful viewpoint, which allows researchers to include other sources of information for researching an in a much more complex approach