In the last two-three years administrative-territorial reform has become one of the most widely debated, most mediatised issues of the Romanian public opinion, especially after the determination of the ruling coalition to carry out in 2013 (in one year!) a thorough and comprehensive regionalisation and decentralisation reform. Although a wide debate emerged involving a series of actors from the public, to the academic and political spheres, instead of an in-depth comprehensive analysis of the question of administrative-territorial reform in Romania, the discourse was mainly catalysed by superfi cial studies and models proposed by various political stakeholders. Th is process mainly resulted in the frequent publication of several maps presenting the new administrative/territorial structure of Romania, very often generating heated, but superfi cial public debates. Unfortunately, the negative aspects of the public debate also characterised the government's reform project, which – amidst superfi ciality and hasty preparation – not surprisingly ended up in failure.
In this respect, of course, the following article does not and cannot answer all of the above questions; instead the text can be interpreted more like a refl ection, which through its specific space-time perspective analyses the issue of regionalisation from the establishment of the first instance of administrative-territorial organisation of the Romanian nation state until present day Romania (1859–2013). Th erefore the article opens with a brief introduction to the concept of regions and regionalisation, while the second part chronologically presents past meso-level administrative-territorial structures of the last 154 years through a thorough scientific analysis. This unique historic-geographical perspective, as well as the analysis of the past heritage clearly sheds new light upon administrative-territorial reform of today's Romania.

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