Abstract: Timisoara is nowadays the second city of Romania, an important economical, social and cultural urban centre. Until 1990, the city had a relatively continuous growing, natural at the beginning of the 19th century, but artificially accelerated during the communist period. After the political change, the city has started a natural process of reconfiguration, similar with the national and euro-regional trends. In this context, the relation centre-periphery into the urban space involves a renegotiation for its new equilibrium. This article is based on the partial result of the project FP7 no.225193 ShrinkSmart – The Governance of the Shrinkage into the European Context, financed by European Commission. West University of Timisoara is partner into the consortium of this project (http://www.shrinksmart.ufz.de/).

Keywords: Shrinkage, Urbanisation, Industrialisation, Migration