The Position of Rural-Urban Fringe in the Framework of Human Settlement System

The term of rural-urban fringe is more or less used in the specialized Romanian literature, which might be a consequence of the fact it superposes or confounds itself, as delimitation, with the periurban area or/and urban periphery. A brief presentation of the terms included in the equation of territorial delimitation, starting with the urban CBD to the effectively rural region, clarifies the succession of different concentric areas in a certain proportion. In order to reveal the expectancy horizon of this term, it is also necessary to study the situation at international level, where it is used to the prejudice of periurban or where both terms are used. This study emphasizes that an empirical research on terminology is far from being sufficient, the analysis of the methods used in determining the limits being also quite necessary, as our main target is to observe if the areas are superposed or if they are complementary.