Operational Structures in Urban and Rural Strategic Development Vasile ZOTIC 1 , Diana-Elena ALEXANDRU 1 1 Babeş-Bolyai University, Faculty of Geography, Centre for Research on Settlements and Urbanism, Cluj-Napoca, ROMANIA E-mail: zoticv@geografie.ubbcluj.ro, diana.alexandru@geografie.ubbcluj.ro K e y w o r d s: settlement, development strategy, informational ranking, logical scheme, threshold value, assessment unit A B S T R A C T 1. INTRODUCTION Development is the feature of each geosystem’s evolution in the geographical space. This is the response geosystems give to the availability of free energy in space, whereas the complexity of development is proportional to the amount of free energy existing at a time. Development is a long-lasting process, subject to laws governing the organization of matter in the geographical space, fact that makes development consistent with the organization of matter. Like all system processes, development is dynamic and a function of its dimensions and components [11]. Natural components of the geographical space are self- organizing as compared to the man-made ones, which are just partly self-organized and in need of strategic development through spatial planning [7]. The organization capacity of the human factor is also limited and directly and primarily dependent on the knowledge available at a given time (concepts, methods, and level of accessibility to raw or processed information), plus the resources and technology. Settlements development is a man-made process conditioned by the need to increase the quality of life of the population, the need to adjust to environmental changes, and by the available knowledge in the field, resources and current technology. If, in the past, settlements development would be purely dictated by the need to solve the current and inherent problems, in today's knowledge-based society era we employ Centre for Research on Settlements and Urbanism Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning J o u r n a l h o m e p a g e: http://jssp.reviste.ubbcluj.ro Settlements development is an ongoing process and besides being conditioned by extrinsic and intrinsic factors it is also conditioned by the evolution of a set of parameters that should call for a selective adoption of specific development actions. When designing a strategy for the development of urban/ rural settlements it is not enough to just perform an overview of the status of constituents, subsequently revealing dysfunctions and problems, which would be later covered by the strategy through a set of proposed programs, measures and projects. This type of approach can be regarded as outdated and limited. Therefore, due to the inconsistencies between the written measures and the practical results in the field our aim was to develop an integrated logical scheme, containing parameters, indices and threshold values to methodically address the highly complex systemic structure of settlements in the process of development. This should represent the foundation for the diagnosis and for further simulations of development depending on the changing development parameters. This proposed logical scheme, consisting of assessment units and their parameters, would help specialists improve the quality control of development strategies and know real-time changes occurring in the settlement system due to changes registered in the values of parameters. We debate on the need to develop a multi-criteria assessment tool useful in designing the future development of settlements and the results show a possible model of logical scheme and its inner structure.