Contenu du sommaire

For the twenty last years, Donau was harnessed with hydro-electric plants and locks (the most important of them beeing the Irongate's dam). Nevertheless, traffic grows slowly, particularly between socialist and west- european states. Some technical and economical considerations explain this decay.

Though almost non-existent when the socialist regime came into being, the Rumanian hydraulic agriculture now concerns more tham 3 705 000 acres, mainly in the Danubian plain. So remarkable a transformation was made possible by the features of the natural milieu : flatness, deep soils, favorable estival pluviometry. But the determining [actor seems to have been the socia~ lization of the land which made it possible to remould space rationably and thus implement its hydraulic development. As far as human behaviour is concerned, socialization is far from having solved all the problems, and it is probably because the cultural choices were very simple (corn, maize, sunflower, lucern) that the irrigation scheme was rapidly developped.

Between the 1968 et 1975's census, the population of the urban district (S.D.A.U.) of Saint-Etienne, just grew from 3 % up. The old central town and the west towns know a slight decay. The east towns and the north end with some new urbanized spaces know a slight increasment.