Rezumat/Abstract. Sustainability evolved towards a multifarious concept, with four pillars (economic, social, environmental and cultural) and more dimensions, including a territorial one. Therefore, the study hypothesized that in order to check whether development achieved sustainability, the indicators must account for several sectors. The case study looked at the urban settlements of the North-East region of development in Romania using 2011 data analyzed using the Principal Component Analysis integrated with GIS. Results indicated that the variation of the level of development can be explained by population, turnover of the primary sector, share of the employees in the tertiary sector, density of wastewater sewerage networks, density of water supply networks and area of green spaces per inhabitant, supporting the underlying hypothesis.

Cuvinte cheie/Key words: sustainable spatial development, GIS, Principal Component Analysis, territorial imbalances, North-East Region of Development

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