Respecting neither traditional rural values nor a positive ethic of urbanism, systematization is now almost universally agreed to have been a disaster for Romania and a major contributing factor to the uncommonly violent fall of the Ceauşescu regime during the uprisings of 1989.
Systematization began as a program of rural resettlement. The original more-or-less rational, plan was to bring the advantages of the modern age to the Romanian countryside. For some years, rural Romanians had been flocking to the cities. Systematization called for doubling the number of Romanian cities by 1990. Hundreds of villages were to become urban industrial centers via investment in schools, medical clinics, housing, and industry.
As part of this plan, smaller villages (typically those with populations under 1000) were deemed "irrational" and slated for reduction of services (at best) or (at worst) forced removal of the population and deliberate physical destruction. Often, the towns that were destined to become urbanized fared little better, with their entire housing stock torn down to be replaced by apartment blocks. Unsurprisingly, peasants were not uniformly pleased to be relocated from their traditional homes into concrete monoliths.
Although the systematization plan extended, in theory, to the entire country, initial work centered in Moldavia. It also affected such locales as Ceauşescu's own native village of Scorniceşti in Olt County: there, the Ceauşescu family home was the only older home left standing. The initial phase of systematization largely petered out by 1980, at which point only about 10 percent of new housing was being built in historically rural areas.
Given the lack of budget, in many regions systematization did not constitute an effective plan, good or bad, for development. Instead, it constituted a barrier against organic regional growth. New buildings had to be at least two stories high, so peasants could not build small houses. Yards were restricted to 250 square meters and private agricultural plots were banned from within the villages. Despite the obvious negative impact of such a scheme on subsistence agriculture, after 1981 villages were mandated to be agriculturally self-sufficient.
Regardless of theory, much of the country's meat and produce continued to come from the deprecated private plots. The hungry years of the late 1980s would doubtless have been far worse if systematization had proceeded further.
In the mid-1980s the concept of systematization found new life, applied primarily to the area of the nation's capital, Bucharest. Nearby villages were destroyed, often in service of never-to-be-completed projects such as a canal from Bucharest to the Danube. Most dramatically, eight square kilometers in the historic center of Bucharest were leveled, including monasteries, churches, synagogues, a hospital, and a noted Art Deco sports stadium. 40,000 people were evicted with only a single day's notice to make way for the grandiose Centru Civic and the megalomaniacal Palace of the People, a building second in size only to the Pentagon.
Systematization, especially the destruction of historic churches and monasteries, was protested by several nations, especially Hungary and West Germany, each concerned for their national minorities in Transylvania. Despite these protests, Ceauşescu remained in the relatively good graces of the United States and other Western powers almost to the last, largely because his relatively independent political line rendered him a useful counter to the Soviet Union in Cold War politics.
See also Hunger circus.