The present study is a concise form of some of the researches conducted within the Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Researches on Territorial Dynamics of the University of Bucharest, which had as an objective identifying the relationships between the development of the poles network and the evolution of demographic indicators. The study’s objectives are related to identifying the role of decisional impulses from the development poles level in the functional structuring of the local settlements system. The analyses were done at each census level, and the measures adopted by the decision makers in order to stimulate the economy of development poles were underlined. A special attention was given to the communist period, when decisional impulses were followed by immediate effects at the level of dissipative capacity of towns, towards which the investments allocated in order to develop industry were oriented.