Abstract: There were realized numerous geographical, sociological and economic studies with special regard to land use change on the territories around Bucharest Municipality. Our paper is focused on the dynamics of the spatial patterns of land use types in the post-socialist period at the level of first tier of administrative-territorial units (towns and rural communes). The boundaries of the study area were defined from the viewpoint of the rural-urban fringe approach. We applied methods of multivariate statistics and hierarchical agglomerative clustering in order to identify changes in the distribution and use of land resources. Our findings confirm previous achievements about uneven development of the Bucharest’s outskirts and provide more details with regard to changing land use patterns. Thus, we identified and confirmed the opposition between north and south, different spatial patterns of land use distribution between internal and external periphery of the study area. We believe that reducing these differences through a balanced economic development policy would generate development opportunities for both the capital city and settlements in its suburban area. In order to obtain better results, each of the resulted land use cluster requires tailoring of the general economic development policy to its specific needs.