Socio-Demographic and Socio-Economic Problems of the Cities of Straseni from the Republic of Moldova and Zarnesti from Romania

Author(s): Laurențiu Crăciun / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2020

The socio-economic dynamics of small and medium-sized cities in the modern era, highlights the fact that their development and progress over time have been accompanied by many problems of socio-economic, territorial, ecological, etc., which have been intensified, or mitigated, to the extent that local public authorities have effectively monitored and administered them. Numerous development programs, plans and strategies have aimed to address these issues, most often in isolation, without relying on their ranking and prioritization in accordance with the severity of the event, or the impact on the community. Most of these actions were sporadic, being dictated by a risk factor, or conjunctural, without continuity, a report on long-term development strategies. The advantageous geographical arrangement, the proximity of important urban centers such as Chisinau (in the case of Straseni) and Brasov (in the case of Zarnesti), have greatly influenced their development trajectory, having several common features, both in terms of achievements and regarding the problems that arose in both situations.Through the present study, the author aims at an evaluation of the socio-economic and socio-demographic problems from a comparative perspective, of the way their management by A.P.L. (Local Public Authorities), as well as to propose certain solutions in the eventual diminution, or solution of them, as well as to see the “possibilities” that the two cities have and what they can offer to the population to pursue the opportunities they offer to the population. This scientific approach is part of a doctoral study "Integration of small and medium-sized cities in the regional urban system".

Akrobaci już tu nie mieszkają

Author(s): Olga Gitkiewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 788/2021

Parking mój widzę ogromny

Author(s): Olga Gitkiewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 789/2021

Pusty dom

Author(s): Agnieszka Burton / Language(s): Polish Issue: 790/2021

Proszę siadać

Author(s): Olga Gitkiewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 791/2021

Trochę bardziej u siebie

Author(s): Olga Gitkiewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 792/2021

Evoluţia conceptului de comunitate

Author(s): Razvan C. Dinică / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2011

Organizations require management. Those who run them have to at least try to make sure that they achieve their goals. What is the best way to do this? One way is to divide work up into simple tasks, give workers detailed instructions, and see that they carry them out. In most organisations, there are experts with a specialized knowledge of the activity concerned, but do they control what goes on? In many industries and services there have recently been major changes in ownwership with its transfer from the public to the private sector through privatization.

Ségrégation sociale et spatiale au milieu urbain

Author(s): Luminita Miron / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

Anthropology, geography, as well as sociology, dedicate many studies and articles to the process of segregation. At the analytical level, the lack of a well-founded typology slows down research in this area. This clearly explains the difficulty of approaching this concept, whether due to its polysemous definition but also to its delicate measurement. In this study we will analyze the process of segregation in the urban environment, distinguishing between social segregation - emphasis on population and on social aspects and, on the other hand, spatial and geographic segregation.

Comunitățile umane între tradiție și modernitate

Author(s): Victor Voicu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2010

In this paper, the author selects from the reference literature a few ideas that are used as arguments for demonstrating the ambiguity of the current community impact on human civilization. Without discrediting the advantages of the undisputed materials of civilization and contemporary technology, the present survey focuses on the anticipation of the modernizing influences, particularly of its collateral aspects on the spiritual life of human communities’ influences that have had as effect a disruption of human relationships and of traditional customs. The author intends to draw attention to the danger that the modern civilization awaits, if it is unable to control its own accomplishments.

Dezvoltare socială în comunităţile urbane

Author(s): Luminița Miron / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2010

Community development has become a method of supporting the disadvantaged people as belonging to their own communities through their active involvement in the identification and solving of the community problems. Its main aim is to improve the living standards through an increased efficiency of resource allocation, of local initiatives in developing and using the specific means and actions and of representation actions for socially marginalized groups. Within this context, social development has acquired a special significance, rendering the real development of the social processes and policies, namely an important premise of community development. The urban environment is currently going through a number of issues related to poverty and unemployment, inadequate working and living conditions, air pollution, noise and excessive crowding, land and habitat degradation, drinking water resources shortage. Within this context, community planning struggles against unemployment, social exclusion and poverty, which constitute key areas of sustainable urban community development. In this paper, I will provide an analysis of the social development in the context of the processes that take place within urban communities and that are closely related to the urban reconstruction and regeneration process. It is essential to mention that an important emphasis is laid on the strengthening of local initiatives as an essential factor for the improving of life in the urban environment.

LIVING CONDITIONS IN RURAL AREAS IN ROMANIA FROM 1990 TO 2020

Author(s): Iulian Stănescu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The paper looks into the main trends of living conditions in rural areas in Romania from 1990 to 2020. The first part of the paper deals with housing. It features issues and indicators concerning housing supply, the breakdown of the housing stock by building material, overcrowding, vulnerable groups, and housing cost overburden. The second part focuses on access to public utilities: water, sanitation, natural gas, electricity and the Internet. The third part looks into the policy and financing concerning living conditions in rural areas. We use national time series, objective data from census and statistical surveys for observing long term trends. Cross-sectional, objective data from European statistical surveys is used for international comparisons. According to the main findings, living conditions in rural areas in Romania experienced a marked improvement over the thirty year period, especially in terms of reduced housing overcrowding, increased access to water, sanitation, and the Internet. However, this statement requires nuances and caveats. Despite the progress made, the gap compared to Western Europe persists. The suburbanisation of rural areas and the variance between and within communes in terms of dwellings’ access to water, sanitation, and natural gas are two trends that point to the increased heterogeneity of rural communities in Romania. Looking forward, there are sustainability and affordability risks concerning the expansion of public utilities in rural areas.

Dom utracony, dom opuszczony. Bajt i jego znaczenia w prozie Anthony’ego Shadida

Author(s): Filip Ryba / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2020

Kultura ludowa – restytucja czy zawłaszczenie?

Author(s): Dobrosława Wężowicz-Ziółkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2020

The objective of the article is reflection on folk culture in the context of knowledge about the memory and knowledge about the past, deepened by the contemplation of mechanisms that appropriate the secondary pasts through the discourses of the dominating groups. The author argues that the traditional folk (or so-called peasant) culture is nowadays a culture without a subject and the ideological selection sieve and processes of globalisation only contributed to its whole areas falling into oblivion or being denied, while selectively keeping only those aspects which can easily undergo its institutionalised restitution. Pointing to the process of restitution being embroiled in the appropriating politics of memory, the author argues with the opinion of Barbara Fatyga who views folk culture as the modern popular culture.

‘Rural poverty’ in urban spaces of Budapest Research proposal for examining spatial inequality in contemporary Hungary

Author(s): András Vigvári / Language(s): English Issue: Spec 4/2016

In this paper an attempt is made to find new perspectives on the investigation of spatial inequalities in contemporary Hungary. The research focuses on urban and suburban spaces that belong to Budapest, yet are also intensively linked to rural spaces through the migration processes from resource-poor rural regions to the resourceful areas of the capital city. The paper first attempts to define the concepts of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’, to better understand the uneven relation between them, and to avoid those simplifying approaches that are wide-spread in these kinds of investigations. Having understood and defined the concept of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ from an Eastern European perspective, I have reconstructedIn order to demonstrate how important it is to consider the institutional mezzo level (as the housing policy and labour market), which influence the cycles of this process the most important steps of the rural-urban migration process in the case of Budapest are reconstructed.. Finally through a local example it is shown how to find these abstract concepts in a concrete space and what kinds of patterns can be observed through a local example.

Monumentalizing the urban and concealing the rural/coastal A spatial reading of Matnog, Sorsogon, Philippines

Author(s): Cecilia Fe Sta Maria-Abalos / Language(s): English Issue: Spec 4/2016

A discursive reading on how urban ideology is monumentalized, this article peels on the spatial experience of Matnog, Sorsogon as it transitions from a rural/coastal nature to the urban. Taking a spatial perspective, with theoretical underpinnings from Lefebvre’s concept of ‘oeuvre’, interlaced with Bourdieu’s take on social space and Giddens’ arguments on historical time, the article elaborates on the spatial machinations orchestrated to construct polemical spaces that deftly conceal spaces occupied by the poor. Extrapolating from photographs and maps of the place, field notes and interviews with Matnog residents who come from the low-income bracket, elucidated spatial consequences that weave discourses on the spatial problematic that unfolds through the shift in social space and historical time, consequential to the silencing of social differences in the transitioning spaces.

Determinants of local food purchase Insight from a consumer survey in South Tyrol (Italy)

Author(s): Riccardo Brozzi,Agnieszka Elzbieta Stawinoga,Christian Hoffmann,Thomas Streifeneder / Language(s): English Issue: Spec 4/2016

A large number of previous studies relate local food purchase to the demographic and financial profile of consumers. This article provides an innovative insight into the sociocultural and spatial factors influencing local food purchase in the multilingual region of South Tyrol (Italy). To derive a representative sample for the South Tyrolean population, 498 consumers have been interviewed through Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI). The differences in the consumer attitudes towards local food were tested for significance using both parametric and non-parametric statistical tests. The results show that consumers’ cultural background and spatial typology (according to their urban, predominantly urban and rural place of residence) have a significant influence on specific attitudes towards local food purchase. More specifically, differences in urban/rural consumers are observable with regard to the preferred stores to purchase at and in the level of expenditure on local food. The cultural background influences the meanings associated with local food and the reasons attributed to its purchase.

Local Food as an Agent of Regional Rural Development Three Examples from the Małopolska Region in Poland

Author(s): Krzysztof Gorlach,Martyna Wierzba-Kubat,Anna Jastrzębiec-Witowska,Piotr Nowak / Language(s): English Issue: Spec 4/2016

The article presents current issues and research problems concerning the problems of food in the area of sociology and other social, humanistic, and political sciences. Since the lack of analytical approaches other than the traditional division between scientific disciplines, the authors suggest a new approach based on the reviewed literature, namely: the so called intra-human and extra-human approaches. In this paper the authors use the extra-human approach combined with the neo-endogenous perspective to analyze three empirical cases of the following regional products, namely: oscypek cheese, zatorski karp (local pound fish), and lisiecka kiełbasa (regional sausage).

Social components of food marketing in RDP-supported projects

Author(s): Anna Augustyn,Gusztáv Nemes / Language(s): English Issue: Spec 4/2016

In response to a growing awareness of the consumers across Europe, efforts towards improvements of food marketing have been intensifying during the last decades. Targeted actions to tackle these challenges have been undertaken by rural communities, public and private sector, including large multi-national companies. This paper looks at the various approaches fostered within the EU Rural Development Programmes. We review different types of marketing schemes relevant for EU rural areas, affected by both market and public sector mechanisms. Social components have been frequently added to these, based on voluntary, bottom-up processes and quality control, and embedded in local community and economic development. We claim that social marketing can be effectively combined with the public support available under the EU rural development policy and help food producers to gain better access to markets. The value that social networking and bottomup rural development represent in the marketing of local products is essential for food-driven innovation in rural areas. Our paper presents an analysis of projects from the database of the European Network for Rural Development, clustered around different social marketing components.

'Struggling with temporality'

Author(s): Gergő Hajba / Language(s): English Issue: Spec 6/2018

I have been conducting anthropological research, involving participant observation in microcommunities engaged with urban agriculture, especially crop cultivation, from late December, 2015. Beyond the avarage yield of basic vegetables or fruits and herbs, community gardening is about ’colonising’ urban space, or in other words, practising community control over a relatively small piece of urban land, endowing vacant lots with new functions. Thus, urban gardening is a territorial natured initiative, a materialized conglutination of various ideas and acts referring to the dynamics of urban transformation processes and city development. Apart from introducing a bottom-up Hungarian garden community settled in a constantly transforming district of Budapest, I represent how place attachment and displacement influences the decision-making practices of the community, and how place attachment functions under rapidly changing conditions. At the same time I argue that place attachment lets the gardeners express forms of criticism addressed to development and to the underlying logic of ’progress’: the controversial appearance of economic growth and capital injection in the district. I suggest that such affective initiatives function as social seismographs, in which the perceptions of contemporary urban transformations are emergent, highlighting a dialectical relationship between urban dwellers and modernisation processes.

Változó szerepek, változó városképek. Kassa és Miskolc a 20. században

Author(s): Melinda Harlov-Csortán / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2019

Tamáska Máté (2019) Változó szerepek, változó városképek Kassa és Miskolc a 20. században. Martin Opitz Kiadó