French presence in the South-East part of the Kingdom of Hungary and the everyday life of the Settlers.
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Keywords: House prices; semiparametric geographically weighted regression (S-GWR); structural attributes; location attributes; Tanjong Malim
This paper analyses the local geography of the relationship between residential property prices and its determinants. A semiparametric geographically weighted regression (S-GWR) technique is employed to explore this relationship. Selling prices, structural and locational attributes data were collected from the database of the Department of Valuation and Services of Malaysia, selected maps and reports. The outcome of this paper shows a strong geographically varying relationship between residential property prices and its determinants in which the residential property price determinants have a positive impact on prices in some areas but negative or no impact on the others. The magnitude of the effect is also found to be geographically varied; the capitalisation in residential property prices is found greater in some areas but less or with no effect in some other parts of the areas. The use of S-GWR technique makes it possible to reveal such geographically varying relationships, thus leading to a better understanding of the relationship between residential property prices and its determinants.
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Keywords: Gated developments; Gating; Neighbourhood; South Africa; Bloemfontein
Growing trends of fear and insecurity in cities have sparked the re-visitation of gating, posing significant problems for citizens and policy makers alike. Gated developments are a global phenomenon occurring in diverse countries in both the developed North and developing South. Metropolitan areas in South Africa have also witnessed a rapid increase in the number and spread of gated developments since the late 1980s. Development of enclosed neighbourhoods has become increasingly popular, gaining widespread support for their utopic lifestyle and safety features. On the whole, high levels of crime and fear of crime have led to the construction of defensible space, in the form of gated developments, resulting in elevated levels of segregation. This paper provides a spatial analysis on gated developments in the non-metropolitan setting of Bloemfontein. The pattern and timeframe of gating in this city is shown to be similar to those found elsewhere in South Africa and, indeed, globally. Overall, it is the contention that gating is a trend not only seen in large metropolitan areas, but across the entire urban hierarchy of South Africa, and, as a consequence, requires investigation far beyond its metropolitan regions to more fully understand gated developments.
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Keywords: Natura 2000; ecological awareness; sustainable tourism; environmental education; South Baltic
The article presents the results of the questionnaire survey studying the level of Polish tourists' ecological awareness, as well as the degree of their familiarity and interest in the European Ecological Network Natura 2000 in the coastal areas. The survey was held in the years 2012-2013 and was conducted among the respondents visiting the Polish Baltic coast. The majority of tourists (80%) arriving at the seaside for recreational purposes declare a high level of interest in environmental protection and daily pro-ecological behaviours. The most popular sources of information on the environment comprise television and the Internet. The majority of tourists express their interest in recreation in protected areas, yet up to 82% of them are not familiar with the notion of Natura 2000. The knowledge about the locations of Natura 2000 sites in the vicinity of tourists' holiday spots is equally poor. The visitors to the coastal areas are highly critical of the availability of information on Natura 2000 and indicate the information boards, websites and leaflets as the most desired sources of information.
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Keywords: Kraków Metropolitan Area; green areas; river parks; Upper Vistula Valley; spatial structure
The Kraków Metropolitan Area (KOM) is a specific functional region comprising a big city that is the Kraków metropolis, together with its neighbouring complex of settlements with a variety of mutual interactions. The social and economic space requires multi-dimensional enhancement of its interrelations and partial rehabilitation of its developed areas; it constitutes, at the same time, a potential which strengthens the position of Kraków as a European city. A clear structure of the metropolitan area and its internal links through green seams provide the basis for functional and spatial integration of the metropolis. The greenery, comprised in larger natural structures such as river parks and green wedges, enhances the area's polycentric concept. The shaping of the urban tissue of Kraków and its suburban zone by composing and building a network of open spaces is the basic criterion for developing a coherent metropolitan area with a sustainable structure. Many problems of the urban environment and its surroundings can be fully understood through their analyses in various scales. In order to better illustrate this complex system of interrelations, reference should be made in analyses to the macroregional scale then narrowing them to the regional scale, to ultimately go down to the metropolis. The issues covered in the paper concern open areas which should not be discussed without a broader spectrum because the notion of green areas is understood to mean primarily spaces which are networked and intertwined with the settlement structure. Some of them are clear, for instance the greenery which accompanies water courses, and easy to identify. Marshlands are mostly linearly continuous and this makes them coherent in their nature. Other green areas (apart from larger forest complexes) are not of essential significance for the integration of the metropolis. The example of Kraków shows that the KOM (1) has a big potential expressed through its natural environment in the form of green areas. The anthropopressure, however, is so high that open spaces are being absorbed by developments. It is riverside areas which have retained a clear structure of interrelations and they should be perceived as the future for the links in the metropolitan area.
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Keywords: city break; clubbing tourism; urban tourism; tourism potential
Over the last decade Polish cities have become popular destinations of the foreign clubbing tourism. Interest of foreign tourists, however, is not reflected in the interest of scientists, because clubbing tourism-related issues have not been extensively studied in the literature regarding Polish cities. In this paper the authors have tried to fill this gap by analysing the potential of city break clubbing tourism in Wrocław, the city which has been selected the European Capital of Culture 2016. As part of the analysis, the following elements affecting the development of this type of tourism were examined: transport accessibility, clubbing infrastructure (discos, nightclubs and pubs), and other factors (accommodation facilities and selected tourist attractions). The transport accessibility data include only regular direct flights carried by low-cost carriers (LCC) in 2014 (number of connections, frequency of flights and ticket prices), as this type of transportation is crucial for city break tourism.
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Keywords: Cities; districts; population dynamics; centre; periphery
The paper looks into the dynamics of the population size of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus after the census of 1989. Regions and cities of these countries were the focus of the research (territorial units level NUTS-3). The analysis addresses the question to what degree the remoteness from the regional centre, i.e. the position in the core-periphery system, influences the dynamics of the population size of the territorial units of the given level. For the analytical purposes the distinction has been made between the regional centres including adjacent suburban areas and internal regional periphery comprising districts and cities. The main indicator employed was the distance between the periphery areas and regional centres. The results of the analysis show that in spite of the depopulation of all three countries and severe transformational crisis, there was a steady growth of the population size in the regional centres, while the periphery areas of the regions continued to lose the population. The mentioned differences are primarily determined by migration flows, since the fertility rates are below the replacement level in all the countries' territories. Population tends to concentrate in the regional centres, which means urbanisation has not been completed yet. While similar patterns of population decline are observed in the periphery areas of Ukraine and Belarus, in Russia the depopulation rates are negatively influenced by the factor of remoteness of a periphery area from the regional centre. All three countries experienced rural population decline everywhere but suburban areas of the regional centres.
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Keywords: hedonic price analysis; agricultural land prices; spatial heterogeneity; spatial dependence
A great number of contemporary studies are incorporating explicit consideration of spatial effects in the estimation of hedonic price functions. At the most basic level, interactive spatial regime models are employed to detect the presence of spatial heterogeneity in datasets. A full-scale spatial analysis would include determination and adjustments for spatial lag and spatial error dependences. However, there is still plenty of room for future research to help unravel the numerous modelling and practical issues associated with a comprehensive spatial examination, such as the specification of the spatial dependence structure or functional 'neighbourhoods'. Another important issue relates to the use of spatial multipliers to filter spatial bias particularly in models which use log-transformed variables. Estimation of a hedonic price function using Malaysian dataset of agricultural land sale values indicates spatial disaggregation and spatial dependence. However, diagnostic tests and actual estimation of spatial models do not always provide unambiguous conclusions while predicted errors do not vary all that much from those generated by simpler models. Despite the conceptual appeal of spatial analyses, the inefficiency attributable to spatial biases may not be large enough to cause critical errors in policy decisions.
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Keywords: regional growth; regional inequality; economic distance; Poland; NUTS 2
The main aim of this paper is to present the concept of regional distance as a measure of economic diversity at the regional level. Additionally, the paper is devoted to the identification of regional inequalities in Poland, based on the metric presented. Estimates of the regional distance between specific regions (NUTS 2) and the mean level of development of the national economy or Mazowieckie Voivodship (the region with the highest GDP per capita in Poland) were based on calculations conducted using logarithmic equations. Two different distances were calculated: (a) the mean number of years required to achieve the present reference area level of development, (b) the mean number of years necessary to achieve the reference area GDP per capita, taking into consideration the growth rate of the reference area. The empirical example of regional distance application revealed significant inequalities between regions of Poland at NUTS 2 level.
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Russian opinions about Stalin and the Soviet Union in 2016 Percentage of Russians who think that Stalin played a positive role in the history of Russia: 54 percent. Percentage of Russians who believe that purges and the Gulag were “a political necessity”: 26 percent. Percentage of Russians who felt this way in 2007: 9 percent. Percentage of Russians who would prefer that the Soviet Union did not disintegrate: 66 percent.
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The direction of political changes in Poland has recently been debated in the European Parliament. Here, in a nutshell, is the chronicle of relevant events. In 2015 elections, a previously unknown candidate Andrzej Duda won the presidency while Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice) received the plurality of votes. Two new parties, Kukiz-15 and Nowoczesna.pl, gained substantial presence in the parliament.
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At the end of October 1918, after four years of war, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy collapsed. The army from the front changed into a horde of displaced persons wanting to return home as quickly as possible. The legal authorities perished into ash, blasted away by a hurricane of enjoyment and rebellion blowing through the constituent countries of the Austro-Hungarian empire and nations of the dying Holy Roman Empire. It acted from Trieste to Suczawa, from Bregenz to Dolna Watra. Galicia and Lodomeria and the principalities of Oświęcim, Zator, and Kraków resisted being taken over. The coup occurred quickly and almost without pain.
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Coming of Age under Martial Law The Initiation Novels of Poland’s Last Communist Generation By Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova. Rochester: Univ. of Rochester Press and Boydell and Brewer Ltd, 2015. viii + 224 pages. Index. ISBN 13: 978-1-58046-528-1. Hardcover.
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Selected Drama And Verse by Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa Edited by Patrick John Corness and Barbara Judkowiak. Translated by Patrick John Corness. Introduction by Barbara Judkowiak. The Toronto Series 37 (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe). Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 478. Toronto, Ontario and Tempe, Arizona: Iter Academic Press (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), 2015. xv + 395 pages. Illustrations, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0- 86698-532-1. Softcover. $45.00 from Amazon.com.
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Year Zero. A History of 1945 By Ian Buruma. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013. 368 pages. ISBN 978-1-59420-436- 4. Hardcover.
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Kaleidoscope of Poland. A Cultural Encyclopedia By Oscar E. Swan with Ewa Kołaczek-Fila. Foreword by Adam Zamoyski. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. xxvii + 366 pages. English and Polish indexes. ISBN 13- 978-0-8229-4438-6. Hardcover. $39.95.
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Cienie moich czasów [The shadows of my time], by Bronisław Wildstein. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Zysk (www.zysk.com.pl), 2015. 451 pages. ISBN 978-83-7785-701-4. Paper. In Polish. Comparisons and Contexts: Essays on Central-Eastern European Literature and Culture, edited by Bogusław Bakuła, Dobrochna Dabert, and Emilia Kledzik. Poznań: Biblioteka Porównań, 2015. 300 pages. Index, photographs. ISBN 978-83-62298-75-4. Scriptorum: Fragmenty Pism, czyli uwagi o wojnie i pokoju [Notes on war and peace, 1660], by Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro. Translated from Latin by Jagoda Chmielewski and Bartłomiej Bednarek. Introduction and notes by Marek Tracz-Tryniecki. Warsaw: Narodowe Centrum Kultury (www.nck.pl), 2014. 845 pages. Index, notes, photographs. ISBN 978-83-7982-063-4. Hardcover. In Polish. Ojczyzna literatura: O środowisku skupionym wokół Związku Pisarzy Polskich na Obczyźnie, by Regina Wasiak-Taylor. London: Poets’ and Painters’ Press (Oficyna Poetów i Malarzy, 103 Colindeep Lane, London NW9 6DD), 2013. 294 pages. Index of names, biographies of writers, Reproductions of paintings and drawings. ISBN 978-0-9570372-1-2. In Polish. Historia według poetów: Myślenie metahistoryczne w literaturze polskiej, 1764- 1848 [History according to poets: Metahistorical thinking in Polish literature, 1764–1848], by Andrzej Waśko. Kraków: Arcana, 2016. 515 pages. Bibliography, index of names. ISBN 978- 83-65350-03-9. Hardcover. In Polish. The Quest for a Free Ukraine, by Olena Chekan. Edited by Bohdan Rodyuk Chekan. Vienna: Der Konterfei, 2015. 94 pages. ISBN 978-3-903043-04-6. Paper. In English and Ukrainian.
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Jacques Defourny, Lars Hulgĺrd, Victor Pestoff (Ur.) SOCIAL ENTERPRISE AND THE THIRD SECTOR Changing European Landscapes in a Comparative Perspective Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York, 2014., 279 str. Dan Woodman i Johanna Wyn YOUTH AND GENERATION Rethinking Change and Inequality in the Lives of Young People Sage, London, 2015., 201 str. Daniel Franklin i John Andrews (Prir.) MEGAPROMJENA Kako će izgledati svijet 2050. Naklada Ljevak, Zagreb, 2015., 389 str. Jadranka Lasić-Lazić (Ur.) INFORMACIJSKA TEHNOLOGIJA U OBRAZOVANJU Znanstvena Monografija Zavod za informacijske studije, Zagreb, 2014., 234 str.
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