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The Covid 19 pandemic crisis has restarted the debate on how we can use the urban space as citizens in a safe and caring way. This research presents our explorations in human-scale board-games developed during the second part of 2020. Not only we had to rethink the rules of the games to cope with the current pandemic situation and create a safe environment for the players, but also the concepts played in the games started to have a deeper understanding of processes that create or are created by the urban environment. The two games are `Far to Close` developed within Life Long Burning 2020, at WASP Working Art Space and Production Bucharest, and `The System in the Room` created during Simultan Festival 15, Timișoara. The first game explores urban situations and how the players deal and react to some trivial city-happenings. To win the game, they have to use the physical distancing rules to `move` in the board-game city and tell the story of their trip. The second game centers more on dialogue than on winning. This time the players move in a board-game that represents the system behind housing developments. They have to explain the concepts presented in this system and create together a narrative on how housing developments should work. While, at first glance, the games can appear different in concept, the hypothesis behind them was the same: how can we use games as a tool of understanding the relationship between the citizens and the urban environment. This paper will present our observations derived from playing and observing the two games.
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The main objectives of the current paper are the need to promote adaptation programs for urban areas; the need for increasing proactive actions of local authorities, in response to the extreme weather events related to climate change; the need of raising public awareness and improve citizens’ access to information on the emergency situations and measures in response to the natural events. At the global scale, the urban areas are responsible for a significant share of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions. Bucharest is under an increased exposure and vulnerability to heat waves and floods which are going to be more frequent and persistent then prior. The current analysis is based on a methodology aimed to improve the use of climate risk assessment in decision making related to disaster reduction and adaptation to climate changes in large urban agglomerations. As main result, the emergency measures in response to the storm taking place in Bucharest, on September 20, 2017 were planned and enforced in a better manner then prior. The population reacted faster in urban areas then in the rural region. It was observed a more positive attitude of the citizens. The main conclusions are: a real increase of the public awareness in taking immediate action in the case of extreme weather events; the necessity of undertaking periodic analysis for improving appropriate prevention and proactive procedures and measures for such extreme weather events; the proactive action refers to exercises with target groups potentially exposed to such events.
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The present analysis represents a synthesis of the context in which Romania is found today, in the year it celebrates the Centenary of the Great Union. The subjects treated, though briefly, form a quasi-complete picture of the Romanian realities, be they social, cultural, economic or (geo)political. Even though the data presented is not fully updated at the level of the current year, the content draws attention to the major problems the Romanian society faces even 29 years after the Revolution. Finally, the paper clarifies both the mechanisms that deepen the evolutionary societal fractures that risk to drive Romania „out” of history, but also the potential solutions that can get us out of the crisis
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Analysing Pavel Dan’s and Cesare Pavese’s work, although there are differences, some similarities regarding the influence of biographies and space is visible. Both writers are born and raised in rural areas, where silent peasants were used with a hard work of the land. Both are considered realistic writers and both were compared with Faulkner. Pavese is also considered a modern writer. Pavel Dan was described both as traditionalist and modernist. The short stories of both writers may be structurally reduced to a unique event. An important symbol for Pavese is the hill, a muted witness of the heroes’ loneliness. The plain is the main symbol in Dan’s work. Loneliness is a major theme met in their short stories and a feeling they experienced for a long time. One of the similarities in the short stories of the two writers is the use of autobiography. Pavese’s literature is a symbiosis with biography, a meditation upon the self-abnormality, a result of an intense experience and of a careful self-analyse. Some literary critiques stated that Pavel Dan has no imagination and uses his reality transformed into text. Exile is another important theme in both creations. Pavese was exiled in the proper meaning of the expression. Pavel Dan was expelled from college and had to finish his studies in another city, Tulcea, with an antagonist landscape compared to the writer’s native land. Another antagonism is met in both creations – rural/urban. Carlo Dionisotti and Sergio Antonelli discuss this antagonism in Pavese’s work. Also Dan uses this opposition. His short stories presenting life in the city present the lost hopes and dreams of the children and young people coming from the rural areas, hoping to help their families remained in the village. This people always end as unhappy, lonely personalities, living fears isolated in the crowd.
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This paper investigates the opportunities that crowdsensing, Internet of things and mobile technologies and services bring to improving life quality and healthcare ecosystem in smart cities. The main goal is to develop a crowdsensing system for smart cities that will encourage citizens to participate in collecting environmental data and solving problems related to ecology and healthcare. The proposed system will enable monitoring of air quality, allergens, level of noise and vibration caused by traffics. Intelligent devices such as mobile phones with embedded sensors, microcomputers, microcontrollers, and different sensors will be used for the monitoring. All the crowdsensing data collected from the smart city will be stored in the cloud, and used by different stakeholders via developed web and mobile applications. The crowdsensing data will be gathered in the city of Belgrade, Republic of Serbia. The proposed crowdsensing system and obtained results could serve as a good basis for adoption and implementation of crowdsensing smart city services in Serbia and other cities and governments. Furthermore, the proposed system can enhance citizens’ e-participation and initiative to contribute to the detection of problems related to environmental pollution.
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The paper discusses the floods of the Sarajevo rivers Miljacka and Željeznica, which occurred in December 1968. This flood served as a case study to analyze the interaction of natural and constructed environment in the context of urbanization during the second half of the 20th century in Sarajevo followed by the impact of this process on natural patterns, natural environment and finally constructed environment.
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Introduction. Poverty is more multidimensional, but monetary-based method measures are merely one-dimensional. The multidimensional approach is more reliable for describing and analyzing children's poverty. This study only focused on ten provinces in Sumatra out of 34 provinces in Indonesia. There are five major dimensions of indicators which are housing, facilities, food and nutrition, education, child protection, and health. Purposes. This study uses Multidimensional Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) Approach on Alkire-Foster Method as a measuring tool for analyzing children's poverty in Sumatra in 2017 and 2019. Results The number of 0-4 year-old-deprived children was decreasing for most dimensions in 2019, compared to 2017, except child protection dimension and the number of 5-17 years-old-deprived children was decreasing for most dimensions, except health dimension. 2) The condition of the Child Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) become better in 2019. 3) Education was the most contributed dimension to child multidimensional poverty in Sumatra for 2017, while health dimension for 2019. 4) North Sumatra was the first highest score of Child MPI, headcount ratio, and intensity of poverty. 5) Bengkulu and Lampung were the provinces in 2017 and 2019 experiencing both monetary poverty and child multidimensional poverty above Indonesia’s poverty rate and Child MPI in Sumatra.
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The high population growth is not followed by the growth of infrastructure procurement, which causes the phenomenon of excess demand for clean water and sanitation facilities and infrastructure and also currently Environmental Sanitation in Indonesia is still high, poverty is also high so the behavior of hygiene and sanitation poor food, causing infectious diseases accompanied by disorders such as decreased appetite and vomiting. This condition can reduce the nutritional status of children under five and have negative implications for the progress of child growth (stunting). The purpose of this study is to see the relationship between environmental sanitation, poverty, and stunting in 34 provinces in Indonesia for the period 2015-2017. The data used is secondary data during 2015-2017 in 34 provinces in Indonesia. method This uses the analytical approach used is the Granger causality and VAR panel data and spatially uses classic typology. Results: spatially it shows that Indonesia is classified as low stunting and low environmental sanitation (Quadrant III), while in terms of stunting and poverty, it is classified as high stunting and high poverty (Quadrant I).
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The paper investigates the issue of fuel poverty and its presence in the Bulgarian context. The focus of the analysis is on the potential for alleviation and – in the long term – elimination of energy poverty through the implementation of measures for energy-efficient retrofit of residential multi-story apartment housing. An effective strategy tackling this topic at the local scale is a key prerequisite for the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with particular relevance for SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy and SDG 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities. Achieving the optimal ratio of saved energy versus financial resources is the key to renovating housing at scale sustainably and efficiently. Energy poverty as a phenomenon is linked to the combined effect of three main factors - low household income, high energy costs and low energy efficiency of housing. There is a broad scientific consensus that this phenomenon has a serious negative impact on the quality of life and citizens’ health and wellbeing. Furthermore, energy poverty contributes to a huge waste of energy and also affects the physical dimension of the sustainable development of the built environment. Therefore, energy poverty exacerbates deficits and discrepancies for territorial economies and communities. Eliminating the problem of “fuel poverty” is often considered to be impossible without the support of the affected households through subsidies. Subsidies invested in energy-efficient housing reconstruction result in immediate savings in housing heating costs, which in turn leads to a tangible reduction in the “fuel poverty” experienced by residents of reconstructed housing. Energy-efficient housing reconstruction (retrofit) is the fastest and most efficient (in terms of public resources) way to combat energy poverty. The financial resources required to enable these activities could also be obtained or complemented through financial engineering schemes with third-party involvement.
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The national identity has a genesis that a historian can rigorously reconstruct, and it is not at all a myth. Identity is closely related to spirituality. Rural communities have best preserved spirituality. This study aims to analyze the Romanian society in the context of a double pressure: the non-indigenous Austro-Marxism in the West and the revolutionary discourse in the East. In the same context of the twentieth century, the Romanian Orthodox Church would become a patriarchy.
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The present article endeavours to treat, in a comparative style, two ways of positioning oneself towards the discourse about the Romanian village: one idyllic (“the village idea”) and the other realistic (the real village). The inflation of the “village idea” has inevitably led to the ignorance of the concrete problems with which the “real village” is confronted. Any form of dichotomy between the two visions is counterproductive. The way out of this ideological whirlpool could become possible only if we take into account the spiritual dimension of the peasant civilisation as well as the need to implement some intelligent public policies to redress the Romanian village. The rural and the urban must not be thought of in a Manichean way, but complementarily. The salvation of the Romanian village from disappearance could only be ensured if we pay heed to two fundamental aspects: the spiritual renewal of the rural and of the urban coupled with a heightened attention from state authorities in regard to the real and concrete problems of the village. Any other approach which ignores this perspective risks remaining only in the territory of senseless ideology. We must avoid free idealization as well as the tendency to ideologically “set alight” the village. The only and unique modality of saving the Romanian peasant and the village is to discover again the culture of expectation as the duration of patience and love so characteristic to the peasant civilisation—patience as otherness and love as union. It is only in this way that the village and the city will reciprocally discover the joy of finding out that the spiritual, cultural and economical interdependence constitute the most appropriate ambient of survival for both of them.
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The past experience of the Evangelical movements in Romania – I specifically include here the communities of Baptists, Brethren, and Pentecostals – has been mostly researched from the point of view of political and institutional history. The present study discusses some of the key elements which had a formative impact upon the Romanian evangelical communities during the twentieth century, especially in defining the main features of and in consolidating their collective identity. Most of the evangelical churches in Romania were built in villages. This rural character thus remained, for a long time, an extremely powerful identity marker of the Evangelical Christians. The wave of migration towards urban areas during the first decades of the communist regime, which also strongly affected Evangelical communities, had an especially lasting influence on the destination communities in the cities. This was due to the large number of immigrants originating from villages, who had brought with them a whole array of rural-based ideas, practices and attitudes. ‘Legalism’ was a characteristic feature of these communities. The Evangelicals followed high ethical and moral standards, displaying powerful normative tendencies. They explicitly rejected luxury, condemned smoking and viewed alcohol consumption with a high degree of suspicion. Even while displaying a tendency of distancing themselves from the ‘lay world,’ the evangelical communities were far from being isolated. Particularly during the second phase of the communist regime in Romania, an increasing number of evangelicals successfully completed their secondary or higher education.
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Recreation and entertainment have always been an important part of a person’s daily life. The second half of the XVII century made significant changes in the usual way of spending time of the city dweller of England, and first of all of the capital. These changes were inextricably linked with the further growth of their well-being, which could be spent on new leisure activities. This aspect was facilitated by the fact that with the beginning of the Restoration, strict Puritan supervision over the sphere of recreation and entertainment weakened. The court nobility and the London urban elite become pioneers in the new kinds of leisure. In the reign of the late Stuarts, there is a certain transformation in the forms of recreation and entertainment compared to the times of Shakespeare. The phenomenon of the appearance of coffee shops testifies to the emergence of a new aesthetics of leisure of wealthy and educated social strata of the capital society of England of the late Stuart era. Coffee houses of this time serve as an example of the fact that there was a process of rationalization of leisure, i. e. the free pastime of the Englishman acquires practical meaning, closely intertwined with his aesthetic values and professional interests. Leisure in coffee shops becomes part of the business etiquette of the business circles of the City, which gathered in the coffee shops “Lloyd”, “Harvey” and “Jonathan”, located next to the Royal Exchange. The literary elite of the capital gathered in the coffee shops of “Wills” and “Button”, and the artistic bohemia in “Slauter”. Coffee shops have become a new form of leisure with higher aesthetic demands for their visitors and appropriate rules of conduct. However, the spirit of mercantilism and rationalism, which flourished in this era, led to the fact that some visitors to these institutions combined leisure and professional activities.
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Review of: Jill L. Grant, Alan Walks, and Howard Ramos, eds. "Changing Neighbourhoods": Social and Spatial Polarization in Canadian Cities. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020. 348 рp. ISBN 9780774862028.
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The article examines tense relations between the state, managers, and employees of industrial enterprises, concretely at the Vodokanalizatsiya Trust. The trust was engaged in the design, construction, and operation of water supply and sewage systems, the most important systems for modernizing urban space in the whole of Europe. Technological innovations were to be followed by social changes that could have their own specific traits in relation to other enterprises, since the trust did not belong to any of the most important branches of Soviet industry. Materials from the Central State Archives of St. Petersburg regarding activities of this department in the “Vodokanalizatsiya” trust show that a so-called Secret Department (Sekretnaya chast) or Secret Police, a branch of the OGPU — NKVD, gradually began to play an increasingly important role in managing these enterprises. Through these Secret Departments, new principles of hiring and dismissal from work, as well as imposing disciplinary sanctions, were introduced in the late 1920s. The special attention of the Secret Department was received by so-called “former people,” as well as by representatives of peoples. All this took place under conditions of an acute shortage of skilled labor in Leningrad. Thus, the state’s interests in economic development came into conflict with other interests, which in state literature are labelled as “ideological” and are rarely analyzed in detail. The article discusses the real case of anti-Soviet agitation, of which the central figure was a worker in the communal services of Leningrad. Thus, the role of the OGPU — NKVD in the development of the Soviet industry in the 1930s is studied using the example of the Vodokanalizatsiya Trust.
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Le matériel met en évidence la préoccupation des gouvernements roumaines après la première guerre mondial pour la refaite économique du pays, particulièrement pour l ’agriculture.
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Review of: NEHA GHATPANDE - From the past to the present: Shaping Identities of the Young ROMILA THAPAR: The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities through History Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2014, 344 p. ANITA STAŠULĀNE - OKSANA KOVZELE: Svētku kultūras transformācijas pierobežā: Latgales un Pleskavas apgabala piemērs [Transformations of Festive Culture in the Borderland: The Case of the Latgale and Pskov Regions] Daugavpils: Daugavpils Universitāte, 2020, 271 pp. SANJA ZLATANOVIĆ - TATIANA ZACHAR PODOLINSKÁ, Marian Devotion Among the Roma in Slovakia: A Post-Modern Religious Response to Marginality Palgrave MacMillan, 2020, 166 p. PETER SLAVKOVSKÝ - JANA LINDBLOOM: Transformácia a zánik poľnohospodárskych družstiev [The Transformation and Cessation of Agricultural Cooperatives] VEDA, Publishing House of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava 2019, 255 p. ZUZANA OBERTOVÁ - KATARÍNA ŽEŇUCHOVÁ (Ed.): Etnolingvistický výskum na Slovensku. Súčasný stav a perspektívy [Ethnolinguistic research in Slovakia. Current state and perspectives] Bratislava: Slavistický ústav Jána Stanislava SAV, 2020, 168 pp.
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The Vidin region has attracted much scholarly attention, particularly due to the bloody uprisings in the area around the middle of the nineteenth century. For a long period, Balkan historians have understood this mid-nineteenth century crisis as an inevitable consequence of a Bulgarian national awakening. Although the recent scholarship challenges the nationalist narrative, it continues to ignore the complexities of the socio-legal structures in the Vidinese hinterland, which had developed in the course of the eighteenth century, and reduces all conflict lines to the duality of interests between peasants and proprietors. Going beyond the dualistic narratives of exploitation, this study aims to historicize the land question in the Balkans by presenting the Janissaries both as actors of the Ottoman military establishment in the Vidin region and as rural investors who enjoyed benefits from and shaped the workings of the area’s land regime thanks to their own networks and the state’s policies. By doing so, it contextualizes the ruptures and continuities in landholding patterns, and also highlights the rural entrepreneurship of the Janissaries, who in Ottoman/Middle Eastern scholarship have generally been portrayed as active historical agents of city-based riots and urban-centered commercial activities.
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