Nicolae Popa

In the socio-territorial context of post-industrial transitions and uneven development, the peri-urban fringes of Romanian cities such as Timișoara contain fragile, often-abandoned spaces. These interstitial territories—former farmland, brownfields, ecological patches, and degraded heritage zones—are marginalized in planning, yet hold latent cultural, ecological, and symbolic value. This paper examines how memory embedded in material, visual, and ecological fragments can catalyze new spatial practices that contest conventional urban expansion, proposing reinterpretation, occupation, and minimal intervention in line with the European Landscape Convention and the “third landscape”. Through the case of Timișoara’s metropolitan fringe, the study highlights tensions between speculative suburbanization and symbolic re-appropriation, analyzing peri-urban areas as “spaces in motion” shaped by memory and identity. Using a multidisciplinary methodology - spatial analysis, archival mapping, photography, and participatory observation - it proposes strategies to transform overlooked spaces into drivers of resilience, advocating for planning frameworks that value continuity, ordinary heritage, and cultural landscape evolution.

Tourists are central to the vitality of any destination, as their behavior shapes its image and growth. Understanding the factors that drive repeat visits and recommendations informs strategic planning for sustainable destination development, strengthening the competitiveness of emerging destinations. This study examines the determinants of tourists' behavioral intentions in Timișoara, Romania, designated as the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) in 2023. Using the cognitive-affective-conative framework, the research investigates the impact of travel motivations, perceived quality of destination attributes, and satisfaction on tourists’ intentions to revisit and recommend the destination. Data were collected within one year of Timișoara’s EcoC designation from 682 foreign tourists and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to assess the relationships among the key constructs. Findings indicate that perceived quality of destination attributes - particularly food and drink, the urban environment, and accommodation strongly drive tourists' behavioral intentions, while travel motivations related to the city’s cultural heritage exert an indirect effect. These insights offer actionable recommendations for city planners and destination managers, highlighting the importance of strategic investments in tourism infrastructure and enhancing visitor experiences. This study contributes to event tourism research by providing a model for baseline assessment of emerging cultural destinations and by demonstrating how the cognitive-affective-conative lens can be applied to a city undergoing significant tourism transformation, offering an unexplored perspective for future research on event tourism and destination management.

This article explores the extent of ECoCs (European Capitals of Culture) as placemaking laboratories. Methodologically, this study employed a mixed-methods approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with public and private stakeholders involved in the ECoC programming, and questionnaires were applied to capture personal insights of citizens. Data were correlated within spatial contexts using ArcGIS spatial analyses. The findings show that placemaking within ECoCs is more effective when embedded in transparent governance structures. Local narratives anchor placemaking in the everyday life of citizens. This placemaking legacy depends less on tangible inputs and more on the cultivation of processes and policies that empower communities to articulate and negotiate their sense of belonging within an inclusive and understanding governance structure. Also, we highlight that the latest ECoC included an ecological dimension within placemaking processes. Ultimately, this study illustrates that ECoCs become critical lenses to understand how culture-driven placemaking adds value to places, changes perceptions and behaviours of residents, and contributes to a stronger feeling of collective belonging.

Uncontrolled urban sprawl represents a significant challenge for many countries worldwide. This article analyzes discussions sparked by increased land consumption driven by urban sprawl in Timișoara’s peri-urban area, Romania. In this context, the objective is to identify the processes of transformation and dysfunction of spaces under the effect of peri-urban expansion. Methodologically, geospatial and satellite data were utilized to assess the evolutionary trend of peri-urbanization. Secondly, an evaluation of land-use types at the level of peri-urban sub-neighborhoods was conducted. Furthermore, an analysis of the online reactions of the inhabitants of these spaces was conducted. The results demonstrate differentiated urban growth patterns in the spatial expansion dynamics of peri-urban spaces, which have emerged along major communication axes and in response to the configuration of available land and proximity to the urban core of each locality. Based on LCR/PGR indicators, these patterns can be further categorized into compact and expansive growth models. Furthermore, deficiencies in fundamental infrastructure pose a significant challenge for a considerable proportion of the local population. The study provides authorities and urban planners with reflective analyses on how to better manage peri-urban development. The results of the study support coherent, preventive, and sustainable urban development to avoid replicating the dysfunctions observed in the studied areas in other peri-urban areas.

The territorial contexts in which the universities are supposed to function become more and more complex and involve different forms of military, social and political risks. This article examines potential methodological approaches for evaluating these risks, using the network of AUF universities as a case study. The data used for the evaluation are provided by the ACLED datasets of incidents at a world scale, and they were spatialized using classical GIS tools. The first methodological approach measures the university's exposure by placing them in different distance bands around the median centers of significant state and non-state actors responsible for the military conflicts between 2021 and 2025. The output of the second approach is a multivariate typology of the AUF universities, each class describing different forms of exposure to risks. The key findings underline the fact that there are substantial disparities between the AUF regions, in terms of exposure, with severe risks in Western Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.0 Based on the results of the research, a set of recommendations for policy design inside AUF was developed.

Increasing the level of livability in cities is a topical area both in EU policies and in local urban development, as well as in scientific studies. The aim of this article is to assess the degree if livability of the large housing estates (LHEs) built during the socialist period in the main regional cities of Romania and how adequately they meet the requirements of current urban life. The research focused on assessing the accessibility of these neighborhoods to green spaces and other types of public facilities and services of interest, also taking into account the typology of LHEs. For this, we used mixed research methods, namely GIS remote sensing, fieldwork, and questionnaire surveys, with the results being digitally processed and mapped. This comparative research allowed us to see to what extent each type of neighborhood lends itself to the application of the European Green Deal principles (EGD). In this sense, we mapped the transformations undergone by urban green spaces, as a major dimension of sustainability, and we created an LHE accessibility index, using eight groups of indicators. Based on this index, we assessed the degree of livability and the compatibility of LHEs with some of the EGD principles. We believe that this study can be applied in other regions with similar characteristics, for the analysis of territorial accessibility of public services, in the creation of quality of life registers, or for the planning of spatial components of green cities.

This study evaluates the impact of different territorial contexts on academic mobility within the framework of the Erasmus Programme, using data on Key Action 1 exchanges between 2015 and 2023. Using official EU datasets and a gravity model framework, the research investigates how economic performance, geographical distance, EU membership, AUF (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie) regional affiliation, and state contiguity shape international academic flows. The research developed two gravity models: one aimed to measure the potential barriers to academic flows through a residuals analysis, and the second integrated territorial delineations as predictors. In both models, the core of the explanatory variable is formed by indicators describing the economic performance of states and the distance between countries. When applied, the models converge in emphasizing that the inclusion of states in different territorial configurations has a strong effect on the structuring of academic flows. This suggests that the Erasmus Programme exhibits trends of overconcentration of flows in a limited number of countries, questioning the need for a more polycentric strategy and a reshaping of the funding mechanisms. Even if the gravity models behave well, given the limited number of predictors, further studies may need to incorporate qualitative indicators for a more comprehensive evaluation of the interactions.

Emotions play an important role in today’s tourism practice. In order to understand how emotional experiences are created, we first must consider that emotions are subjective and subliminal constructs. These are conditioned by individual personality and influenced by social, cultural and spatial contexts. The aim of this research is to identify tourists’ emotional experiences in European Capitals of Culture (ECoCs), to explain disparities and to suggest ways of action in tourism practice. For this study, we combine quantitative and qualitative methods, using an extended statistical and text database, as well as official documents on each ECoC. The results of this study show how the cultural agenda of ECoCs stimulates and influences specific feelings and emotions among tourists. Emotional dimensions were also correlated with cultural vibrancy, creative economy and enabling environment, and this paper discusses these statistical results. The majority of the documents regarding the cultural programmes of ECoCs illustrated and emphasised emotional experiences, either by focusing on the emotional characteristics of the ECoC or by trying to create and produce emotional experiences. On the basis of our findings, we draw conclusions on the conceptual and methodological relevance of our main hypothesis, stating that cultural programmes of ECoCs influence tourists’ experiences.