Alexandru Dragan

Recent studies on users of urban parks call for the need for more insight into the importance of green spaces as catalysts of more inclusive spaces. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate by examining urban parks as age-inclusive infrastructures in a post-socialist context. Three parks in the City of Timișoara, Romania, are selected as a comparative case study. Our analysis combines systematic field observations and GIS-based mapping of park accessibility and facilities with 42 semi-structured interviews with young, mid-aged and older visitors to the three contrasting parks: a renovated historic central park, a peripheral forest-like park and a small neighbourhood park embedded in a communist-era housing estate. The findings suggest that inclusiveness for all generational categories, as well as attachment for neighbourhood parks, are important drivers for urban parks users. Inclusiveness is driven not only by amenities, but also by park-specific attachment, as well as the quality of maintenance and lighting. These factors shape perceived equity and convenience. We advocate for a differentiated management model tailored to each park, balancing conservation-oriented quiet zones with flexible, event-capable areas. This model prioritises lighting, seating ergonomics and safety measures as core components of age-inclusive planning. Our findings support the need for different management of urban green spaces that capitalises on the social and spatial specificities of each park. The comparison further shows that the smallest and least equipped park generates the strongest attachment and the most regular use across all generations: proximity and continuity of maintenance matter more than surface area or scale of investment.

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.

Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of street (re)naming as a driver for urban users. The transition from one political regime to another is often accompanied by a significant renaming...

La Roumanie est passée en un laps temps très court du centralisme autoritaire à un pluralisme décentralisé. Son inscription sur l’axe politique occidentale, marquée par l’adhésion à l’OTAN et à l’UE, a intensifié les mécanismes de contrôle extérieurs, notamment dans le domaine de la justice et de la « liberté » (d’expression, de la presse, etc.). Au sens large, l’enjeu majeur fut la consolidation de la démocratie. Afin d’accomplir cette dernière, une émergence de la société civile et des organisations de l’économie sociale et solidaire est indispensable. Dans les pays post-communistes, les organisations de l’économie sociale et solidaire ont connu une renaissance après la chute du communiste. D’un côté, les coopératives et les mutuelles, bien présentes dans la vie économique pendant le communisme, ont gagné leur liberté interne de décision démocratique. De l’autre, les associations et les fondations, interdites auparavant, ont commencé à apparaître. Nous parlons donc d’une émergence, dans le sens d’une apparition d’un fait social, économique et politique nouveau. L’objectif général de cette étude est d’analyser l’économie sociale et solidaire roumaine par une approche géographique, à plusieurs échelles. La référence de l’étude sera la région Ouest de la Roumanie, à travers cinq territoires d’études. La finalité de la thèse est de comprendre ce qu’est l’économie sociale et solidaire (ESS) dans le contexte post-communiste roumain et de quelle émergence et de quelle structuration peut-on parler dans la région Ouest de la Roumanie.

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.

Recent debates on political monuments in Central and Eastern Europe have highlighted the need to study the spatial dimension and contestation of statues and other monumental sites in more detail. By employing GIS spatial analysis and media framing at the local level, our study adopts a micro-spatial perspective and critically contests monuments in the central area of Timisoara, Romania. Besides presenting differences at micro-scales of monuments based on a methodology that incorporates the Shannon-Wiener Diversity Index, Hot-Spot Analysis, Getis-Ord Gi*, and Kernel density, the results from the local media framing reveal the tensions created by nationalist and progressivist monuments. For instance, if Decebalus is a statue that has recently inspired nationalist and even far-right actions of identity, Supermam is a progressivist monument that has also been criticized and less accepted by local stakeholders. However, behind the nationalist-progressivist layer of statues, the local community still accepts the Austro-Hungarian layer of statues, which are imposing in the public space of Timisoara.

This study investigates the influence of public transport on the quality of urban life through a combined approach that includes both an objective and a subjective assessment. The objective quality of the public transport network in Timișoara was measured using the Public Transport Accessibility Level (PTAL) index, whose values were recalibrated to better fit the context of an Eastern European post-communist city, while citizens’ perceptions were analyzed based on a public opinion survey in Timișoara, conducted over 5 years on 9490 respondents. The research methods used combine cartography and statistics, with tools such as ArcGIS Pro, IBM SPSS Statistics v27, and R v4.5.2. The results highlight a correlation between accessibility levels and user satisfaction, emphasizing spatial disparities between the city center, which enjoys excellent accessibility, and the periphery, where accessibility is much lower. The integration of these two dimensions provides a holistic perspective on urban mobility and makes relevant contributions to sustainable planning strategies and the development of smart city initiatives.

This study analyses how four public monuments in the centre of Cluj‐Napoca (the Matthias Corvinus Statuary Ensemble, Avram Iancu, Baba Novac and the Transylvanian School Statuary Ensemble) reflect Romanian‐Hungarian relations, urban governance practices and how collective memory is negotiated in post‐socialist public space. The research combines a qualitative survey of local and regional newspapers (1990–2025), field observation and GIS analysis, with a multi‐stage computational pipeline for event classification and sentiment analysis. The media corpus was coded in the CAMEO ontology and assessed by a multilingual natural language inference model (Zero‐Shot), complemented by an event intensity score (Goldstein) and two sentiment analysis branches: a Hugging Face (HF) and Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) transformative model, contextually adapted and lexically extended for the language of heritage‐related news. The results show that the Zero‐Shot scores remain low and relatively uniform, indicating a predominantly descriptive media discourse. The Goldstein scores highlight tense episodes for the statues of Avram Iancu and Baba Novac and high volatility for Matthias Corvinus, while the HF and, to a lesser extent, VADER, indicate a clear intensification of the emotional tone after 2022, especially for the Transylvanian School and Matthias Corvinus. The differences between the monuments are less pronounced than the differences between the analytical tools, but all series converge towards a recent increase in discursive intensity. The qualitative analysis outlines three main registers of contestation: (i) the spatial performance of monuments in central squares as spaces of urban power; (ii) disputes over inscriptions and textual formulations and; (iii) public trust in the administrative management of heritage. The conclusions suggest a shift from a strictly custodial conservation logic to a communicative governance of urban memory, based on procedural transparency, public digital registers, multilingual inscriptions and the systematic use of computational tools in planning and evaluating heritage policies.