Mihail Eva

The Imam Al Bukhari Complex is a unique pilgrimage site in Hartang, Samarkand region, Uzbekistan. This site is requiring a better visitation flow by its present administration as unique stakeholder. The goal of this article is to spot the solutions that could further increase the experience at the site as well as the benefits to the local community. The main study
methods used were the qualitative observation during fieldwork, the interview with visitors and stakeholders as well as the analysis of online resources. The analysis of the demand and offer of this tourist attraction has highlighted an imbalance towards a wide range of weaknesses that
could be fixed in a short-term perspective. The solutions envisage several measures to increase the accessibility and online visibility of the Complex, to enhance the experience of the visitors, to involve the community in order to obtain larger benefits.

The disappearance of the Communist regime marks the entry of Romanian cities into a new phase of urban development, characterized by the transition from socialist-type compact city, reliant on public transportation, to unorganised, dispersed and capitalist-type city, whose spatial sprawl is dependent on the existence of market economy, the degree of motorization and individual freedom of people. At the same time, this period of urban development is marked by the transition from government to governance, within which, the local territorial actors can play the leading role in setting the development directions of their own communities. Trying to analyse the connection between two phenomena particular to postmodernity - periurbanization and governance - the present paper evaluates the way local authorities, represented by local officials (mayors or deputy mayors), perceive the territorial governance and its specific features in a periurban space of Romania.

Conceptul de reziliență prezintă o istorie de peste jumătate de secol, însă prezența lui în discursul științific cu privire la planificarea rețelelor de transport este specifică doar ultimilor 10-15 ani, iar operaționalizarea și implementarea lui în domeniul administrativ este și mai recentă. În cazul României, cu puține excepții, conceptul nu este prezent în lucrările științifice care tratează funcționalitatea teritorială a rețelelor de transport și nici nu este integrat în modele de planificare și administrare a rețelelor, deși creșterea nivelului de reziliență a sistemelor de transport este un lucru necesar în contextul integrării din ce în ce mai profunde în structurile teritoriale europene. Capitolul de față prezintă o sinteză a preocupărilor cu privire la studiul rezilienței rețelelor de transport, urmată de o analiză a mijloacelor prin care acesta este operaționalizat și instrumentalizat în scop științific sau în folosul societății.

Main debates concerning urban mobility in Romania are dominated by the necessity to define, adopt and implement sustainable urban mobility plans (SUMP). SUMPs are strategic instruments to move forward from the traditional way of managing spatial accessibility and transport issues (which is especially true for post-socialist cities) to a more integrated, participative and innovative approach. Although some investments in urban transportation have been made in Romania during the EU's previous financial period (2007-2013), most urban areas still face numerous challenges in leaving behind the old paradigm. Our paper brings into discussion the current state in adopting SUMPs for major Romanian cities. In addition, the paper discusses the public transportation and spatial accessibility issues for the particular case of Suceava City with the aim of highlighting some of the challenges SUMPs have to find a solution. These challenges are numerous and very diverse and, as a consequence, we opted for discussing only some of the aspects which one may consider as representative for most of the Romanian cities. The methodology deployment involved, in a first phase, the creation of a database concerning the economic actors in the field of public transportation and the services they offer, and, in a second phase, the use of GIS instruments in order to create a road transport infrastructure spatial database and to analyse the quality of infrastructure and the spatial accessibility it generates. The results highlight some of the administrative challenges to be faced and some issues related to transport infrastructure quality and to periurban spatial accessibility.

Debates around how to deal with increasing inequalities gained significant importance following the 2007 global financial crisis. This is the case not only for personal inequalities, but also for regional inequalities. Indeed, recent electoral outcomes, such as Brexit referendum and the emergence of right-wing nationalism throughout Europe, have shown that regional inequalities might be more important than scholars and policy-makers thought (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018). As such, there should be no surprise that the issues of lagging regions and how to deal with them have risen to prominence in regional studies. Lagging regions are sometimes labelled "places that do not matter" and their electoral behaviour in favour of populists is interpreted as a sort of revenge for being left behind over long periods of time (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018), or as a "rebellion of the globalisation's losers" (Davoudi, 2019). Moreover, Davoudi (2019) argues that we are not only dealing with places "left behind", but also "kept behind", by "neglect, lack of investment and misguided policies stemming from the long-term neo-liberal obsession with aggregate growth, big city boosterism and trickle down effects". The author, therefore, calls for re-imagining European cohesion policy, and she is not the only scholar stating this. Iammarino et al. (2017) also call for re-imagining cohesion policies, arguing for a place-sensitive approach, a new concept that asks for policies that take into consideration the context, and not only the local one, but also the context exterior to local conditions. In both cases, as in many others, one can notice a shift from place-neutral or even-place-based approaches to place-sensitive and more systemic approaches to dealing with lagging regions. Against this background, the edited volume of Lang and Görmar argues that one should regard regional inequalities in a broader perspective, taking into consideration not only differences between central and peripheral places, the performance of lagging regions per se, or the "catch-up" perspective, but to look instead at the core-periphery relations and its subsequent processes: polarisation, centralisation and peripheralisation. The book starts with the assumption that polarisation is an ongoing process that is happening in a threefold manner within the EU: demographically, economically, and even electoral. The authors are searching * Mihail EVA is assistant lecturer at the "Alexandru

During the last decades, tourism activities were promoted by local and regional policy-makers as a universal solution for rural areas’ suffering from massive depopulation, technological delay, or economical struggles. A large debate flourished in the literature on whether and to what extent tourism could play a role in supporting rural localities. Some valid evidence was brought by researchers backing the cure-all role of tourism, as well as by those who criticized the limited, or even negative, impact of tourism on rural areas. However, following the economic crisis of 2008, the attention switched to a newer and more relevant topic: Does tourism increase the resilience performance of rural areas? Our paper tries to answer this question by focusing on both economic and demographic resilience, which are the most sensitive sectors during an important shock. Following a detailed territorial breakdown according to a twofold typology (spatial accessibility and number of employees), corre...