Dispersed settlement in detached houses: Attitudes over the residential space consumption in Slovenia

Abstract

Public opinion surveys investigating the levels of environmental awareness target the most diverse aspects of environment pollution, but they rarely examine people's attitudes to the ways and forms in which space itself is used or consumed, especially in the context of residential or settlement patterns. This article analyses the connection between the prevailing long-term value orientations about residential preferences in Slovenia, which we associate with an ideology of “anti-urbanism”, and the resulting “schizophrenic” environmental perception, which expresses itself as relatively high declared environmental awareness of people who do not live in a town. Extensive and dispersed use of the physical space (defined as a sprawl) is in general one of the issues of environmental degradation. Dispersion and low settlement density, as well as the connected consumption of physical space in detached houses, is even more rarely addressed as the key issue of the environment problem. The absence of comprehensive “ecologisation” of the ways in which space is consumed for residential purposes in Slovenia is of a structural nature. Its structural captivity is identified on ideological, institutional, planning, and individual levels. Dispersed individualised settlement is critically addressed, but usually seen from the angle of pollution and not as an immanent ecological problem, i.e. the consumption of space as a rare commodity. In surveys on spatial values, we come across the phenomenon that parochial ruralism is equated with environmentalism, something we explain with a schizophrenic environmental perception, when respondents consider living in individual family houses environmentally more acceptable than living in multi-dwelling houses in an urban environment

Rural areas, rural population, and rural space in central Europe (JCEA countries): Research visualization in Scopus and Web of Science

“…Namely, it has already been shown that a great part of agricultural research gets published outside agricultural categories (Bartol et al, 2016). At the same time, we also assume that the agricultural countryside is changing along with other trends in nature and society, such as the intertwining of urban and rural, when non-productive aspects already prevail in relation to rurality, being study subjects of other disciplines (Hocevar, 2012).…”

Impact of dispersed settlement on the structure and diversity of rural landscape (Case study of village Hrušov, Slovak Republic)

“…The prevalence of dispersed settlements in an agricultural landscape in Ireland is highlighted by Environmental Protection Agency (2008). Dispersed settlements -tanye -were studied in the Hungarian lowlands by Kovács and Farkas (2011), dispersed and decentralized settlements in Slovenia were analyzed by Černe (2004) and by Hočevar (2012), in the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula by Frolec (1980), in southern Spain by Amate et al (2016). Bodzak andKiełczewska-Zaleska (1973-1977) compiled a map of dispersed settlement in Poland.…”

Agriculture vs. social sciences: subject classification and sociological conceptualization of rural tourism in Scopus and Web of Science

“…Self-evident association of the countryside depending (only) on agricultural production in a narrower sense and where such production defines the rural way of life is no longer appropriate (Hočevar, 2012;Uršič and Hočevar, 2007;Mavri and Černič-Istenič, 2014;Schroeder, 2016).…”