Living the Urban Cultural Landscapes in the City Centre of Cluj Napoca / Kolozsvár / Klausenburg, Romania

Abstract

More than ever before, today's cities are significantly multi-cultural and heterogeneous. Intrinsically, the modern city centre is the most easily recognisable urban area by both locals and visitors or tourists, due to a concentration of significant functions. In this paper, we discuss the physical and historic centre of Cluj-Napoca, the place that exhibits distinctive structural and functional features and which, throughout history, was shaped and adapted to different ages and needs. As a result, it is the most refined and monumental cultural landscape, granting the city a strong identity and a space rich in cultural significances. Analysing the cultural landscape of these spaces from a past, present and future perspective, it is necessary to emphasise the link between the users' perception of the city centre and the "cold demarcation", through official urban planning, based mainly on quantitative data and on urban indicators (e.g. consistency of the built space, buildings height, proportion between inhabited space and the organised one, accessibility, urban connectivity, etc.). Quite a lot of times, urban planning ignores users' perceptions, being focused on businesses and ensuring people's daily needs and not necessarily on preserving or creating symbolic places, which inhabitants are attached to and where they feel "at home". Therefore, our aim is to highlight the cultural significance of the public spaces within the city centre of Cluj-Napoca and to assess users' perceptions of these places more and more altered and affected by globalisation spaces. We used the results of two questionnaire surveys and of an extensive research on the history and present features of these spaces. The first survey consisted of 150 filled-in questionnaires designed to set the perceived limits of Cluj-Napoca central area and, the second one, with 300 filled-in questionnaires, aimed to establish the inhabitants' perceptions of the public squares' aesthetics and functionality. Many cities are part of or head towards the so-called cultural vacuum, mainly a result of a profound globalisation and of interpreting culture itself in a wrong way. One more reason for such research approaches to be welcomed and up to date.

The spatial development of peripheralisation: The case of smart city projects in Romania

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The Biocultural Resilience Index (BRI): A New Tool for Assessing the Sustainability of Multifunctional Landscapes

“…The multitude of the analyzed parameters (biophysical indices, socio-cultural in-dices, spatial accessibility and connectivity indices, landscape transformation indices), along with the heterogeneity of the quantified variables [120] and the complexity of the working techniques, attribute a certain transdisciplinary dimension to the research carried out. From our point of view, this aspect has a significant contribution to strengthening the applied role of profile research, expanding the multidimensional perception of differentiated reality [121,122] and mitigating interdisciplinary asperities.…”

The Roles Played by Environmental Sustainability and Innovation in the Rehabilitation of Abandoned Mining Sites

“…It was taken into account that the application of specific geospatial analysis tools be suitable for mountainous territorial systems affected by industrial-mining activities in all the working stages (variable generation, application of calculation equations, operations on raster structures). Such a data analytical approach at different scalar levels is necessary to identify the degree of suitability of structures resulting from industrial-mining activities for landscape reconversion and spatial-functional reintegration [48] and to develop integrated territorial rehabilitation models linking resource opportunities with social needs in the context of defining viable alternative economic solutions.…”