Volume 28 (2022): Issue 1 (December 2022)

The subject of the paper is the process of rural gentrification in Poland. In Poland, this process has a special character. It began later than in the West and intensified in the last decade of the twentieth century. It resulted from two parallel processes endogenous and exogenous to the countryside. The rural middle class grew due to an increase in the level of education of the rural population (resulting from the “educational boom” after 1989) since a higher level of education entitles one to occupy a higher position in the social and professional structure. It was accompanied by the settlement of the urban middle class in rural areas. The paper identifies (based on literature and earlier own research) the features of rural gentrification in Poland. Based on them, the level of gentrification of rural communities was indicated, and in turn, the spatial extent of the rural gentrification process in Poland was defined.

The internal resource-based development of peripheral regions – which are still to be defined precisely and accepted universally – is a constant challenge for the European Union and the Member States, which is difficult to address in the form of a schematic recipe. An important aspect of this complex issue is the existence and success of local governance, which, based on its own internal characteristics alone, can mobilise a community, without which the chances of making further progress are bleak. Governance and the issue of peripheral regions together, at least at the EU level, are reflected in the EU’s development policy. This paper, based on the analysis of EU documents and the Hungarian local and regional experience, aims to investigate whether the European Union is able to assist peripheral regions to catch up, and if so, in what form and through what mechanisms, and what conditions and requirements-related to governance – may be necessary for successful catching up, which may at the same time lead to the success or failure of EU objectives.

While the main body of linguistic landscape (LL) research still focuses on urban areas, more recent works have broadened the scope and conceptualisation of LL to include rural spaces. However, these works almost exclusively examine the Global North or the Global South. Suspended somewhere between the Global North and the Global South, the so-called Global East, to which Southeast Europe belongs, is for the most part excluded not just from notions of globality, but also from LL studies. The aim of this paper is to redirect the focus of LL research to a rural area in the Global East, namely, the village Ečka in the Serbian Banat, a region with a specific and lengthy history of multilingualism. We hold that the typologies used for the study of urban LL cannot yield relevant results if applied to rural LL. Our study is based on data collected in 2020 and 2021 during six field trips to Ečka which resulted in more than 300 photographs containing inscriptions in different languages and scripts. Furthermore, we conducted participant observation by recording interviews and collecting walking narratives from locals in Serbian or Romanian. Our study confirmed that there is a gap between the official multiculturalism and multilingualism policy as declared and implemented by top-down agents and the gradual transition to monolingualism and monoscriptalism at the bottom-up level. Therefore, instead of the classical top-down and bottom-up distinction, we propose seeing the village space from a two-fold perspective: the synchronic LL, which mirrors the current use of languages, language prestige and language policies, and the memorial LL, which is a chronicle of the multilingualism of past generations and welcomes a diachronic perspective of LL.

As agricultural activity is primarily linked to rural areas, negative demographic trends characterising them present as one of the basic factors of size and age structure changes in the agricultural population. On the other hand, the modernisation of agricultural production, combined with various stimulating mechanisms, impacts its attractiveness, thus influencing the number and age structure of agricultural producers. Change in the overall agricultural activity rate reflects these two processes, making it suitable to be analysed by quantification of effects that produce these changes by applying Das Gupta’s decomposition method. The Timok Krajina region is chosen as a characteristic example due to the recent and relatively significant rise in the overall activity rate in agriculture, in contrast to the national level, where a constant decline in this rate is present. This research focuses on the difference that occurred in the last intercensal period (between 2002 and 2011), aiming to determine the impact of changes in the age structure of the active population that performs an occupation on the change of overall activity rate in agriculture in the Timok Krajina region. The research results depict that the changes in activity rate in agriculture in the examined period almost completely occurred under the influence of demographic factors, while other factors, marked as the rate effects, had a symbolic impact.

The study aims to answer the question of how effectively cities of an underdeveloped rural area (Siklós district in Hungary) can involve the surrounding settlements in the tourism economy, thereby promoting the development of rural areas. Besides local governments and tourism organisations, our important goal is to understand the ideas of service providers and their guests related to rural development, as well as the spatial use characteristics of the latter group. The key method is the questionnaire survey, targeted at the mayors of all settlements in the district, as well as the guests of the accommodations belonging to the different product types. The primary sources are based on two further series of interviews, which explore the opinions of service providers and professional organisations. Empirical experience shows that thematic trips can play a prominent role in the development of less frequented small settlements. The essence of this is to connect by a bike route the places offering traditional crafts and local products.

One of the most important elements of tourism development is encouraging the participation of the local community. In order to encourage their participation, it is necessary to be aware of the attitudes of the local residents with respect to the development of tourism. The aim of this research is to determine the attitudes of the local community towards the development of sustainable tourism and ecotourism in the protected area Tikvara, along with the local residents’ level of nature protection and preservation in the Tikvara Nature Park. A survey was conducted among 301 residents and the results indicate that while good community support for sustainable tourism activities in each area captured by the survey (planning, participation, activities, and decision-making) exists, local residents’ attitudes are affected by their sociodemographic characteristics. Nonetheless, a large number of locals were happy to participate in protection programs and believed that the environment should be protected for future generations to enjoy the natural and cultural resources of this area. These findings should be considered when designing sustainable tourism management strategies, while respecting the needs and rights of the local community, as the willingness of locals to develop sustainable tourism is essential for the success of this sector.