Temporal and territorial discontinuities
The present paper has been aimed, in principal, at applying discontinuity theory to identifying intra- and inter-regional disparities in the labour market. It is rather a daunting task because the labour market is a highly dynamic socio-economic system featuring lots of interdependences with the economic system, with social and cultural phenomena, with many other modelling factors, etc. Each of the four chapters of this volume is conceived as a step forward in identifying and analysing first temporal and then territorial discontinuities in Romania's labour market.
A stage-wise approach to the social-economic evolution of the labour market is made in the book, with highlight on those events (thresholds) delimiting the phases of labour market development in Romania. Stages, as well as in-between intervals in which profile legislation, or an institutional framework were missing are briefly reported.
A true scientific challenge by using discontinuity theory in studying the two labour market components (offer and demand) and unemployment represents the next part of the book. The last part of the book expounds on governance in the labour market, a problem attracting the growing interest of the scientific community in principal.
Proceeding from some general considerations on the spatial dimension of the labour market and attempting to apply territorial discontinuity theory and make a chronological approach to the events (thresholds) that had an overriding influence on the specific traits of Romania's labour market, as well as studying territorial discontinuities and the areas delimited by them in greater detail, the author has conceived the present volume as a necessary exercise for understanding geographical differentiations in job offer and demand, in unemployment, and the institutional framework involved in the management of the labour market in Romania.
Due to its position in the Romanian Plain both the capital city, Bucharest, and its metropolitan area are affected by several environmental issues as a result of the physical peculiarities of this relief unit, as well as its man-made changes.
Over the past decades Bucharest Metropolitan Area is facing new environmental-related problems connected with the main environmental stressors in terms of uncontrolled urban sprawl, land use – land cover changes, natural and technological hazards.
The work is aiming to put forward a complex analysis of the metropolitan space both from a theoretical and conceptual perspective, as well as from a practical point of view, by assessing the environmental changes on component and on system level pointing out the dynamics of the relations between the two sub-systems of the metropolitan system (Bucharest Municipality and its metropolitan area).
The assessment of the main extreme climatic phenomena in the Bucharest municipality and its surroundings
By its position in the Romanian Plain, both Bucharest municipality and its metropolitan area are exposed to several climatic hazards with major impact on the environment.
The book assesses the occurrence and the amplitude of the hazard phenomena in the Bucharest Metropolitan Area based on annual, monthly and daily extreme climatic values from all the meteorological stations of concern (1961...2007).
Combining and adapting the already existing complex classifications and ierarhizations to the particularities and scale of the study-area, a regionalization of the main climatic hazards was achieved.
Relying on the annual incidence and amplitude of the main thermal, pluvial and mixed phenomena as well as on the heat island's dimensions, the main vulnerability classes were established.
Finally, the extreme climatic phenomena were grouped into: climatic hazards within the cold, climatic hazards within the warm semester of the year and climatic hazards occurred all throughout the year.
This work represents an interdisciplinary approach to the study of land-use dynamics and to the assessment of its impact on the environment of a Cotmeana Piedmont. A sub-unit of the Getic Piedmont, the Cotmeana Piedmont makes the transition between the Subcarpathians (Muscelele Argeşului) and the plain region (Gãvanu-Burdea Plain). Having in view the natural factors of this area and the general and its regional economic particularities, the land use structure is mainly agricultural (over 60% of the total surface-area).
The study contains nine chapters and is based on a big volume of information found in the specialist literature of several scientific domains, e.g. geography, economy, environmental protection, sociology, the soil science, agronomy, etc. and on numerous space data, beginning with the old cartographic documents (Specht's Map 1790, Szatmari's Map 1857, the Austrian Map 1912), the topographic maps on the scale of 1:50 000 and 1:100 000 (1975), soil maps (1:200 000), and the Landsat 5TM and Landsat 7 ETM (2000) satellite images, and the statistical data supplied by the National Institute of Statistics, the County Directions of Statistics (Argeş, Olt and Vâlcea), the Environmental Protection Agencies (Argeş, Olt and Vâlcea), etc. Very many additional data have been obtained from field surveys.
The main objectives of this volume are reconstruction of land use structure over the past 200 years and more using the GIS methodology, assessment of land use changes during the post-socialist period and their consequences on the environmental factors of the Cotmeana Piedmont.
The elaboration of this Dictionary benefitted from the contribution of over 40 specialist geographers from the Institute of Geography of the Romanian Academy, who had a vast field and laboratory experience in various domains. Beside the topographic maps on the scale of 1:100 000, documentation work involved a wide-ranging bibliography (treatises, encyclopaedias, locality sign-marks, geographical dictionaries, etc.), as well as dictionaries of historical provinces toponyms elaborated by linguists.
Unlike the other dictionaries of geography and toponymy, the present one has all the characteristic features of a Gazetteer based on the recommendation of the UN Group of Experts for the Standardization of Geographical Names.
As a result, a series of qualitative and quantitative elements are attached to the entries, such as the category which the respective name belongs to, its exact geographical position within the natural and administrative regions, the number of inhabitants (according to the latest population census), minimum, medium and maximum altitude (as the case might be), length of running waters, the surface-area of counties and of nature reserves, latitude, longitude, etc.
The Dictionary contains 40,000 terms: place names 14,000, landforms and administrative units 1,000, forest names 1,000, names of rivers and lakes 6,000, names of mountains, hills, plains, peaks, protected areas, etc. 18,000. The elaboration of this work has taken nearly 20 years.
Between forcible industrialisation and economic decline
One-industry towns represent a distinct component of the Romanian urban system. Special literature studies in this country have been dealing with individual situations, or with territorial groupings. As a distinctive functional entity, this category of towns has not benefited by a geographical work in any comprehensive approach. And that is precisely what this book - One-industry towns in Romania. Between forcible industrialisation and economic decline - intends to do, namely to provide a synthetic picture of their evolution in the 20th and 21st centuries. The topics discussed herein focus on the factors involved in the emergence, dynamics and type of towns specialised in a certain industrial branch, their workforce and economic basis. At the same time, the author tries to envisage solutions for revitalising the one-industry urban ecosystems destructured by the hardships of transition from a centralised economy to the market system.
The volume has a broad interdisciplinary profile, its elaboration relying on the study, analysis and synthesis of a large body of information found in works written by specialists in Geography, History, Economy, Statistics, Territorial Planning and Sociology. In addition, plenty of statistical data, gathered from reliable sources, are also used (the population and housing fund censuses from 1930, 1956, 1966, 1977, 1992 and 2002, statistical yearbooks and settlement records from the 1990-2003 period).
Comparisons between one-industry towns found in this volume offer reliable information to the government, companies, authorities and the inhabitants themselves concerning the problems facing this category of towns, possibly leading to policy changes. The information refers to aspects of economic planning in the 20th-century, and the beginning of the 3rd millennium, infrastructure, short-and-medium-term management options, achievements, and decline in the transition period. The strategies dealing with industrial decline and restructuring ought to be integrated into the communities' own plans.
Unemployment is a socioeconomic phenomenon that has occurred in Romania with the onset of the transition period towards a market economy and which has started to gain a strong interest in different academic/research fields. This book is one of the first that approaches this topic from a geographical perspective and together with other works from the economics and social sciences, contributes to investigations of a present-day subject, relevant for decision-making factors.
Six chapters structure the book. The first includes concepts, theories and types of unemployment, all of them being connected with issues of labor market functionality in particular and of economy, in general. The second chapter is a comprehensive study of the labor market in Romania, which particularly analyzes the labor market dynamic, potential, structure, disparities and the relationship between job offer and demand. The next two chapters rigorously tackle the spatial analysis of the unemployment phenomena, the author integrating the results within the economic context of Romania. There are identified the representative areas of unemployment, rural and urban, as well as the regional disparities which are viewed on the temporal scale, as well, not only spatially. The next chapter is connected with the spatial results of the unemployment, being examined form the point of view of governance policies and strategies. The last chapter includes two case-studies (least favored mining zones and the Buzãu County) which might be taken as examples of analysis of unemployment at large geographical scales. The purpose of this part is to capture the local characteristics, particularly those regarding the economy and labor market, and to analyze them within the specific physical and socioeconomic context, specifically referring to natural resource availability and main demographic characteristics.
This work presents the geographical traits of Romania´s natural environment, population and economic life, enabling the reader to get a unitary insight into the changes experienced by this country over the past fifteen years.
The volume, which has been elaborated by specialists from the Institute of Geography, represents an updated synthesis of the previously published National Geographical Atlas (1972-1979), the five-volume Geographical Treatise of Romania (1983-2005) and the Historical Geographical Atlas (1996).
The authors also tackle some topical issues connected with sustainable development within the context of global environmental change, natural and technological hazards and regional development. Benefiting from the contribution of specialists in geology, history, demography and economy, the work has an interdisciplinary character, providing a synthetic view on the spatial and temporal dynamics of the Romanian landscape.
This work falls in line with preoccupations over the past few decades to promote methods of preventing, reducing and controlling the effects of natural extremes and natural hazards with negative effects on life and the quality of the environment. One such hazard are the destructive quantities of precipitation characterized by temporal discontinuity and uneven distribution in time and space.
Based on a rich documentation and a very reliable data-base, the reader will find a comprehensive synthesis of Romania´s precipitation regime, with highlight on the years 1961-2000 which marked the beginning of global warming. The data reported herein are the more valuable as this is the only cross-country approach to the variability of the precipitation regime in this country over the past few decades, a regime featuring striking rainfall contrasts against a global warming background. Monthly and annual averages of maximum quantities fallen within short intervals (24, 48 and 72 hours), as well as their absolute values are also reported. In order to assess the magnitude of pluvial risks and their consequences, very many quantitative indexes have been taken into account.
The issues, structure and argumentation, beside the wealth of data and information presented from a geographical viewpoint, make of Excess Precipitation in Romania, a reference work rich in substance and coverage, useful to future studies and researches in various disciplines and to profile higher education students.
Stratigraphy and Paleogeographical Evolution
The author presents the lithostratigraphy and biostratigraphy of lands formed during the Pliocene and the Quaternary over the past five million years and provides information on the palaeoclimate and the source-areas of sediments, the geological structure and the neotectonic movements.
The palaeogeographical evolution and some characteristics of the present-day geological environment are also analysed.
The volume makes an in-depth approach to the concept of landscape, also providing a synthesis of landscape evolution in the Oltenia Plain, a region extending in the south-west of Romania. The study expounds on the 20-th century dynamics of this Plain when its landscape experienced dramatic changes. The highlight falls on the post - 1989 situation after the old political regime had been ousted from power. Government and socio-economic policies would seriously modify the distribution of the region's population and economy, this contributing to making the local landscape even more vulnerable.
The key factor that enhanced the Oltenia Plain's landscape vulnerability and fragility has been excessive anthropication alongside the geoclimatic trend to aridisation and the higher incidence of episodes of climatic instability.
Climate aspects are extensively dealt with in this work, because they were deeply involved in landscape regression over the past two decades; aridisation trends are tackled bath by classical and modern methods.
Besides landscape typology and spatial structure, aspects of fragmentation grade, dynamics, temporal organization and functionality are discussed in term of human development.
Using several landscape type identification criteria put forward by various geographical schools, a number of 12 Oltenia Plain landscape types are depicted. Another aspect that captured the author's attention was landscape vulnerability to erosion, flooding, salting and drought. The findings have revealed a mosaic of spatial units prove to similar such risks which local communities are expected to solve by adjusting development programmes to the new situation.
The last chapter overviews spatial management programmes in close connection with regional development ones, especially since the surveyed region is one of the poorest in Romania that has been benefited, and still wall by financial and technical assistance from the central authorities and the international bodies.
A geographical study with application to Romania
The functional typology of human settlements is shaped also by the political-administrative function. Its distinctive place is determined by subjective factors, such as the political-administrative decisions, which have changed the progress of some settlements to the benefit of others, or reverted them from their normal, natural evolutions.
That means external involvement in space organisation to the detriment of self-organisation, which the outcome of the permanent tendency of territorial systems to recover from dysfunctions induced by exogenous factors.