Viorel CHIRIŢĂ¹, Daniela MATEI² & Vasile EFROS^3
1“Ştefan cel Mare” University of Suceava, Romania, chirita@usv.ro
²Romanian Academy, Iași Branch,“Gh. Zane” Social and Economic Research Institute, Romania, daniela_matei2004@yahoo.com
³“Ştefan cel Mare” University of Suceava, Romania, efros@atlas.usv.ro

GEO-CULTURAL LANDSCAPE – LANDMARK OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RURAL AREA OF BUCOVINA

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The geo-cultural landscapes (G-CL) of Romanian villages typology are, beyond their visual nature, determined by the quality of their assets. The analysis of these assets’ quality, both nationally and regionally, places the region of Bucovina in the middle of the territorial range. A desire to increase the domestic and international tourist inflow has led to plans to conserve the authentic heritage in Bucovina’s villages, a potentially difficult task given the geo-cultural evolution of the rural space. We focus on the analysis of typology of villages form the point of view of G-CL and their sustainable development. Since 2013, the Association of the “Most Beautiful Villages of Romania” has held a nation-wide contest in collaboration with the Embassy of France, following the Western European (French and Spanish) traditions. This process has stimulated competitiveness among rural communities to improve rural tourist attractions. Unfortunately, most of these efforts take the form of cultural festivals, but it is unclear how far they are likely to lead to sustainable rural development because they appear to offer very little that is new. The paper proposes as main research results identifying the multiple-criteria (matrix-type) territorial analysis of the components of villages in Bucovina in order to determine the most relevant criteria to designate the cultural village and, also are identified a typology of villages from the different shaping of geo-cultural landscapes criteria.