During the last decades, against the backdrop of radical social and economic restructuring, the rural environment has changed fundamentally, arising new social and economic dynamics and cultural realities. The second homes development has significantly contributed to this process and created major challenges for the need to protect the rural character. Therefore, with the purpose of integrated and sustainable spatial planning, a detailed acquaintance of second homes’ spatial differentiation as part of contemporary rural landscapes, is a core prerequisite. This study aims to determine the second homes spatial patterns in relation to the main characteristics of the local environment, and to create a practical cornerstone for stakeholders concerned with integrated planning of second home tourism. In order to achieve these goals, this research used five major datasets related to land cover, elevation, climate, management system for protected areas and other social aspects (e.g. tourism, native settlements). Twenty-three variables were defined using GIS and subsequently assigned to grid cells with a size of 1.5 km2. To reduce the dimensionality of spatial datasets, Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was performed, resulting seven components that explained 77.2% of the variation. The PCA score was the subject of k-means cluster analysis that revealed nineteen landscape types. Finally, the spatial location of second homes is overlaid with the identified rural landscapes. This approach shows plenty of hidden nuances of second home tourism and facilitates its integration in both spatial, socio-cultural, and administrative dimensions.
This study aims to explore the visual discourse about women and their roles in the Romanian village, a discourse created by the picture postcards from the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. To reach this aim, we considered the following objectives: to realise a typology of the used research material, to identify the main representations of women, to analyse the relationship between the representations of women and the other represented elements (men, children, rural landscapes, households, tools, etc.), to discuss the main features of the visual discourse about the women from the rural area, for the respective period, based on the previous identification of the elements that became iconic through repeated representation. We used a critical visual methodology and discourse analysis to explore the picture postcards that represented women from the Romanian village, underlining the connection between their meanings and the cultural reality. Our findings are useful for similar research on gender and its visual construction from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
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