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The urban structure reflects different stages of its life cycle land use efficiency. Extensive development of Slovak cities in the second half of the 20th century in combination with the construction method, demands on infrastructure and transformation of the industry, caused that there is an enormous number of dysfunctional, unused, empty areas and degraded sites in our cities. Such areas can be regarded as a problem, but above all as a potential and driving force for re-development, the city's urban vitality gen...

Urban sustainability has been a topic of keen interest to both the scientific community, as well as practitioners around the world. However, despite increased efforts in recent years, the debate continues over its clear definition and especially its measurement and monitoring. As the concept of urban sustainability is deeply rooted in its physical context and the territory scale taken into consideration, a wide variety of studies, diagrams, graphic models or value maps have been proposed, as each researcher and na...

High-quality, full-featured urban public spaces are characterized by wide complex of attributes. Places for fun and relax, offering emotions of joy, happiness and a good time for inhabitants and visitors, can raise the quality of urban environment. With their functional and emotional potential, the places for relax and entertainment can contribute to make the urban public spaces of contemporary cities more attractive, more lively and more people-friendly. We examine the potential of fun and relax spaces and design...

Demographic change and economic decline modify the patterns of urban land use. Shrinking cities are the subject of intense international debate and numerous academic and government studies. However, neither thorough scholarly understanding of the urban shrinkage phenomenon nor proven urban strategies for its mitigation have been achieved. Characterized by the incipient stages of urban sprawl in a context of acute population loss, the un-sustainability of Romanian urban development is unequivocal. Social and econom...

In the present-day context, the collective housing represents a generalized urban phenomenon, a largely spread residential typology, which shapes the contemporary city both physically, as well as from the social-cultural point of view. Therefore, the matter of life quality for the communities residing the collective housing neighborhoods becomes significant, from the perspective of the factors which influence this aspect, as well as of the urban strategies implementable in order to improve the existing circumstanc...

The need for the local government authorities' attitude shift from administration towards management through a more entrepreneurial behaviour is the subject of many academic and professional research studies. However, the means of achieving this objective and connecting to their †urban customers' have not been fully discussed. Local governments worldwide have increasingly become closed bureaucratic institutions, loosing track of their objectives - fulfilling the needs of the people - and have developed a view of...