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In recent years, the scientific community, as well as practitioners around the world, have gradually turned their attention towards the matter of life quality, both from an ecological, as well as from a socio-economic point of view – particularly in relation to the realities of the urban environment. Within contemporary cities, collective housing neighborhoods concentrate the highest densities of housing units, thus offering shelter to a large percentage of the population. These developments therefore have the lar...

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...

The need to steer our development towards a more sustainable future is ever more imminent in the light of the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Urban areas bear much of the blame and burden and interventions towards urban sustainability may have the greatest impact. Despite increasing interest in urban sustainability, from both the scientific community, as well as practitioners around the world, its clear definition and especially its measurement and monitoring is still a cause of ...

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...