Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: Rural landscapes are the result of complex interactions between natural and social forces. Product of changes through time, landscapes can only be understood in their historic context. The present study focuses on the historical change of a rural landscape in Valea Dragului, a traditional farming community in southern Romania, during the past 200 years; it uses maps from the end of 18^＜th＞ century to 1980 and recent Landsat imagery, supplemented with evidence from historical sources, statistical data, recent field surveys. At the end of the 18^＜th＞ century, local landscape is still largely natural, but population growth (with the crucial contribution of Bulgarian immigrants), successive land reforms and technological progress during the 19^＜th＞ c. shape it into the traditional agricultural landscape. Landscape change amplifies during the second half of the 20^＜th＞ c., following 2 major political shifts. One is the socialist restructuring of landownership patterns and farming systems after the WWII, when traditional rural landscapes were replaced by "productivist" agrarian landscapes. The second one, following the political shift in 1989 and the recent land reform, is the unexpected resurrection of traditional rural landscapes. Recently, Romanian rural landscapes have to cope with two new challenges: the major one is global environmental change; the other, accession to the European Union (January 2007) and compliance with the Common Agricultural Policy. Accordingly, the re-adjustment of land use patterns is expected to reverberate in further landscape transformation.
Author: Lidia Sasaki
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W414986089