Privileged transit traffic or similar railway lines illustrate Central Europe’s historical interdependence and the persistence of infrastructural anomalies. This paper analyses their contemporary role as instruments of cross-border integration through two Czech-Polish cases: the Liberec–Bogatynia–Zittau–Varnsdorf–Seifhennersdorf line in the west, which also includes German territory, and the Jeseník–Głuchołazy–Krnov line in the east. Using a qualitative comparative approach that integrates document analysis, field observation, and stakeholder interviews, the study assesses how governance density, fare regimes, and accessibility influence the dimensions of cross-border integration. The results reveal contrasting trajectories. The Zittau line, embedded in trilateral governance frameworks and supported by fare integration, enables frequent services and symbolises everyday transnational normality, except for a small section. Conversely, the Głuchołazy line remains hindered by outdated legal arrangements, low frequency, and peripheral infrastructure. These differences underscore that multilevel governance and fare harmonisation are crucial preconditions for cohesion, while regulatory fragmentation and institutional inertia exacerbate marginality. Overall, the study argues that privileged transit railway connections, if supported by regional advocacy and coordinated investment, can evolve from historical exceptions into agents of European integration.
Imagine a scientific world in which researchers everywhere have equal opportunities to publish and gain recognition. Far from being an exception, space syntax research is shaped by structural inequalities that privilege Northern institutions and epistemologies. While existing bibliometric reviews broadly map the field, they overlook how selective indexing structures global visibility. Drawing on 2,323 Web of Science–indexed space syntax articles, this review examines publication growth, citation impact, and journal landscapes across regions. The findings show that although research activity is expanding globally, particularly in Asia, citation impact remains concentrated in the United States and the United Kingdom. Elite Northern journals dominate the field, while Southern scholarship largely circulates in less visible venues, reinforcing enduring geographical imbalances in knowledge production.
This systematic scoping review investigates the influence of spatial design on employee behaviour by analysing workplace research presented at the Space Syntax Symposia (SSS). Adhering to PRISMA guidelines, 37 articles from the 1st–13th SSS were analysed regarding their spatial, social, and methodological components. The study reveals correlations between analysis techniques, syntactic properties, and social behaviours. Although limited to symposium proceedings, the review demonstrates strong representativeness and operational consistency. Two primary contributions emerge: the identification of three contextual patterns mapping the relationship between syntactic metrics and behavioural phenomena across office types, and the establishment of a comprehensive empirical foundation connecting behaviour, perception, and metrics. This work provides a critical baseline for future meta-analyses and theoretical research in the field.
Small towns play a significant role in the settlement network, primarily serving as economic and service centres for rural areas. After 1990, deindustrialisation severely impacted small towns in Central and Eastern Europe, including Hungary, challenging their competencies. However, in the 2000s, a wave of reindustrialisation began, extending to the small-town level. This study attempts to assess the economic significance of Hungarian small towns and its changes between 2011 and 2022, connecting this to the effects of reindustrialisation and exploring the regional disparities in small-town development.
This is a combined review of three recently published books on city branding. In addition to individual reviews of the three books the article contains an introduction and a conclusion that highlights the books' common thread.
This article examines the long-term evolution of the European Union’s dependence on Russian mineral fuels and its transformation after 2022. The analysis combines Eurostat trade data for 1999–2021 with complementary post-invasion evidence from European and international sources. Using structural comparisons and correlation-based diagnostics, the study identifies dominant fuel categories and differences in adjustment across Member States. The findings show that oil and gas created deep path dependencies that limited the speed of decoupling. Although direct imports fell sharply after 2022 and diversification accelerated, the process remains uneven and indirect exposure has not disappeared. The article contributes by linking historical trade structures with the emerging post-war regime and by distinguishing between transit roles and domestic energy policy. The results inform debates on EU energy security and the governance of diversification. The results indicate that diversification capacity is strongly conditioned by pre-existing infrastructure and trade geography.
This study conducts a comparative analysis of the urban regeneration processes in Łódź, Poland, and Yazd, Iran. Despite the fact that both cities share a common historical background in textile manufacturing, they are characterised by distinct political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts. This research synthesises the findings of six doctoral papers to explore the values associated with textile manufacturing heritage, the role of post-industrial functions in urban management, and the determinants influencing urban regeneration. The methodology employed semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, complemented by fieldwork and observational analyses of textile manufacturing heritage sites, with a particular emphasis on revitalisation projects. While the Historic Urban Landscape framework examines the principles of spatial integration, the critical heritage studies approach evaluates the representation of heritage and the construction of meaning. By integrating comparative perspectives from Central European and Middle Eastern contexts, this research provides transferable strategies for policymakers, urban planners, and heritage managers aimed at fostering equitable, culturally informed, and sustainable urban transformation within industrial districts.
Parking shortages increasingly constrain medium-sized post-socialist cities, yet empirical evidence on stationary traffic is scarce. This case study of Goražde (Bosnia and Herzegovina) inventories and GIS-maps parking supply measures weekday occupancy, surveys residents’ perceptions, and proposes a three-zone parking management scheme. Methods combined a field inventory with GIS mapping, hourly manual counts on 1 June 2023 (8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.) at 11 lots (349 spots), and an online household survey (1–17 June 2023; n=103). Peak network occupancy reached 86.2%, and hotspot sites exceeded nominal capacity (up to 110%). The study provides a replicable baseline for monitoring and policy design in similar medium-sized cities.
This paper assesses territorial cohesion in the EU by examining whether 242 NUTS2 regions converge to a common steady state or form distinct convergence clubs. Using regional GDP per capita data for 2000–2022 and EU Cohesion Policy payments per capita for 2000–2020, we estimate absolute and conditional β-convergence models and apply k-means clustering based on initial income, growth performance, and funding intensity. The results indicate aggregate convergence, but a strongly uneven spatial pattern: regions group into three convergence clubs with different development trajectories. While some initially poorer regions exhibit strong catching-up, other clusters show weak or very slow convergence despite substantial funding. These findings support the Club Convergence hypothesis and underline the need for more place-based cohesion interventions tailored to regional structural conditions.
The article analyses one of the tools for public participation in urban regeneration processes in Poland, specifically the Revitalisation Committee. The study evaluates the practical implementation of this tool based on an analysis of 20 municipalities in the Łódzkie Voivodeship. The results indicate that this tool is often used in a largely symbolic or superficial manner, with considerable arbitrariness in the selection of committee members and limited influence on actual revitalisation activities at the municipal level. They can be a valuable basis for further research in this field. The conclusions may be useful for municipalities implementing revitalisation, where community involvement is considered crucial.
This article investigates Hungary’s growing status as a moderate innovator in the European Union, examining why it lags behind leaders like Denmark and emerging performers like Estonia. While previous research has focused on composite scores such as the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), this study combines these indicators with a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to evaluate innovation efficiency. The study covers the period from 2016 to 2023 providing a temporal analysis of Hungary’s innovation deficit relative to the EU average, as well as a comparative assessment with chosen EU equivalents. The paper identifies systemic slackness in Hungary’s innovation ecosystem, notably in terms of converting R&D inputs and human capital into concrete innovation outputs.
Since 1978, when the Historic Centre of Krakow, Poland, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, it has undergone various developments, largely driven by tourism. In 2008, the Krakow City Hall adopted the “Local Revitalization Program: The Old Town” to address such challenges as heritage management and preservation, gentrification, and tourism development in the area. The purpose of this study is to identify this plan’s proposed strategies based on the historic urban landscape (HUL) approach and to assess the gap between planning and implementation of the strategies. The HUL approach was introduced by UNESCO in 2011 to enable better management of World Heritage by integrating heritage conservation with a broad spectrum of urban development challenges. First, the content of the document was thematically analysed based on the HUL-proposed tools to clarify suggested strategies. Next, an Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) was conducted, referring to 19 local experts. This study offers a framework to serve as a reference to evaluate urban plans. Using the plan as a case study, the paper revealed a general understanding of the current and desired status of the strategies’ implementation.
The main objective of this article is to analyse the concept of the outermost regions, which, on the one hand, correspond to areas of the EU located at great distances from Europe and, on the other, promote a positive discrimination between regions by granting specific economic benefits. A literature review and analysis of socio-economic data are the main methods used to achieve the proposed objectives. The research focused on the legal evolution of the ORs in the EU Treaties, the development support programmes under European cohesion policy, and the main indicators that make it possible to characterise the current economic and social situation of these remote areas. From this type of analysis, it was possible to see that the majority of the ORs are still far from the average values of the EU-27, both economically and in terms of the standard of living of their inhabitants, despite the substantial progress that has been made over the last 30 years, as a result of an increasingly consolidated outermost status in European politics.
Budapest’s global city network integration determines its future social and economic development regarding every related dimensions. This position is based on its international labour market flows in a specific way. While unskilled labour provides essential but changeable resources, highly skilled labour has much higher added value and create liveable social and cultural environments. Local regulation tries to balance domestic market needs and deeper economic integration by eliminating low skilled workers in vain according to existing experiences. Their spatial concentration, deeper integration and the diversified sources of immigration both contribute to Budapest strengthening global city connectedness. Our aim is to show and analyse these processes.
The study developed a spatial Decision Support System (DSS) to assess the impact of land freight logistics on regional development and create an evaluation map in a GIS environment. By designing a tri-level conceptual framework and applying the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP), real stakeholders were involved at each evaluation level according to their roles. The system was integrated into GIS for final analysis and applied to the developmental Syrian axis of Tartous–Homs–Al-Farqulus using 2018 data. The results highlighted the importance of the relationships between evaluation criteria in identifying the role of freight logistics in regional planning and achieving broader developmental outcomes.
The study analyses tourism in the Lake Neusiedl region, an important tourist area on the Austrian-Hungarian border. It analyses not only its long-term development but also the current state of accommodation capacities and visitor numbers in selected Austrian municipalities in the region. Emphasis is placed on identifying key trends and seasonal fluctuations. The work is based on data for the years 2000 to 2024, which have been processed using appropriate methods and subsequently visualised. The results indicate a concentration of tourism in a few central municipalities, persistent seasonality, and a slight decline in the region’s relative importance within Burgenland. At the same time, the potential for further sustainable tourism development in the area is identified.
This study compares the economic development of Tierra del Fuego (Argentina) and Calabria (Italy), two highly peripheral regions. Despite their remoteness, they exhibit contrasting trajectories: Tierra del Fuego shows industrial growth driven by state-led policies, while Calabria faces stagnation despite EU support. Using a mixed-methods approach (quantitative institutional data and semi-structured direct interviews), we analyse factors influencing these divergent paths. Findings highlight the crucial role of institutional frameworks and sectoral specialisation, challenging the assumption that peripherality inherently hinders development. Remoteness does not necessarily preclude development. We suggest policy and strategic positioning can transform peripheral status into a catalyst for development.
This article explores the potential of a Lusophone Maritime Spatial Data Infrastructure (LMSDI) to enhance geospatial cooperation among Portuguese-speaking countries. Grounded in bibliographic and documentary analysis, the study examines how shared oceanic heritage and spatial data interoperability can support marine governance across the CPLP. It proposes the development of a Lusophone Geoportal for monitoring Exclusive Economic Zones, promoting environmental enforcement, and advancing the blue economy through digital integration and multilateral collaboration.
