GIS application for improving housing conditions in substandard Roma settlements in Serbia

In order to tackle socio-economic inequality problems of Roma minority population in Serbia, Serbian Government has adopted in 2009 the Strategy on Improvement of the Status of Roma in the Republic of Serbia (Roma Strategy). During last 7 years, this Roma Strategy has been implemented by different entities and through various projects, dealing with some of the major identified issues of Roma community in Serbia, like: substandard living conditions; low or no income at all; legal and other discriminations; lack of rights on social care and/or health insurance; etc. Within the programme “We are here together – European Assistance for Roma Inclusion”, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Mission to Serbia (OSCE Mission to Serbia) provides technical assistance to the Serbian Government in implementation of the mentioned Roma Strategy. Since 2013, part of this assistance has aimed at creation of an information system, that is, centralized GIS application for the substandard Roma settlements (SRS) in Serbia. The main purpose of this GIS application is to support the Ministry of Construction, Transportation and Infrastructure (MCTI) together with local governments, to register, monitor and analyse quality of housing within SRS in Serbia, and make right decisions for improvement of Roma community living conditions in future. Thus, in order for affordable housing solutions for SRS in Serbia to be identified and then proposed by MCTI for funding, the OSCE Mission to Serbia has implemented project “Mapping of substandard Roma settlements in GIS” for building GIS application for SRS. This project consisted of two main groups of activities: (1) spatial and alphanumeric data collection on SRS, and (2) GIS application building for SRS housing conditions monitoring and decision-making. As part of project methodology, the first conceptual data model for SRS was created using UML language. Based on this model, questionnaire for alphanumeric data collection on SRS housing conditions was developed, while spatial data for SRS boundaries were collected using CAD tool and orthophoto maps for each site where these settlements were located within Serbian municipalities. Also, in order for SRS data collection activity to be performed efficiently, network of 16 field co-workers throughout Serbia was established and appropriate training was provided. Finally, as second part of project methodology, collected SRS data were subject of quality verification before their conversion and integration within SQL database, which was basis for creation of appropriate GIS environment using QGIS open-source software advantages. The aim of this article is to present project methodology and main results. First, recent activities on Roma community housing improvement in Serbia would be listed and the OSCE project “Mapping of substandard Roma settlements in GIS” would be presented. Then, selected methodology for the project aim and outputs achievement would be described. In following chapter, OSCE project main results would be presented together with their main characteristics and first data analysis results. Finally, project methodology and results would be discussed and conclusion would be made, including possible implications and future steps towards improvement of Roma community housing conditions in Serbia

Spatial Plan of the Republic of Serbia in the light of Digital Agenda for Europe 2020

European Union (EU) needs to overcome and counteract negative effects of the global economic crisis. In this respect, EU has decided to strategically build its social, economic and other development potentials, and to make them able to respond efficiently and effectively on dynamic life and work challenges within Information Society paradigm. Therefore, European Commission (EC) has adopted and, since March 2010, has implemented the Europe 2020 strategy. Its aim is to establish preconditions for common vision of sustainable future in Europe by 7 flagship initiatives, directed to smart, sustainable and inclusive growth throughout EU Member states as well as Candidate states and other bordering regions. Therefore, in order to assure further increase in standards of life in Europe while facing sharp demographic ageing and increasing global competition, one of those Europe 2020’s 7 initiatives –namely, Digital Agenda 2020- has been launched for ‘smart growth’ implementation. This Agenda consists of common digital priorities and set of targets needed for full utilization of ICT enabling role in every Member states and other relevant territories relying on knowledge and innovation of its citizens. It is expected that wider and better deployment of ICT capabilities, particularly broadband Internet within social and economic domains, would improve daily life quality for both businesses and citizens in Europe, including better health care, more efficient transport solutions, easier access to public services and cultural contents, cleaner environment, etc. In the same time, spatial planning and plans, especially those on national level, present platform for long-term and strategic thinking, planning, directing, coordinating, implementing and managing development policies and decisions from different domains within certain territories. Because of these characteristics, national spatial plan should be one of crucial policy instruments in any country for Digital Agenda 2020 priorities and ‘smart growth’ features implementation. On one side, being development blueprint of each country, national spatial plans have role to provide territorial dimension for integrated, balanced and coordinated implementation of different sectoral policies and interests; on the other side, national spatial plans have obligation to promote various and progressive territorial cohesive development principles for inclusive economic and society development in future. Based on the above recognised national spatial plans strategic role in each country development process, the aim of the article is to identify potentials and capacities of national spatial plan in Serbia for implementing Digital Agenda 2020. To this end, national spatial plan, namely Spatial Plan of the Republic of Serbia 2010-2020 (Plan), is reviewed and analysed in order for relevant Digital Agenda 2020 digital priorities and targets to be recognised and evaluate, and proposal for ‘smart development’ features and policies integration to be made. Also, since mentioned Spatial plan is adopted in 2010, and Serbia is lagging in ICT advantages utilization in general, expected lacks in support to digital technologies objectives and solutions implementation within this document should provide relevant information and argument for its revision in future

ATTRACTIVE DANUBE Project – Territorial Attractiveness Analysis of the Danube Region

Following integrative approach of the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) for achieving balanced and sustainable territorial development in Europe, European Union (EU) has launched the European Observation Network for Territorial Development and Cohesion (ESPON) programme to research and identify integrative territorial evidence models for the different EU development policies monitoring and evaluation. Among the others, territorial evidence model for a territorial attractiveness (TA) monitoring was developed as result of the ESPON’s ATTREG project, since TA has been recognized by the different EU policies as one of those complex territorial qualities important for the European competitiveness and territorial cohesion. Defined as a set of territorial capitals and assets with capacities to retain existing and attract new resources, policy-supported TA is able to create or improve territorial identity –i.e. competitive advantage- needed for reaching inclusive, smart and sustainable development goals on different levels within EU and its cross-border regions. Thus, targeting the EU Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR) goals, and relying on the INTERREG Danube Transnational Programme (DTP) instrument, the Improving Capacities for Enhancing Territorial Attractiveness of the Danube Region (Attractive Danube) project has been launched in 2017 with the aim to build a TA monitoring system in the Danube Region. This system should support both national TA policy priorities identification and monitoring, as well as transnational TA policies coordination among the 11 partner-countries (including Austria) in the Danube macroregion. The purpose of this paper is to present the initial findings of TA analysis for the Danube Region, using the results achieved during the first year of the Attractive Danube project implementation. The project objectives and activities in 2017 included: 1) data collection for the selected TA indicators, and 2) building national and transnational TA monitoring platforms, namely 11 national TAMPs and transnational CO TAMP. The focus of this paper is on the 22 common TA indicators analysis based on their values collected by the project partners for period 2008-2016. In order for the TA disparities and trends to be identified and, thus, needed TA policy improvements to be defined, methodology applied for this TA indicator analysis was compiled using the approaches elaborated and modelled by the other ESPON projects, namely INTERCO and KITCASP projects. As an initial result, it is found that positive TA cohesion trend was prevailing one and that there was no common TA indicator with strong territorial disparity trend in period 2008-2016. Therefore, in this paper, after the Attractive Danube project’s aim and objectives description, the TA as development concept is presented. Then, methodological approaches to the TA indicators data collection and analysis are defined. Finally, the main results and initial findings of the TA indicators analysis for the Danube Region are presented and interpreted, and general conclusions on possible TA policy improvements towards territorial cohesion and sustainability in future in this macroregion are made

Possibilities for the development of ecotourism in protected areas of Western Serbia

Sustainable tourism is an important element of modern tourism, which are strictly controlled by the impact of tourism on the environment. Balanced ecological, economic and sociocultural components of tourism are therefore more frequently mentioned in the programs and strategies of tourism development. Sustainable tourism is particularly applicable to the development of tourism in the category of protected natural areas. These natural systems (national parks, nature parks, nature reserves and natural monuments) are all interesting areas for various segments of the tourist. Typically, this is ecotourism - a modern form of tourism in which through education, volunteering, learning about nature, we help protect and preserve nature. Tourism development in protected natural areas is particularly sensitive, and as such it involves the determination of carrying capacity, limits of acceptable changes, environmental impact assessment, tourism zoning and designing codes of ethics that would help tourists to coordinate their activities with the values of the environment

O režimu velikih voda reka Kosova i Metohije

The examples from Kosovo and Metohia attempted to point to some problems in the domain of hydrogeographic regionalization. The river water regime, especially the phase of high flows which marks this regime, has been the topic of almost all researches which treat water resources of drainage basins. However, the thing that has not been achieved till now is the unique solution by which the classification of rivers would be made according to this feature. On this example it has been shown that even some older methods, based on genetic analysis of hydrograms and of global type, as well as some recent ones, with lot of quantitative entry and regional approaches, cannot with certainty answer all the challenges which river regimes bring with themselves. This work shows that apart from climate, orographic and physiognomic features of drainage basins, the periods of data processing and the analysis of individual intra-annual series of discharges are very important as well. Discretization on time periods shorter than one month, as well as elimination of the extreme values of discharges in the longtime series is recommended for the future research.Primerima sa Kosova i Metohije se pokušalo ukazati na neke probleme iz domena hidrogeografske rejonizacije. Vodni režim reka, posebno faza velikih voda koja daje pečat tom režimu, tema je gotovo svih istraživanja koja tretiraju vodne resurse slivova. Ono što, međutim, nije do sada postignuto, to je univerzalno rešenje kojim bi se izvršila klasifikacija reka po ovoj osobini. Na ovom primeru se pokazuje kako i neki stariji metodi, zasnovani na genetskom raščlanjivanju hidrograma i globalnog su tipa, isto kao i neki noviji, sa mnoštvom kvantitativnih odrednica i regionalnog pristupa, ne mogu sa pouzdanošću da odgovore na sve izazove koje sobom nose rečni režimi. Ovim radom se ukazuje i da su osim klimatskih, orografskih i fizionomskih osobina slivova veoma važni i periodi obrade podataka i analiza pojedinačnih unutargodišnjih serija proticaja. Za buduće istraživanje se preporučuje i diskretizacija na vremenske periode kraće od jednog meseca, kao i eliminacija ekstremnih vrednosti proticaja u dugogodišnjem nizu

Possibilities for the development of ecotourism in protected areas of Western Serbia

Sustainable tourism is an important element of modern tourism, which are strictly controlled by the impact of tourism on the environment. Balanced ecological, economic and sociocultural components of tourism are therefore more frequently mentioned in the programs and strategies of tourism development. Sustainable tourism is particularly applicable to the development of tourism in the category of protected natural areas. These natural systems (national parks, nature parks, nature reserves and natural monuments) are all interesting areas for various segments of the tourist. Typically, this is ecotourism - a modern form of tourism in which through education, volunteering, learning about nature, we help protect and preserve nature. Tourism development in protected natural areas is particularly sensitive, and as such it involves the determination of carrying capacity, limits of acceptable changes, environmental impact assessment, tourism zoning and designing codes of ethics that would help tourists to coordinate their activities with the values of the environment

O režimu velikih voda reka Kosova i Metohije

The examples from Kosovo and Metohia attempted to point to some problems in the domain of hydrogeographic regionalization. The river water regime, especially the phase of high flows which marks this regime, has been the topic of almost all researches which treat water resources of drainage basins. However, the thing that has not been achieved till now is the unique solution by which the classification of rivers would be made according to this feature. On this example it has been shown that even some older methods, based on genetic analysis of hydrograms and of global type, as well as some recent ones, with lot of quantitative entry and regional approaches, cannot with certainty answer all the challenges which river regimes bring with themselves. This work shows that apart from climate, orographic and physiognomic features of drainage basins, the periods of data processing and the analysis of individual intra-annual series of discharges are very important as well. Discretization on time periods shorter than one month, as well as elimination of the extreme values of discharges in the longtime series is recommended for the future research.Primerima sa Kosova i Metohije se pokušalo ukazati na neke probleme iz domena hidrogeografske rejonizacije. Vodni režim reka, posebno faza velikih voda koja daje pečat tom režimu, tema je gotovo svih istraživanja koja tretiraju vodne resurse slivova. Ono što, međutim, nije do sada postignuto, to je univerzalno rešenje kojim bi se izvršila klasifikacija reka po ovoj osobini. Na ovom primeru se pokazuje kako i neki stariji metodi, zasnovani na genetskom raščlanjivanju hidrograma i globalnog su tipa, isto kao i neki noviji, sa mnoštvom kvantitativnih odrednica i regionalnog pristupa, ne mogu sa pouzdanošću da odgovore na sve izazove koje sobom nose rečni režimi. Ovim radom se ukazuje i da su osim klimatskih, orografskih i fizionomskih osobina slivova veoma važni i periodi obrade podataka i analiza pojedinačnih unutargodišnjih serija proticaja. Za buduće istraživanje se preporučuje i diskretizacija na vremenske periode kraće od jednog meseca, kao i eliminacija ekstremnih vrednosti proticaja u dugogodišnjem nizu

Towards institutional and organisational framework for the National spatial data infrastructure development in Serbia

Spatial data infrastructure (SDI) represents a concept that tends to create a context for cooperation and exchange of data, information and knowledge between a particular spatial data community’s stakeholders. Thus, the aim of SDI concept development is to establish a common spatially supported platform for making right decisions relevant for economic progress, good governance and sustainable development within a certain domain or jurisdiction, i.e. administrative level. Today, the majority of launched SDI initiatives are on the national level that is also identified as the crucial one for evolution of this concept in general. Additionally, recent research has proven that national SDI (NSDI) developments have become prevailingly social phenomena since interactions between their stakeholders appeared to be critical for achieving purpose of these initiatives, and SDI concept vision in general. Therefore, the aim of this article is to propose an appropriate social, i.e. institutional and organisational framework, for NSDI development in Serbia

Problems of the labor market: A case study of Belgrade

High unemployment accompanied by a decline in production is one of the major economic and social problems in Serbia. The existing economic problems, which are defined by structural mismatch, non-competitive production and traditional means of production is accompanied by an increase in the problem of poverty, due to the participation of elderly and dependent persons, a decline in the number of employees. Markets are a way to organize economic activity and can only be successful if the activities are organized in a way that enhances the overall economic benefit. If this does not happen, there is a market failure which is the situation in which the market alone fails to achieve full efficiency. Taking into account of territorial disparities in economic potentials of development, the aim of the paper is to point out the problems facing the labor market in Belgrade. The author tried to show the basic characteristics of Belgrade during his work, as well as economic, traffic and market a significant city in Southeastern Europe. The effects, instruments and benefits of market policy and alternatives to overcome existing constraints, opportunities and solutions are presented. Activities to improve the productivity and quality of work must be planned according to the expected changes in the economic structure, according to the greater involvement of Belgrade in the European and regional economic integration, and with optimal use of domestic resources to the comparative advantages of the country

Analysis of fieldwork methodology in anthropogeographic works of Jovan Cvijić

Interpreting the extensive and varied bibliography of Jovan Cvijić, largely in foreign languages, which apart from the text includes geographic and ethnographic map of the Balkan Peninsula, atlases, notes and drawings, it is concluded that his scientific work was versatile and complex. Cvijić's perception of space, the use of didactic principles, methods and forms of work can be categorized as actual and modern even in the present time. He was the first among the Balkan geographers who simultaneously interpreted natural, historical, sociological, ethnographic and ethno-psychological phenomena and processes. Cvijić pointed to the relationship between the geographic environment and human communities, civilizations and historical events, constantly examining their mutual conditionality. Numerous research trips in almost all regions of the Balkan Peninsula led to his interest in the culture and customs of the people. He noted that in the Balkans, there are different people by origin, religion and mentality. The result of the field research is certainly one of Cvijić's most important work - 'Anthropogeographical problems of the Balkan Peninsula'. His scientific approach has given an outstanding contribution to methodological development of geography