Strategic Planning and Public Opinion Survey

Strategic Planning is a creative, practical planning process for community change. Community Strategic Planning produces a visionary statement of what the community wants to be 10 to 20 years in the future. There is no one ideal strategic planning process that has worked for all communities and community groups. Different communities have successfully used a variety of processes. The article describes methods important for evolvement of the situation analysis, particularly the method of representative public opinion survey that provides basis for SWOT analysis and formulation of the strategic goals. The method reflecting public’s attitudes, values, and beliefs regarding community development is demonstrated on the example of two cities located in the Eastern part of the Slovak Republic - Košice and Spišská Nová Ves. Key words: Community Strategic Planning, Community Needs Analysis, City and Place Marketing, Strategic Planning Methodology, Public Opinion Survey, Questionnaires design.

Slovak Creativity Index – A PCA Based Approach

The article aims at transferring the European Creativity Index (ECI) assessment from the country to regional comparison basis, focusing on the case of Slovakia. The newly created Slovak Creativity Index (SCI) has the power to assess the creativity potential found in the Slovak regions. The Principal Component Analysis has been chosen as an advanced method for establishing a well-designed overall Index and six sub-indices to show differences and variability according to all dimensions of the creative potential. The research also explains several relations between creative performance of the regions by several factors such as urbanisation, cultural environment, human capital and tolerance

Subjective Well-Being in Czech and Slovak Cities

Cities are home to a significant proportion of the population in the EU, providing access to job opportunities and public services and, subsequently, driving economic growth. However, cities also face social and environmental challenges such as poverty, prohibitively high housing costs, discrimination, crime, excessive noise and air pollution. This raises the issue of how residents in European cities perceive their lives and assess their overal well-being and satisfaction with the amenities in their city. A U-shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age is tested in a sample of European cities using data from the Quality of Life in European Cities survey, with higher levels of satisfaction expected among younger and older individuals. The results supported the hypothesis and provided evidence for the importance of considering age in the analysis of well-being in urban settings. Subjective well-being is not only influenced by personal factors such as age and individual experiences but also by the quality of the urban environment. The second part employs ordinal logistic regression to analyse individual and contextual factors of well-being in four Czech and Slovak cities, namely Prague, Ostrava, Bratislava, and Košice

INNOVATION ABILITY OF KOŠICE AND PREŠOV SELF-GOVERNING REGIONS

Since the transition to a market economy, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE countries) have suffered from severe serious economic and employment-related problems. That is valid fully for Slovakia, one of the EU candidate countries, comparing to western EU countries. After becoming member of EU, economy of Slovakia will face very strong competition with traditional market economies. Almost all macroeconomic indicators show still a big gap between economic performance of Slovakia and EU 15 countries. The European Union declares itself as the union of regions – and the gap is even more visible at a regional level, especially when considering Eastern part of Slovakia. Western part of Slovakia reaches much better results in economic performance than Eastern part of Slovakia, consisting of Košice and Prešov self-governing regions (SGR). That clearly indicates that Western part of Slovakia is evidently better prepared for entering EU and also it is much more competitive

Modelling social inclusion, self-esteem, loneliness, psychological distress, and psychological resilience of refugees : does hospitableness matter?

Despite a growing stream of research addressing hospitableness in destinations and hospitality settings, very little is known about the role of hospitableness in fostering favorable social outcomes for vulnerable individuals such as refugees. This omission is intriguing given the heated debate on how local communities in refugee hosting countries can contribute to tackling the refugee crisis. Drawing on data collected from Ukrainian refugees hosted by locals in Slovakia, this study proposes and tests a conceptual model linking hospitableness, social inclusion, self-esteem, loneliness, psychological distress, psychological resilience, and subjective well-being. Using SEM-PLS, the findings confirm that hospitableness can positively enhance social inclusion while mitigating loneliness. Contrary to our predication, however, our results fail to confirm the positive effect of hospitableness on subjective well-being both directly and indirectly mediated by self-esteem and social inclusion. Psychological resilience significantly moderates the relationship between hospitableness and social inclusion. The study makes significant theoretical contributions to the corpus of literature on the social outcomes of hospitableness and provides timely implications for policy makers to utilise “refugee hosting by locals” schemes and “private sponsorship of refugees” programmes as a viable solution to enhance refugees’ social inclusion and foster their overall well-being

Stepping Out of the Shadows: Legacy of the European Capitals of Culture, Guimarães 2012 and Košice 2013

The following materials are available online at http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/ 11/5/1469/s1: Interview Guidelines for Guimarães and Košice.The European Capitals of Culture (ECOC) is the most ambitious cultural, collaborative programme in Europe. Up until 2000, ECOC projects were hosted by several national capitals and principal cultural cities in Europe. In the second phase, the programme also began to discover second-tier and less well-known cities hidden in the shadow of the cultural capitals. This paper focuses on assessing different ECOC strategies (traditional versus radical) and the corresponding legacies of two medium-sized cities: Guimarães (ECOC in 2012, Portugal) and Košice (ECOC in 2013, Slovakia). Cultural heritage is identified by the capacity of culture to change development trajectory and to boost the economy of cities. The strategies and legacies of Guimarães and Košice have revealed themselves to be comparatively different, especially due to their differences with respect to UNESCO cultural heritage. While Guimarães partially succeeded in enhancing its position as a tourist attraction and the visibility of its historical cultural heritage, the industrial city of Košice is an example of more radical and dynamic culture-led form of development, overcoming the provincialism of the city. Most importantly, and due to the strengthening pride of the locals, both ECOC cities have stepped out of the shadow of stronger cultural capitals in their countries. This joint research offers the possibility of a first-hand comparison of traditional and radical approaches and an in-depth interpretation of their legacies after a period of five years, explaining the mechanisms of forming different legacies in two types of ECOC cities. The results can help future ECOC cities to set their strategies in relation to their desired cultural and economic development.This research was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency (APVV) under the contract No. APVV-14-0512.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Možnosti rozvoja rýchlostnej cesty R4 ako súčasť pobaltského koridoru

The relationship of the eastern regions of Poland, Slovakia and Hungary has a long history. Naturally, to bring back life to those historical relationships, building and maintaining spatial connections among those countries is necessary. Corresponding regions have similar economic problems that can hardly be solved at the national level. Therefore there must be a global interest of all involved countries to start. The future cross-border cooperation of the considered regions will possibly get a new quality in the new framework of European Union. Spatial and regional development of the eastern region of Slovakia together with north-east region of Hungary and south-east region of Poland is already a part of the European Spatial Development Perspective, adopted by the Ministers for Spatial Planning at the Potsdam Council on 10 and 11 May 1999. Government of Slovak Republic has approved a new project of building motorways and highways for the years 2001-2004. Particulary, building of the motorway/highway R4 could foster an economic development of the eastern region of Slovakia

Quality of life: typology of european cities based on cluster analysis

Quality of life is a frequently used term to evaluate living conditions of a person or a family. Both economic and non-economic factors of the quality of life are often taken into account and the role of external environment as objectivized measure for individual life satisfaction is emphasized. Hence, in examining the quality of life, two basic approaches of subjective perception of individual emotions, or approaches based on using objectified measurement methods classifying macroeconomic, social and demographic indicators chosen to reflect “objective” life conditions can be used. Determination of groups of cities with similar subjective quality of life assessment and the spatial patterns of similarity in the European area is the main research question studied in the paper with a proposition, how apparent is a difference between the cities of western, southern Europe and former communist countries. Database for comparison descends from the primary research carried out in seventy five European and Turkish cities on a sample of 37 626 citizens in 2009. Research was conducted through a questionnaire survey in which respondents answered 24 questions and the resulting document “Survey on perceptions of quality of life in 75 European cities“ offers a basic descriptive comparison of the cities. In the article, the same survey primary data was processed using cluster analysis to classify the cities into eight groups according to similarity of citizen views. The subjective perception of the quality of life is confronted with the measurable quantitative indicators approach. The subsequent analysis examines the relation between objective and subjective assessment of quality of life. To clarify the classification of cities into clusters based on the subjective perception, four key indicators used in developing spatial typologies – GDP per capita, population, population density and the unemployment rate in the cities