Študija o Solčavskem 1932-2007: Poročilo o skupnem terenskem delu Univerze v Ljubljani in Univerze v Londonu 1932-2007

This is a report – in Slovene, but with summaries in German and English – of research carried out in Solčavsko, a 'remote' region in northern Slovenia, between 2004-2007. The impetus for the study was a joint UK-Slovene field study conducted in September 2004 by postgraduate students on the Birkbeck MSc in Countryside and Protected Area Management and the University of Ljubljana MSc in Natural Heritage Protection, part of a 'twinning' of the two institutions between 1997 and 2007. During our preparation of the field course, a report was discovered in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society of an earlier study of the area in 1932, led by Sir Dudley Stamp, possibly the foremost British geographer of his generation, when he was a young academic at the London School of Economics. This was the first 'expedition' of the newly formed Le Play Society - a body set up by Sir Halford Mackinder under the influence of Sir Patrick Geddes at a time when geography was beginning to emerge from its 19th century imperial tradition (of collecting, cataloguing and ranking), to focus on the interactions between people and nature under the slogan 'Place, Work, and Folk' – an early concern with sustainability. This 1932 study,conducted at a time when Slovenia was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, plus a report of subsequent visits to Solčavsko by the Brathay Exploration Society in 1971 and 1972 (under socialist Yugoslavia, provided a 'time slice' through the area facilitating our own 2004 understanding of the changes in and prospects for the region within an independant Slovenia which had just become part of the European Union. Subsequent to the joint London-Ljubljana field study, a small travelling grant was secured from the Sir Frederick Soddy Trust which enabled us to carry out additional research and to write up the results as 'Študija o Solčavskem' – 'Solčavsko Studies' – 75 years after Stamp