PERFECT REPRESENTATIONS OF SOVIET PLANNED SPACE

The article looks at mono‐industrial cities in the Baltic States during the Soviet era. In terms of economy, ethnicity and their urban appearance these heterotopic towns were outposts in the integration of the occupied European‐like territories into the Soviet Union. Thanks to the principles of planning and state‐favoured development that were applied across the Soviet Union, these towns, built for Russian speaking immigrants, stood out from the surrounding patterns of settlement that had developed naturally over time. The uranium producing town of Sillamäe in Estonia was built in secret and with lightning speed amidst the panic concerning the atom bomb immediately after the war, and provides us with a perfect model of Stalinist urban development. Stu?ka, built in the 1960s near a hydro‐electric power station in Latvia and Snie?kus, built in the 1970s next to a nuclear power station in Lithuania, were less separated from the surrounding landscape, but both provide a perfect example of Soviet modernism, which had been learned from mass‐housing in the West.     

Traditional undeveloped municipalities in Serbia as a result of regional inequality

This paper examines the issue of traditionally underdeveloped areas of Serbia, with special emphasis on development trends of the south, south-east and south-west areas of Central Serbia. The observed area is represented through a continuous time and space zone which includes rural, hilly-mountainous, border areas and the contact zone with the AP Kosovo and Metohija, including 22 municipalities, the majority of which belong to the so-called traditionally underdeveloped municipalities, that is, those that have had this status for a few decades. For the purpose of monitoring development trends, the indicators of the settlement structure, demographic and socio-economic characteristics and the level of development of the observed municipalities were used. Then, an evaluation and comparison to the national average were carried out. The presented results show a deviation and significant lagging behind of almost all parameters for the analysed municipalities in the period since 2002 until the present day, which indicates that the several-decade-long gap is still being intensified. A cluster analysis was performed for the typology of observed municipalities in order to determine the level of undevelopment and socio-economic marginalization.     

Palaeopathological evidence of infectious disease in skeletal populations from later medieval Serbia

Published data on palaeopathology are limited from the area of Serbia. This paper provides evidence for infectious disease in 1617 skeletons from eight Medieval Serbian cemeteries. Two hundred and three individuals were analysed by the first author and data on the remaining skeletons were derived from previous published work. A total of 23 adult individuals, and no non‐adults, had evidence of infectious disease. Historical data on infectious disease at that time are considered, particularly leprosy, treponemal disease, and infections affecting only the soft tissues, such as the plague, dysentery, smallpox and rabies, and the results of the analyses compared, with discussions on the limitations of the study. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of zoning in the strategic planning of protected areas: lessons learnt from EU countries and Serbia

This paper aims to highlight the problems and possibilities for improving the nature protection zoning of protected areas (PA) in spatial planning. It analyses and compares the systems of spatial planning and the legal basis for protecting nature in PAs in selected EU countries and Serbia. It investigates and compares the role of nature protection zoning and the practice of spatial planning for selected European countries. The case study of a national park in each of the selected countries is used to analyse the nature protection zoning and its role in the coordination of spatial planning for PAs and their surroundings. The initial hypothesis is tested and confirmed that, regardless of differences in the planning systems of the selected European countries, the models of nature protection zoning established for PAs are defining for the coordination of planning instruments in achieving the protection and sustainable development of PAs. The lessons learnt concern the identification of similarities and differences in approaches to nature protection zoning, and their relationship with the spatial planning for PAs in six European countries. Based on these lessons and existing research, recommendations are given for improving the legal basis for the nature protection zoning and spatial planning of PAs in Serbia.     

The impacts of spatial planning on the sustainable territorial development of the Rhine-Danube Trans-European Transport Corridor through Serbia

The Danube River is both the international waterway E-80 and the Rhine-Danube Core Network Corridor of nine European corridors in the trans-European transport network, and it is the core area of the most significant Danubian development axis in the Republic of Serbia. The present research focus of this paper is the integrated impact of spatial planning on achieving the sustainable territorial development of the Rhine-Danube Corridor through Serbia and its potential transboundary impact. Integrated assessment (environmental and social), based on the combined application of the standard strategic environmental assessment (SEA) method and the newly presented adapted strategic environmental assessment (ASEA) method, has made it possible to predict the effects of future activities on the sustainable territorial development of the waterway corridor, not only in Serbia, but also in other Danubian countries. The applied combination of the SEA and ASEA methods is presented in the form of key planning solutions in three selected sectors: international inland waterway, water management infrastructure and tourism. The results indicate that the negative impacts of potential conflicts between the planning solutions are far greater than the negative impacts of individual planning solutions, and that it is more difficult to control and mitigate or neutralize them.