The “Perfect Map” of Widow Hiamtse: A Micro-Spatial History of Sugar Plantations in Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1685–1710

Not all early modern sugar plantations were in the Atlantic World. Indeed, far away from it, in the rural space surrounding the Dutch headquarters in Asia (the Ommelanden of Batavia (Jakarta)), over a hundred of them were thriving by the end of the seventeenth century. Together, they constituted a unique plantation society that followed Dutch land law, was operated by Javanese rural labour, and was managed by Chinese sugar entrepreneurs. Through archival work on a certain “perfect map” that belonged to a Chinese widow, this article explores how that plantation society took shape on the ground.

The sustainable tourism organization of rural spaces. The island of Sardinia in the era of "staycation"

What future for tourism in the COVID-19 era? This is a question that has become part of the daily life of many tourist destinations. The pandemic has affected all economic sectors and tourism is one of the sectors most suffered. According to data from the World Tourism Organization (2021) due to the health emergency 100% of countries have introduced restrictions in the travel sector and for this reason international tourist arrivals dropping by 74% in 2020. Future projections indicate 2023 as the year when a the "regular" flow of tourists can be recorded globally. However, in the meantime, there is a need to improve this sector by implementing strategies to promote and enhance the places to motivate sustainable tourism. The insecurity of travel and of some destinations, due to the many emergency restrictions, pushes tourists to live an outdoor vacation in contact with nature and host community. Thus, the search for authentic places moves minds more consciously towards sustainable tourism practices showing a greater interest in some forms of tourism such as rural and cultural.The aim of this work is to understand how to deal with the "new" needs of the demand, bringing out the rural realities through the creation of an organized sustainable offer that revolves around existing accommodation facilities such as farmhouses. In particular, the case of Sardinia will be analyzed, an island that has long been known for its seaside tourism, but whose rural and internal areas are still not much used touristically. The study intends, after a short review of the literature on the sustainability of rural tourism, highlight the possibility to create rural tourist itineraries capable of enhancing the territory's peculiarities by combining the different landscape assets. The exemplification of the creation of these routes will be realized in GIS field through the creation of a model of accessibility to the Sardinian rural space. This model will be based on the use of isochronous curves obtained from the analysis of travel times both to move towards and from the agritourism that offer accommodation and within their landscape offer.

Continuity of rural family properties by generation transfer

Discussions concerning rural family succession have occurred more frequently due to different factors such as rural exodus, an aging rural population and loss of existing knowledge in a farm when there is none. We propose to analyze publications on succession in rural properties, highlighting its relationship with rural development. For this, the proposal of Fink (2010) was used as a framework for the systematic review of peer-reviewed journals. One can identify that succession in rural space is a complex action that occurs in different ways, and is influenced by individual issues. Moreover, in many cases, the current manager finds it difficult to understand the need to reduce and subsequently stop his/her work activities so that the successor can continue the management of the property. Moreover, succession planning is necessary in order to achieve a greater success in this process. Succession contributes to the continuity of traditional activities in the rural space, that is, food production.

The Determinants of Landscape and Cultural Heritage Among Italian Regions in the Period 2004-2019

We estimate the Landscape and Cultural Heritage among Italian regions in the period 2004-2019 using data from ISTAT-BES. We use Panel Data with Fixed Effects, Panel Data with Random Effects, Pooled OLS, WLS, Dynamic Panel. We found that the Landscape and Cultural Heritage is negatively associated with “Dissatisfaction with the landscape of the place of life”, “Illegal building”, “Density and relevance of the museum heritage”, “Internal material consumption”, “Erosion of the rural space due to abandonment”, “Availability of urban green”, and positively associated with “Pressure from mining activities”, “Erosion of the rural space by urban dispersion”, “Concern about the deterioration of the landscape”, “Diffusion of agritourism farms”, “Current expenditure of the Municipalities for culture”. Secondly, we have realized a cluster analysis with the k-Means algorithm optimized with the Silhouette Coefficient and we found two clusters in the sense of “Concern about the deterioration of the landscape”. Finally, we use eight different machine learning algorithms to predict the level of “Concern about the deterioration of the landscape” and we found that the Tree Ensemble Regression is the best predictor.

Outsiders in the Village

A shortage of women doctors in Rajasthan’s rural government sector has left sizeable gaps in the provision of women’s healthcare. This chapter explores how, in their narratives, women doctors position themselves as outsiders in the village, unable to create successful careers and lives in rural spaces. Medical graduates considering a rural career must contend with the hierarchy of medical prestige that places cities above villages and the timescale that frames villages as ‘backwards’ spaces. In doctors’ narratives of the village, doctors used the village as code for low educational and class status—and by separating themselves from the geographical space of the village, they also put metaphorical distance between themselves and their subaltern Other. Women doctors’ reluctance to occupy rural space illuminates the ways that class, space, and gender overlap to shape the practice of healthcare, with impacts felt far beyond the careers of doctors.

LEADER Program—An Inclusive or Selective Instrument for the Development of Rural Space in Romania?

The LEADER program is one of the European Union’s financing instruments dedicated to the development of the rural communities. The instrument was introduced in the Romanian rural territory in 2007, a territory characterised by a high level of local and regional economic inequalities. The main goal of the present research is to question whether the development level specific to the rural communities have influenced their performance in managing the LEADER program. In order to answer this question, the characteristics of the initial level of development were analysed in relation to the spatial distribution of LEADER funds. The indicators taken into consideration were the number of projects, funds per capita, funds per Local Action Group (LAG), and the percentage of employees from the total population. In order to assess the relation between the initial level of development and the LAG’s performance, the method used was the Ordinary Least Squares regression, which calculates a set of statistical parameters that highlight the presence, form, sense, and intensity of the dependency relation. The results highlight no correlation between the level of development and the spatial distribution of the LEADER funds. Analysing the data, the paper reveals that the LEADER program is an inclusive rather than a selective instrument for the development of Romanian rural communities, despite other examples researched in Western countries. The results show that the LEADER program can have an influence in reducing the rural disparities, but its effects are of low importance.

Old Geographical Materialities. Recover the Past and the Heritage in the Present of Pheripherical European Rural Spaces: A Research Proposal

The past has had a minor consideration in geographic studies the transformation of rural areas, usually dominated by socioeconomic analysis. Incorporating the old and in many cases, the materialities of the past through a reconsideration of heritage to the future of rural space requires an adequate conceptualization and reconsideration of rural materialities and especially of popular housing. In this way, it is intended to decentralize the human and functionalist point of view to give a life of their own to rural cultural and natural materialities in the context of more-thanhuman-geographies. The renewed study of heritage and the historical past acquires a notable value in the present and future of rural areas through: (1) the interpretation of dissymmetrical realities where the old confronts new activities; (2) for adequate and realistic management of rural heritage and the processes of selective recovery of heritage in certain historical places.

Transforming the image of a rural space into a photorealistic virtual reality and opening to a sustainable development

The aim of the research was to create an "improved" virtual tour, which would allow the transformation of the image of a rural space into photorealistic virtual reality, through mobile scanning equipment and geomatic technique, to meet practical requirements: evaluation of the agricultural potential of the area, evaluation of the tourist potential, reconstruction of the urban space, territorial planning, etc, but also with theoretical implications in the scientific research in the field. The area of interest was scanned with the Leica Pegasus Backpack, a platform for capturing reality. With the help of the acquired data, a virtual tour of this village was made similar to Google Street View, but more complex due to the fact that LiDAR data were also purchased in addition to images during the scan, thus having the possibility to perform various measurements within virtual tour, made with Leica TruView and JetStream software. The inclusion of data in the virtual tour offers, in addition to measurable elements and the possibility of summative analysis of all components of physical space, from "strengths" to "opportunities" and "risks", data that are needed in the process of planning and sustainable development of space.

The Landscape of Węgajty Theatre

The alternative culture in Poland formed between the late 1970s and the second half of the 1990s. In this period many artists were moving from cities into the countryside in order to find space for independent and experimental art. Among these new settlers were Erdmute and Wacław Sobaszek, who made their home in a small rural settlement of Węgajty in the 1980s. The Sobaszeks converted an abandoned farm into a stage and soon their undertaking became one of the most prominent alternative theatres in Poland. This article explores intersections of the Sobaszeks's art and rural landscape through the lens of humanistic geography, anthropology and philosophy. The purpose of the article is to reveal a deep attachment of the artists to local, rural space and to examine how it shapes their performances and community building. In the article, the Węgajty Theatre is recognized as ‘landscape theatre’, a term which attempts to emphasize a bond between the theatre and the natural environment.