During the last decades, tourism activities were promoted by local and regional policy-makers as a universal solution for rural areas’ suffering from massive depopulation, technological delay, or economical struggles. A large debate flourished in the literature on whether and to what extent tourism could play a role in supporting rural localities. Some valid evidence was brought by researchers backing the cure-all role of tourism, as well as by those who criticized the limited, or even negative, impact of tourism on rural areas. However, following the economic crisis of 2008, the attention switched to a newer and more relevant topic: Does tourism increase the resilience performance of rural areas? Our paper tries to answer this question by focusing on both economic and demographic resilience, which are the most sensitive sectors during an important shock. Following a detailed territorial breakdown according to a twofold typology (spatial accessibility and number of employees), correlations were used to determine the impact of tourism activities on building resilience for each type of rural territory. The results indicated a positive effect of tourism activities upon economic and demographic resilience performance in highly accessible rural areas, while in peripheral areas, the impact was insignificant. This paper provides new insights into the various roles that tourism plays in rural areas and offers suggestions for local policy-makers.

EU post-socialist countries are nowadays the epicenter of urban shrinkage, despite economic growth trajectories reported during the last decades. However, systematic assessments of urban shrinkage patterns for this part of the continent are surprisingly insufficiently addressed in the literature, and the relationship between urban demographic decline/growth and economic decline/growth is still to be understood. This paper first delivers a state-of-the-art of the peculiarities of urban shrinkage in East-Central EU countries. Secondly, it employs an analysis grid to assess severity, prevalence, persistence, speed and regional incidence of urban decline in Romania—one of the most affected post-socialist countries within the European Union. Thirdly, it explores the statistical association between urban shrinkage severity and economic growth, on one hand, and between urban shrinkage severity and municipality revenues, on the other. Results show that urban shrinkage is currently increasing in prevalence and severity among Romanian cities, thus continuing an alarming trend that started in 1990. Secondly, the results pinpoint a statistically significant association between demographic shrinkage, local economic output and municipalities’ own-source revenues. However, the size effects are rather weak, suggesting a more nuanced relationship between economic and demographic urban growth than that predicted by some theories of urban change.

The modern concept of smart city rose from a relatively ambiguous term dealing with the future of urban areas to one of the most popular contemporary fields of research. Tackling a considerable range of topics from digitalization, citizen involvement, sustainability or governance, it managed to rapidly attract both academics and policy-makers. This study reviews the research papers published on smart city concept with application to European Union, and especially to the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe. The results indicate many common features of smart cities in EU, but also some peculiarities of CEE in this regard, many deriving from their socialist inheritance. Meanwhile, it can be noticed the rather incipient status of smart cities approaches, the insufficient resources allocated by local authorities, which rely extensively on EU funding, the lack of awareness from citizens and the lack of a comprehensive and structured strategic approach. In order to tackle the abovementioned issues, our paper suggests a series of measures and directions for policy-makers, local administrations and business environment.