This paper explores the issues connected between rural sustainable development in formerly state-socialist countries and the local cultural heritage of rural areas. It pays specific attention to the potential of cultural tourism which can enhance local rural development. This paper is a case study of the Hărman commune, and this area is investigated in depth. It is one of the most important rural and cultural areas located in Brașov County of Romania, a country with an impressive cultural heritage concentrated in its rural areas. The study uses a mixed-method analysis combining quantitative and qualitative research (focus groups, interviews, oral histories, and personal conversions), participatory ethnographic observation, and logical framework analysis (LFA). The main findings of the study illustrate that the Hărman commune has an important cultural heritage which could be more capitalized on in the future through the lens of cultural tourism to ensure local sustainability and to open up new perspectives in terms of local development, connecting rural and cultural tourism with other economic activities. Furthermore, the main findings of this study represent, beyond an informative platform for the local actors in rural development, an inspiring instrument that could frame new policies in local rural sustainable development and fertile backgrounds for new debates in local rural sustainability, enriching local agendas on rural sustainable development through cultural heritage capitalization and cultural tourism.

The linking (in terms of functional use) of brownfield sites with creative spaces is a frequently encountered phenomenon in western European, post-communist, and industrialized countries in general and is viewed as a way of revitalizing, repurposing, or simply making temporary use of them. It may also be seen in the municipality of Timișoara in Romania, where 12 creative spaces, each involving one or more kinds of functionalities (coworking space, maker space, community space, event space, incubator), are operating on such sites. A content analysis of interviews with those in charge of these 12 creative spaces brought to light, on the one hand, the opportunities represented by the existence of derelict industrial spaces, as represented by their large size, low rents, and innate flexibility, but on the other the reality of a number of long-term constraints on the use of these spaces, given the financial instability of cultural operators, the limited numbers of the public who are interested in creative activities of this kind, and, most seriously, the development pressure exerted by some real-estate developers on derelict industrial spaces.