The Impact of Building Recreational Houses in Rural Areas. Case Study: Ranca Mountain Resort

The paper aims at showing how the present-day rural space suffers modifications meant to produce different changes in terms of physiognomy and also at social and economic levels, focusing on the phenomenon of building recreational houses in rural areas, by population coming from urban areas. The case study we have chosen refers to the Ranca mountain resort, situated in the Southern Carpathians (in the Parang Mountains). This place, which thirty years ago might have passed for a peripherally rural area, it is now characterized by incipient urbanization. It is interesting to observe that this process is not supported by the closest urban centre (the town of Novaci), but by the towns located at greater distances (the towns of Craiova and Targu-Jiu), that have the social and economic power to extend their influence up to 150 km distance. Therefore, the flows caused, on the one hand by the urban population migrating during the week-ends to the rural areas and, on the other hand, by the investments made in utility infrastructures, have profound implications not only on the changing rural landscape, but also on peoples' perception of traditional (rural) versus modern (urban) way of life. Hence, a new type of landscape appears in remote rural areas, which benefit from an extraordinary natural potential, as a result of town dwellers' wish for natural surroundings and urban standards.