**1. Introduction**

Scientific research on the preservation and actualization of historical and cultural heritage is retrospective, as a rule, for understandable reasons. Historians are concerned with the recreation of a period, accuracy of data, and the reliability of sources, links between data, and personalized information. Scholars of cultural studies typically explore the uses of heritage and the meaning of its cultural forms to interpret the present and the past. Heritage, however, deals not only with the past. It is constantly re-assessed, re-considered, and re-interpreted, endowed with new values and meanings [1]. As defined by UNESCO's World Heritage Center, cultural heritage "is the legacy of physical artefacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from the past generation, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations" [2]. UNESCO further develops that idea in the Memorandum on "World Heritage and Contemporary Architecture" [3], stating that "historic areas and their surroundings should be regarded as forming an irreplaceable universal heritage", and urging "governments and the citizens of the States in whose territory they are situated ( ... ) to safeguard this heritage and integrate it into the social life of our times". Heritage is a prerequisite for consideration in the development strategy of a place, integrating its qualitative characteristics in the direction of preserving the uniqueness and identity of the past, while maintaining stability and ensuring the productivity of that place. Places of considerable historical significance

**Citation:** Cernicova-Buca, M.; Pevnaya, M.V.; Fedorova, M.; Bystrova, T. Students' Awareness of the Local Cultural and Historical Heritage in Post-Communist Regional Centers: Yekaterinburg, Gyumri, Timisoara. *Land* **2022**, *11*, 1443. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land11091443

Academic Editors: Lucia Della Spina, Paola Pellegrini, Antonia Russo, Maria Rosa Valluzzi and Angela Viglianisi

Received: 10 July 2022 Accepted: 28 August 2022 Published: 31 August 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

still need to live and allow development, otherwise they may become endangered and lose their chance of a future. The major crises of the 21st century, first the economic one in 2008 and more recently the health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, opened new perspectives for viewing historical heritage. Therefore, this research aims to explore how stated preferences of youth retain and value places and spaces in cities of choice for pursuing higher education.

National capital cities usually receive particular attention, due to their international exposure, significant budgets, and privileged situations, and traditionally have harbored the main centers of power in political, financial, cultural, and symbolic terms. Other cities, however, need skilled effort to gain a place on the world map. Regional centers, which are the focus of this study, must find ways to be competitive, visible, and efficient in pursuing their development and branding goals, using less resources than capital cities and relying on more innovative solutions. This research team selected regional centers of three postcommunist states—cities where universities are concentrated, which attract young people from all over the region—aiming to identify how the younger generation perceives the attractiveness and unique features pertaining to these cities, to illustrate with examples awareness of the valuation of different cultural goods, and to identify how this generational group is ready to engage in cultural and economic strategies rooted in local cultural and historical heritage.

Several issues are specific to the selected type of cities. First, to preserve themselves and secure their sustainable development, cities that are regional centers have sought to retain young people through a variety of means, including cultural policies, often at the expense of nearby smaller settlements [4–7]. Second, in a more difficult situation, international experience shows that the involvement of young people in urban development projects brings significant gains in terms of cost-reduction and, even more importantly, in attracting residents to the place, leading them away from alienated indifference [4,8,9]. Third, the urban landscape, including historical objects and spaces, can be built while considering the social activities, patterns of behavior, and trajectories of young people, on which consideration the choice of new functions and new meanings of historical and cultural objects and public spaces depends [2,8,10].

Each generation brings its unique understanding of physical, social, economic, political environments [11–13]. The current generation of young people, typically referred to as "Generation Z", is described as globally focused, digitally socialized, and overwhelmingly visually engaged [11,12]. The study of their movement patterns around the city can benefit from an approach bringing together sociologists and specialists in visual technologies. Such research can take place when using visual models of urban space, since 21st-century architects actively use possibilities of information technology (IT) in search for new architectural forms, thereby proposing new approaches in design and construction, in line with UNESCO's recommendations on architectural interventions in historical sites [3].

The questions addressed by our research were: Q1: What architectural spaces or historical–cultural (historical–architectural) objects are retained by young people and shape their (positive) perception of the city?

Q2: Are these spaces or objects integrated in the places students prefer for gathering and socializing?

#### **2. Literature Review**

Scholars in a variety of disciplines have explored the issues of urban landscapes, cultural heritage, and identity, focusing on different aspects. Understanding the city as an individualized place of intersection of territorial settlement, socio-communal, and mental structures [3,5], we assign decisive importance to the latter. In search of an appropriate frame for analyzing the contemporary city, its heritage, and residents' engagement with the space, this research team builds on works relating to the sociology of the city [14] that allow the city and its citizens to be considered in a single research plane, without reducing the first exclusively to the totality of architecture and infrastructure. Park, for example,

wrote that Chicago is "something more than a collection of individuals and amenities... The city is rather a mindset, a body of customs and traditions ... , a product of nature, especially of human nature" [14] (p. 1). Culture, in such an interpretation, is the fourth and final factor in the social organization of citizens and at the same time represents their competition. The city "comes to life" and receives individuality, due to the actions and faces of citizens [8,9,15,16]. At the other end of the spectrum, super-modernity produces "non-places" inside places, i.e. areas in which habitual relational and social purposes are lost, the free movement of individuals is supervised and, at times, regulated and channeled, and identity is diluted. In his seminal work, *Modernity at Large*, Appadurai discussed the need to "produce locality" as a contextual and relational outcome of the effort to maintain a sense of place in the flow of globalization [17]. Groups and individuals need to apply the notions and resources of heritage and memory in confirming identity and reducing uncertainties enhanced by globalization. This is a ritual process, and a deliberate act of production, involving local knowledge, local subjects, and physical objects existing in the geographic space. He warns that "without reliably local subjects, the construction of a local terrain of habitation, production, and moral security would have no interests attached to it" [17] (p. 181). For him, locality is an ever-changing construct that emerges from the practices of local subjects in specific neighborhoods. The possibilities of its realization as a structure of feeling are, in this respect, as variable and incomplete as the relationships among neighborhoods that constitute its practical instances [17] (p. 199).

Along similar lines, Augé discussed the results of place production practices leading to the place–non-place dichotomy [18]. Augé cautions against the romantic vision of places, seen in traditional anthropology as timeless, unchanging, "rooted in the intact soil", maintained by archaic and exotic indigenous rituals, with reference to the "totality temptation" according to which culture is imagined as holistic and accurately represented by randomly selected individuals, artifacts, places, and practices. While localities (places) come to existence by virtue of being relational, deeply historical, and intimately connected with social and individual identities, non-places are transitory places, which human actors pass through as anonymous individuals and do not relate to or identify with in any intimate sense. Airport terminals, hospitals, movie theaters, and shopping malls are some of the most salient examples of such public spaces, where social action does not take place, residues from human practices do not accumulate, and concrete and artificial surfaces tend to dominate. However, the field research carried out to analyze the selected cases for this study was able to identify both "places" and "non-places" recalled by respondents in their descriptions of the cityscape.

As far as the post-socialist features of the cities selected for the analysis, it is important to refer to Diener and Hagen's analysis of the entanglements of ideology and identity in the urban landscape of (post)socialist cities [19]. According to their research, the socialist period laid a strong mark on urban landscapes, entire cities being seen as "symbolic texts that reflected social, economic, and political relationships of power and resistance though their aesthetics, function, layout, and scale" [19] (pp. 490–491). Post-socialist urbanism, evolving in the context of globalization, supranational cooperation, and cultural hybridity, invites new narratives of the urban landscape, where local identities co-exist with broader global ones associated with modernity, transparency, and progressivity. Such new narratives, however, can lead to conflicting interpretations [1], especially for places and city objects that bear heavy political loads.

The main concepts underlying the above-mentioned literature are culture, heritage, and identity. Traditionally, this triangle was assumed to be the foundation of societies [20] and although some parts of this model may be subjected to critical scrutiny, it still lies at the core of most research and even policy development, especially in the field of soft power. Cultural policy is increasingly used as a tool of soft power in a geopolitical sense. Countries, and also sub-national-level subjects such as regions or cities, resort to cultural policy to wield soft power based on attraction, created by policies and opportunities of the country (or region, or city). From this point of view, cultural–political factors, such as

sustainability, authenticity, inclusiveness, networks, and economic effect are considered strategic components that play a significant role in defining place identity and enabling all stakeholders to organize around shared cultural values and vision [4,9]. Hence, specific instances of such soft power potential were considered in the cities selected for analysis by this research. In addition, the identified objects or spaces were presented in a visual form, to allow for qualitative analysis.

The visualization of data allows accurate assessment of preferences and degrees of development in urban spaces, putting historical and cultural heritage in the perspective of its inclusion in the field of visibility and activity of young people. The visual representation of certain places of the city is realized in this study in accordance with the position set out in the work of Lynch, objectifying the understanding of the image of the city as a set of object–spatial elements by which a person correlates themselves [21]. The introduction of this information into scientific discourse is legitimized by Latour's theory [22]. The transition to the study of urban and everyday culture based on the analysis of images occurs in the works of Bachmann-Medick with her concept of performative and visual turn in culture [23], and the work of Mitchell [24]. The researchers authoring this current study consider that the respondents' attitudes towards the cities are an indicator of the cities viability.

Pirogov identified four grounds for the sociological typology of attitudes to the city. These include a motivational basis associated with the need for self-realization, which acquires special features in cities of different states and scales and determines the value orientations of a person; a dispositional basis as a system of attitudes in relation to perceptions of the city; an intentional basis that specifies personally significant objects to which human activity is directed; and a subcultural basis that determines the attitudes to the city of people of different social groups [25]. Accordingly, underestimation or misunderstanding of certain objects or of the whole city is fraught not only with passivity, but also with all sorts of negative actions, from vandalism to departure [4].

Attitudes towards the city depend significantly on its manifestation of a "human scale" [26]. This scale involves physical and visual spaces commensurate with the person and the possibilities of their perception, including the presence of many pedestrians (not cars), greenery, and visual landmarks. Furthermore, attitudes towards the city are not static. They can change during different cultural practices, as highlighted above [1]. To involve young people in urban development and promotion, it is necessary to understand their readiness for action, their degree of attachment to a place, and so on. Research results capitalize on the responses of a generation that might not have the actual power to determine change [12], but whose presence ensures the viability of the investigated cities and their capacity to maintain relevance on a regional, national, and even global scale [8].
