Departament de Geografia Fisica y Análisis Geográfico Regional

A acessibilidade aos serviços de saúde assume um papel fundamental na organização do território influenciando, desde logo, a perceção da qualidade de vida da população. Para tal, em cada território, a distribuição geográfica dos equipamentos de saúde deve ser adequada à estrutura demográfica da população, sob pena de aumentar o processo de exclusão social.
A área de estudo selecionada é o município de Guimarães onde se procura conjugar a oferta e a procura dos serviços de saúde. Considerando a necessidade de orientar o planeamento em saúde por padrões de melhoria da acessibilidade, este estudo pode ser um contributo sobre como recorrendo às ferramentas básicas do ArcGis é possível obter uma imagem mais realista do território.
Recorreu-se às potencialidades da análise espacial, nomeadamente das distâncias euclidianas, para demonstrar as desigualdades nos níveis de acessibilidade da população, a andar a pé, às unidades de saúde no município de Guimarães.

As mudanças demográficas que têm ocorrido nos últimos anos têm determinado diferenças sociais e económicas, nomeadamente no que se relaciona com a acessibilidade aos cuidados de saúde. A litoralização versus despovoamento do interior tem criado fossos cada vez mais significativos, o que tem implicado iniquidades expressivas nos resultados em saúde, designadamente no acesso aos mesmos. Tendo em conta a inexistência de uma visão macro de localização e da acessibilidade aos cuidados de saúde, nesta comunicação pretende-se avaliar a oferta destes serviços, considerando que é necessário ter uma visão mais realista do território de Portugal Continental para que se percecione as diferenças entre áreas mais repulsivas ou mais dinâmicas, com deficit ou excesso de equipamentos de saúde. Deste modo, recorrendo à utilização de ferramentas de análise espacial urge avaliar as iniquidades no acesso ao serviço nacional de urgência e perceber as alterações que se verificaram no último período censitário.

The sustainable development of municipalities located in rural areas, such as the case of Boticas, requires an appropriate strategy to respond to the problems that tend to be associated with the fact that it is a peripheral territory, in particular: the fight against depopulation, the fragility of economic fabric, the weakness of institutional thickness and closure of basic equipment and services. In this sense, many municipalities have been developing regional development strategies based on tourism, enhancing thus the development of its endogenous resources.
However, territorial convergence inherent in these strategies is still very inconspicuous and the repercussions of the same solution have very different impacts in diverse regions, depending on the capabilities and local opportunities, often antagonistic.
For these reasons, this research attempts to contribute to this debate, discussing the potential of tourism for the economic revitalization of the municipality of Boticas, from the experience of other territorial contexts in Portugal, in Europe and internationally. The purpose of this research is to contribute to the identification of resources and tourism products that can lead to the development and sustainable tourism in the short and medium range. Therefore, this dissertation tries to: (i) recognize the tourism resources and products; (ii) identify different perceptions of different stakeholders regarding the tourism potential; and (iii) identify the destination image of Boticas.
To this end, we used several tools based on two sessions of focus group (conducted in 2015), which had 21 stakeholders of several areas as interveners; a self-administered survey of 453 residents, of which 373 were validated (conducted in 2016) and in the collection of 728 photographs, related to the period between January 2005 and March 2015, from Google Earth, using the database of Panoramio photographs (implemented in 2016).
Results highlight three main facts: first, there are unexploited tourist resources capable of adjusting to certain niches of demand; second, that the territory has been focusing on diversification of leisure and recreational activities, as well as the infrastructure to support tourism, although this is not reflected in visitor attraction; and finally, that there are obstacles to the establishment of networks of local actors and municipalities in the region in order to provide an integrated promotion of
tourism, which perpetuates the lack of consequent strategies in this territory. From these results, one can draw political recommendations not only for the study case, but also to other rural areas with similar problems.

The  urban  space  has  always  been  one  of  the significant  factors  in  assessing  the society that inhabits and the projection of the evolution of urban planning decisions.
The fall of the socialist regimes made a series of urban transformations describing the peculiarity of post-socialist development in the entire region of Eastern Europe.
This communication reviews some of the parameters of urban change in Bulgaria, after  more  than  twenty  years  of  transition  and  focuses  on  the  context  of  the  new challenges of urban planning in the Bulgarian cities, with special attention to the City of Sofia’s case.

The post-socialist development in the cities of Eastern Europe since the 90s of the last century has deeply changed the compact one-class model of the city due to the dispersion, as well as spatial and social fragmentation of the capitalist cities. During the past few years, the theoretical problem of isomorphism between the physical and social space of post-socialist cities and social inequalities as expression of hierarchy of places (Bourdieu, 1997) is still a topical issue for Bulgarian scientists. Cities like Sofia remain on the periphery of the general and scientific literature interests (Hirt, 2012). Since 1989 they have been marked by the rapidly expanding suburban areas and have seen the processes of privatization of urban space and the isolation of "High life" inherent in the Western societies. The result of the coexistence of different social classes in the suburb area of Sofia remains completely misunderstood and is still a main topic of the Bulgarian urban and radical geography. The purpose of this paper is tracking the current trends of the south - southwestern periphery of the metropolitan area of the Bulgarian capital Sofia, as an expression of neoliberal urban conflicts and the classes' fragmentation. A special focus of the study islaid on the phenomenon of the gated communities perceived as a global and irrefutable marker focused on the transformation of the urban southern periphery. The study covers four peripheral districts of the city, namely - Panchаrevo, Vitosha, Ovcha Kupel and Bankya.