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European Neighborhood
CONCEPT AND STATUS QUO
Catalin Gheorghe, Phd, art theorist and critic, editor and coordinator of “Vector magazine – art and culture in its context”.
A concept as well as a reality, vicinity includes meanings and excludes people, configurating spaces of conflict and coexistence. Bringing into discussion distances and proximities, vicinity speaks about the different types of localization, through integration or resistance. The common meaning of “territorial vicinity” can be extended to the special meaning of “cultural vicinity”, both types permitting structure variations in relationship with transitivity, nomadism and affiliation. Perceived as a state of mind, that would reflect communion facts, but both as a pattern of analysis for the absorption of Communism and of the invasion of capitalism, vicinity predisposes us to living and acting, to opening ourselves and securing our selves, to friendship and conflict.

Contemporary Neighborhood
REMIX – A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Ana Bleahu, Sociologist, ICCV Researcher, The Romanian Academy, Bucharest
The excess of today stems from those in the past. In Romania there is an overlapping of a European tradition (with obvious Oriental accents), of one of the harshest types of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe, and of an explosion of contemporary energy. How do we define the new neoghborhood of European Romania?

Revitalising the Neibghborhood
"cARTier, URBAN REGENERATION PROJECT"
Matei Bejenaru, PhD, Curator, Visual Artist, Founding member of Vector Foundation, Iasi
The cARTier project, carried out by the Vector Association, envisioned the cultural regeneration of the Tatarasi neighborhood in Iasi through a series of creative projects, interventions in public space, workshops, shows, exhibitions, etc. The members of the association and their guests involved in a successful manner the inhabitants into their project, determining a redefinition of the identity profile of the neighborhood community.

Contemporary Neighborhood
"MEDIA, THE PUBLIC TRUTH AND MORAL COMMUNITIES IN CONTEMPORARY ROMANIA"
Florea Ioncioaia, Phd, The Philology Department of the „A. I. Cuza” University, Iasi
The presentation approaches the subject of vicinity in the age of media communication. More precisely, it will try to answer to the following question: how do vicinity relationships change in a world of mediated communication, of virtual encounters and of moral debates between anonymous people? Does vicinity still function as a normative instance in the given communities, or are new criteria and a new meaning vicinity needed? Starting from the analysis of the old concept of community ( Gemeinschaft ) and society ( Gesellschaft ), the presentation will try to see to what extent we can still speak of communities (moral, elective, symbolic) today, and to observe the role of the media in their deconstruction/reconstruction. A review of contemporary community representations will be carried out, as well as of the meaning of vicinity that these imply.

Neighborhood – A Different Type Of Space
"GEOGRAPHICAL VICINITY – BETWEEN GEOMETRY, SOCIAL RULE AND SENSITIVITY"
Professor Phd. Octavian Groza, Cuguat-TIGRIS, Geography Department, „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iasi
In geography, vicinity is dual, being framed conceptually by space as a „technical” structure (punctiform, reticular or planiform space structures) and by space as a built object through human action (through perception, conception or practise). As a „technical” structure, vicinity generates polarities and peripheries, creates barriers, limits or interferences, generates administration structures, represents the main vector for certain spatial processes (difusion, movement..). as a built object, vicinity overlaps the places, containing idelolgies, beliefs, myths, irrational or rational, definig itself mainly by subcultural parameters. In order to further complicate this, in geography the two views can be used at the same time, everything being a matter of scale.