Geological Approach for Landfill Site Selection: A Case Study of Vršac Municipality, Serbia

One of the biggest problems of environmental protection in Serbia is landfills. It is often a case that the economic interests are predominant in the landfill sitting; thus, most landfills are not located according to standards. This study shows that detailed geological data assets combined with geographical modeling represents a reliable way to define and locate the landfill site. Geological evaluation is discussed in detail with regard to bedrock lithology, quaternary geology, geological structure, hydrogeology, surface runoff patterns, and topography. An approach combining geographical modeling and geology is presented for determining the sites suitable for landfill selection with respect to their geologic favorability. As opposed to numerous research papers on this topic, in the methodological procedure, special importance is devoted to the analysis of the geological criteria. In this way, it is significantly easier to determine the landfill area with the best characteristics due to geological structure and lithology which unequivocally and precisely indicates inadequate territories for candidate sites. The multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) is based on geological criteria upgraded with road (primary, residential, secondary, and tertiary), settlements network, railway, airport, infrastructure, land use, hypsometry aquifer, wetland, and surface water. The score values are divided into four classes, i.e., restricted areas, suitable but avoid, suitable, and most suitable. Combining geographical modeling with geology led to the recognition of two locations to be most favorable for landfill site located in the most suitable area, which represents 25.3% of the study area.

Games With Space

The culture beeing in the geographical space is one of the important problem fields of ontology. The process of understanding the environment has many levels and characteristics. Culture is an universal object of semiotics, in this case it is considered as a subject of the semioticization of geographical space, the formation of the image of the world. Culture inherits and constantly renews the main discourses associated with this ongoing process, the origins of which lie in the deep archaic. As a result, stable representations of geographical objects and/or permanent culturally significant symbols with different degrees of spatial connotations are formed. Much more interesting than the already formed images and symbols is the process of their creation and the patterns and frames that can be traced in it. The meanings created by culture are involved in the process of secondary interpretation. The most common are several areas of interpretation that play an active role in structuring our ideas about the geocultural space. They can be conventionally referred to as “games with space”, because they have a certain amount of arbitrariness, but also have established rules. This article discusses a few of them – games of range, games of geographical modeling, games of structures, of time, of significations, of emotions and institutionalization.