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Inner areas matter: a place-sensitive approach for the identification of the Daily Life Spaces in the Abruzzo Region
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Abstract
Despite the institutionalisation of the issue of inner areas with the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI), a reflection on their spatial organisation is still missing. Our paper aims at filling this gap by providing a methodology aimed at identifying the citizens’ Daily Life Spaces (DLS) in the Abruzzo region. Their identification results from a multi-step algorithm based on an original definition of central places and on the notions of geographical and organised proximity which consider both citizens’ isochrones and commuting flows. Results show that the output of the algorithm can be used as the spatial unit of analysis of cohesion policies. Our methodology is further able to provide the internal spatial organisation of both Labour Market Areas and Project Areas and is consistent with an historical perspective. Finally, it questions the SNAI classification, calling for a revision of its methodology of identification.
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The National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) is a public policy designed to tackle depopulation in inner areas, defined according to the distance from centers offering essential services. Such a policy’s success is crucial to address the new challenges for planning brought to light by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this sense, there is a need to adequately support its implementation by providing handy decision support tools, understanding the power balances among municipalities, and defining proper interventions. The Indicator Grid, already used by the SNAI for project areas selection, can answer this need. However, the Grid’s application to support public policy at the municipality level requires reviewing some of its features, such as the indicators’ large number and the impossibility of defining some of them at the municipal scale. Based on these premises, this paper aims at supporting inner areas policies by carrying out a critical analysis of the current SNAI Grid, aimed at improving its effectiveness. It relies on a hybrid methodology that merges qualitative data interpretations and statistical analyses. Thanks to this method, defining a parsimonious Grid by leaving its complexity and information level untouched is possible. The so-defined set of indicators can represent a valuable reference tool in pinpointing priorities for actions or selecting further territorial scopes from the SNAI perspective, even if it still brings some criticalities to be faced.
Europe’s response to the sovereign debt crisis in Southern Europe has been premised on the idea that these states can return to growth through internal devaluation and fiscal consolidation. This article explores the distributive consequences of that strategy in Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. We argue that standard measures of poverty do not capture the deterioration in living standards as fully as anchored poverty. Moreover, we show that inequality trends conceal considerable re-ranking within the income distribution: those who were rich in 2012 had got richer in 2009–12, but those who were rich in 2009 lost ground in 2009–12. We find that in all four countries the new poor include significantly fewer pensioners and more unemployed workers, and are considerably poorer than the old poor had been. We demonstrate that there was significant variation in the magnitude and design of austerity, with Italy imposing a far smaller adjustment than Spain, and Portugal achieving less inequality in spite of robust fiscal consolidation. Nevertheless, even when austerity measures were designed to reduce inequality by compressing incomes downward, their second-order macro-economic effects ultimately increased inequality (except in Portugal). In the last section, we explore the political reasons for this variation.
The location of high-order producer services has been extensively documented for the 1970s and 1980s when researchers turned their attention to the effects of tertiarization on regional development. In this article we propose, on the one hand, to update the spatial analysis of high-order producer services by investigating whether they have continued to diffuse away from the top of the urban hierarchy between 1991 and 2001. On the other hand, we also propose to incorporate certain hypotheses from the knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) literature, in particular possible spillover effects, synergies between economic sectors and labor market effects, into the spatial analysis. Over and above city size, do these factors contribute to our understanding of the spatial dynamics of high-order producer services? Overall we find that these services reversed their diffusion process during the 1990s, decreasing their presence in smaller cities in peripheral regions. Labor market, synergies, and spillover effects contribute, to some extent, to understanding their overall spatial distribution and its evolution during the 1990s, but region and urban size remain their principal organizing factors across space.
Traditionally, EU policies have been focused on economic and social cohesion. Recently, the territorial dimension of regional
disparities as an aspect of EU policy has gained importance. The European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), adopted
in 1999, is meant to support a balanced development of the EU territory. Moreover, the European Commission addressed issues
of territorial cohesion in its latest cohesion report. The present paper deals with territorial disparities and their current
development in the EU. It analyses which kinds of region develop dynamically and offer favourable labour market conditions.
The differences between rural and urban areas are a fundamental feature of territorial disparities in the EU and are of essential
significance for the ESDP. The analysis deals with the question whether disparities between poor and rich regions as well
as different growth trends and labour market conditions are still marked by the dualism between city and countryside.
We survey literatures from disciplines including ecology, psychology, disaster studies, geography, political science and economics
to understand how they see resilience. Some literature describes resilience as a return to conditions before a shock. Other
resilience writing embraces a complex systems perspective. For other fields, resilience describes the ability of people, regions
or ecosystems to thrive despite adversity. We conclude that although the resilience metaphor poses the danger of fuzziness and necessitates careful specification of space and time boundaries in studying resilience phenomena, it proves useful for
illuminating regional change and linking different types of regional stresses to alternative resilience frameworks.
Considerable observational evidence indicates that travel time, averaged across a population, is stable at about an hour a day. This implies both an upper and a lower bound to time that can be expended on travel. The upper bound explains the self-limiting nature of road traffic congestion, as well as the difficulty experienced in attempting mitigation: the prospect of delays deters some road users, who are attracted back following interventions aimed at relieving congestion. The lower bound implies that time savings cannot be the main economic benefit of transport investment, which means that conventional transport economic appraisal is misleading. In reality, the main benefit for users is increased access to desired destinations, made possible by faster travel, which is the origin of induced traffic. Access is subject to saturation, consistent with the evidence of travel demand saturation. However, access is difficult to monetise for inclusion in cost–benefit analysis. Consequential uplift in real estate values may be a more practical way of estimating access benefits, which is relevant to the possibility of capturing part of such uplift to help fund transport investment that enhances such access.
This report compares urbanisation trends in OECD countries on the basis of a newly defined OECD methodology which enables cross-country comparison of the socio-econimic and environmental performance of metropolitan areas in OECD countries. The methodology is presented and results from its application to 27 OECD countries are discussed together with policy implication both on national growth and governance of cities. The report also includes three original papers that present the urbanisation dynamics and prospects in China and South Africa and the governance challenges resulting from the new policy agenda on cities in the United Kingdom.
Abruzzo is at a tipping point: despite economic, cultural and natural strengths, the region is facing declining economic growth, ageing population and a reduction in outside economic aid. The devastating earthquake that hit the regional capital L’Aquila and its surroundings on 6 April 2009 caused 309 deaths and was a significant economic shock, jeopardizing the long-term growth prospects of an already vulnerable region.
To increase its resilience to current and future shocks, Abruzzo must encourage innovation-driven growth, based on knowledge and better use of skills, and redesign the city of L’Aquila through technological upgrade to make it more attractive to outsiders and improve the quality of life of its residents.
The report suggests that Abruzzo should focus on endogenous resources to build its long-term development strategy and, at the same time, to increase the external openness of the regional system to attract more entrepreneurs, students, foreigners and external capital. The economic development and quality of societal life in Abruzzo will strongly depend on how private and public actors will make the best use of existing knowledge, strengthening the cultural and economic networks as a major tool for growth; as well as promoting information sharing, transparency, accountability and community engagement to improve decision making.
More broadly, the issues raised in the report can help other governments to rethink regional policy, for both regions vulnerable to natural disasters and for those facing long-term decline. As such, eight guiding recommendations for building resilient regions after a disaster are drawn. These guiding recommendations can provide a framework for policy making in other OECD regions.
This paper summarizes and analyses findings from more than two dozen aggregate and disaggregate studies of travel time (and sometimes money) expenditures, exploring the question of the existence of a constant travel time budget. We conclude (with prior researchers) that travel time expenditures are not constant except, perhaps, at the most aggregate level. Nevertheless, individuals' travel time expenditures do show patterns that can be partly explained by measurable characteristics. Travel time expenditure is strongly related to individual and household characteristics (e.g., income level, gender, employment status, and car ownership), attributes of activities at the destination (e.g., activity group and activity duration), and characteristics of residential areas (e.g., density, spatial structure, and level of service). To the extent that travel time expenditures are constant at the aggregate level, the underlying mechanisms explaining that regularity are not well understood. Consequently, further research into explaining travel time and money expenditure patterns is justified.
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