Territorial scenarios in Europe: Growth and disparities beyond the economic crisis

Up to the start of the present economic crisis (2008), Europe was characterized by a clear trend of convergence in the GDP level of European countries, which was able to counterbalance the opposite trend in intra-national disparities that took place in many countries – namely those with a more recent accession to the Union. The economic downturn of the last years, however, has brought this process of convergence to a halt, mainly as a consequence of the tight austerity policies imposed to many southern European countries. This evidence, recognized by the European Union in the last Cohesion Report (“the crisis has reversed the process of convergence of regional GDP per head and unemployment within the EU”) brought to the fore the relevance of macroeconomic policies in regional development. Therefore in this paper, with the help of a newly built macroeconomic and regional forecasting model (MASST), the future of regional convergence / divergence in the EU is explored through four scenarios: a baseline one, recognizing the clear break of the crisis and three exploratory scenarios, depicting in a consistent way three different “territorial” strategies: supporting large metropolises vs. cities of second and third rank, vs. peripheral and lagging regions. Interestingly enough, the “cities” scenario proves to be at the same time the most cohesive and the most expansionary, shedding some doubts on the traditional equity/efficiency trade-off through an intermediate strategy based on the exploitation of a diffused territorial capital. Overall, diverging regional processes are forecasted from now to 2030

Time walkers and spatial dynamics of ageing information

The distribution of information is essential for living system's ability to coordinate and adapt. Random walkers are often used to model this distribution process and, in doing so, one effectively assumes that information maintains its relevance over time. But the value of information in social and biological systems often decay and must continuously be updated. To capture the spatial dynamics of ageing information, we introduce time walkers. A time walker moves like a random walker, but interacts with traces left by other walkers, some representing older information, some newer. The traces forms a navigable information landscape. We quantify the dynamical properties of time walkers moving on a two-dimensional lattice and the quality of the information landscape generated by their movements. We visualise the self-similar landscape as a river network, and show that searching in this landscape is superior to random searching and scales as the length of loop-erased random walks

New trajectories of the Hungarian regional development: balanced and rush growth of territorial capital

The basic assumption of the paper is that numerous similarities exist between the patterns of economic growth and territorial capital growth. The rush economic growth and rush growth of territorial capital are compared empirically at Hungarian micro-regional level from 2004 until 2010. After normalizing the dataset, a very novel spatial econometric method is applied, called a penalty for bottleneck. The results show that the constant rush growth of territorial capital is as harmful as economic recession. On the other hand, the decrease of infrastructural and social capital caused the rush growth of territorial capital in this period. Moreover, the key findings of two case studies suggest that the balanced growth of territorial capital will be created by the falling social inequalities and increasing infrastructural capita

Employment mobility in high-technology agglomerations: the cases of Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire

This paper examines labour market behaviour of the highly skilled in high-tech local economies, taking the UK examples of Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire as case studies. It reports on data from a survey of members of three scientific institutes to compare rates of employee mobility in the two locations and considers the likely explanations and implications of those patterns

Sustainable Urban Transformation and the Green Urban Economy

This chapter explores the connections between the concepts of sustainable urban transformation and the green urban economy, proposes a framework for understanding how these concepts “fit” together, and makes some practical suggestions for local governments (and national and international policy)

Exploring the role of professional associations in collective learning in London and New York's advertising and law professional service firm clusters.

The value of regional economies for collective learning has been reported by numerous scholars. However often work has been criticised for lacking analytical clarity and failing to explore the architectures of collective learning and the role of the knowledge produced in making firms in a cluster economy successful. This paper engages with these problematics and investigates how collective learning is facilitated in the advertising and law professional service firm clusters in London and New York. It explores the role of professional associations and investigates how they mediate a collective learning process in each city. It argues that professional associations seed urban communities of practice that emerge outside of the formal activities of professional associations. In these communities individual with shared interests in advertising and law learn from one-another and are therefore able to adapt and evolve one-another approaches to common industry challenges. The paper suggests this is another form of the variation Marshall highlighted in relation to cluster-based collective learning. The paper also shows how the collective learning process is affected by the presence, absence and strength of an institutional thickness. It is therefore argued that a richer understanding of institutional affects is needed in relation to CL

cultural heritage creativity and local development a scientific research program

n/