Realising the potentials of Territorial Capital: the role of policy and the mobilisation process (original) (raw)
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Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, 2019
This paper investigates the territorial capital endowments across European regions. Data are collected at NUTS 2 level for all European regions, for the most recent year available, for several indicators that measure different components of territorial capital. Our evidence reveals several patterns of regional economic development, with specific configurations of the territorial assets, which further shed light on the connection between location, competitiveness and development.
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The paper introduces the concept of territorial assets and discusses their role for regional development. Focusing on European societies and taking into account different strands of the literature on place and territorial capital, we argue that the endowment with – and mobilization of – such territorial assets could be seen as a key aspect of regional policy, producing changes in the attraction (and/or retention) of specific segments of population and, in a longer-term perspective, influencing sustainable development strategies. In this light, ‘territorial attractiveness’ – characterized in this paper in both conceptual and operational terms – is presented as a powerful element in European spatial policy, allowing regional development strategies to be more systematically integrated under an overall objective of territorial cohesion, while taking into account their implications in terms of human mobility.
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Territorial capital (TC) is often defined as a set of tangible and intangible values, of an economic, social and environmental nature, capable of determining the development potential of a territory. In this paper, two fundamental categories of TC factors are identified. The first (generative factors) includes human capital and social capital which together significantly influence individual and collective action. The material and immaterial effects induced by this category of TC take the form of structures, infrastructures, productive and governmental structures, artistic expressions, and the cultural heritage and constitute the second category of TC factors (here defined as sedimented factors). Measuring and assessing these two categories, here applied to the case of provinces in Italy, could allow the formulation of key policy suggestions for economic growth and territorial development. The preliminary results provide useful information about the methodological framework adopted and pose new questions for future research developments.
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Regional Statistics, 2023
Territorial capital encompasses all tangible and intangible assets that represent the growth potential of a place. This study reviews the concept of territorial capital and highlights its components. A database of territorial capital indicators for 270 regions of the European Union at the NUTS 2 level is employed, and a classification of regions based on the material and non-material assets of territorial capital is presented. Mapping differences across regions provides insight into the key dimensions of territorial capital, namely the material resource endowment, non-material resource endowment, and material–non-material asset relations. The results reveal that European regions have been differently endowed with territorial capital during the 2010s; a sharp divide is visible between the Western and Eastern European regions, according to the degree of urbanisation and according to the relative development of regions. The findings of this study have the potential to contribute significantly to the ongoing discussion and evolving research on territorial capital.
The Role of Territorial Capital in Urban Renewal in a Non-Core Central European City
DETUROPE - The Central European Journal of Tourism and Regional Development, 2020
The concept of territorial capital, presented by the authors as an alternative to exogenous, FDI-driven economic restructuring strategies, has fertilised regional development policy thinking in multiple ways. Triggering reflections on the bottom-up reconceptualisation of regional policy, it has a particular salience in peripheral or lagging regions due to its potential to reverse deeply-entrenched core-periphery relations. The paper discusses the concept of territorial capital with a view to its policy embeddedness and academic valorisation. The structure of the paper is as follows. The first section presents the theoretical antecedents and conceptual evolution of the notion of territorial capital. This is followed by a brief discussion of the relevance of territorial capital in non-core or peripheral Central European contexts. The concluding section seeks to identify the main obstacles to collaborative and integrated strategy-making relying on the territorial capital approach in the case study city of Pécs, demonstrating its crucial absence from post-2000 top-down regional development programmes.
Regional Statistics, 2023
Territorial capital encompasses all tangible and intangible assets that represent the growth potential of a place. This study reviews the concept of territorial capital and highlights its components. A database of territorial capital indicators for 270 regions of the European Union at the NUTS 2 level is employed, and a classification of regions based on the material and non-material assets of territorial capital is presented. Mapping differences across regions provides insight into the key dimensions of territorial capital, namely the material resource endowment, non-material resource endowment, and material–non-material asset relations. The results reveal that European regions have been differently endowed with territorial capital during the 2010s; a sharp divide is visible between the Western and Eastern European regions, according to the degree of urbanisation and according to the relative development of regions. The findings of this study have the potential to contribute significantly to the ongoing discussion and evolving research on territorial capital.
Territorial capital as a determinant of development processes in functional areas
Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Oeconomica, 2016
The sectoral approach to shaping processes of development has recently started to lose ground to a territorial-based approach. The territorial approach has already become the leading paradigm for creating development policies on the EU level as well as on national and/or regional levels. This results from the growing role of territorial capital in the globalizing world – even though globalization is an undisputed fact, the development policies are increasingly emphasizing the need to adapt development plans to the existing, specific conditions characterizing each territory. Endogenic resources which in their entirety create territorial capital are typically located within the administrative borders of several, functionally inter-dependent territorial units. That is why individual communes (or other territorial units, i.e. districts or even regions) should not become the leading subjects of development policies as this role is best performed by entire functional areas. A functional a...
ERSA conference papers, 2011
Empirical analyses highlight local structural features (territorial capital) as constraints on regional growth and interregional convergence processes, but scant attention is devoted to traditional localised resources and specifically the natural and cultural heritage. However, no heritage provides value by itself: only the application of know-how embodied in human capital achieves this. Specifically, natural and cultural heritage becomes economically relevant through human capital acting through tourist, recreational and cultural activities. Also because of its service exporting nature, tourism is believed to contribute to economic growth and job creation similarly to manufacturing; nevertheless, theoretical and empirical literature concerned manufacturing and rarely studied tourism or extended results to it. Besides, tourism is the market activity most favouring policentricity in Europe: apparently tourism brings territorial cohesion and equity, although its most dynamic component (culture, events) favours metropolitan locations. However, heritage valorisation responding to tourist service demand may have adverse effects on development (congestion) and significant impacts on environmental quality and on resource consumption (heritage dissipation); these partly offsets strictly economic benefits and over time they weaken the destination's pull, hence its value and its population's welfare. Our goal is to discuss and analyse the role of territorial capital, and specifically of intangibles such as the natural and cultural capital, in regional growth processes and in local response processes to exogenous crises. To this end we aim at achieving the following objectives: i) developing the theoretical framework of territorial capital, highlighting the role of immobile resources in local economic growth and in its spatial differentials, and the role of human capital in resource valorisation; ii) building a national database of territorial capital in Italian provinces, containing synthetic endowment indicators for natural and cultural heritage, human capital, and structure and distribution of the tourism and leisure industries. Our methodology includes the application of multivariate, and later on econometric, analyses, with the relevant stateof-the-art techniques. We use already available European and national databases, making recourse to ad hoc integrations if and when needed. The study area is Italy; the optimal tier is NUTS3, i.e. provinces, in Italy. The time reference is the period from the early 1990s to the latest available year, to ensure a structural long-term approach.
Building synthetic indicators for aspects of territorial capital
2015
Empirical analyses highlight local structural features (territorial capital) as constraints on regional growth and interregional convergence processes, but scant attention is devoted to traditional localised resources and specifically the natural and cultural heritage. However, no heritage provides value by itself: only the application of know-how embodied in human capital achieves this. Specifically, natural and cultural heritage becomes economically relevant through human capital acting through tourist, recreational and cultural activities. Also because of its service exporting nature, tourism is believed to contribute to economic growth and job creation similarly to manufacturing; nevertheless, theoretical and empirical literature concerned manufacturing and rarely studied tourism or extended results to it. Besides, tourism is the market activity most favouring policentricity in Europe: apparently tourism brings territorial cohesion and equity, although its most dynamic component (culture, events) favours metropolitan locations. However, heritage valorisation responding to tourist service demand may have adverse effects on development (congestion) and significant impacts on environmental quality and on resource consumption (heritage dissipation); these partly offsets strictly economic benefits and over time they weaken the destination's pull, hence its value and its population's welfare. Our goal is to discuss and analyse the role of territorial capital, and specifically of intangibles such as the natural and cultural capital, in regional growth processes and in local response processes to exogenous crises. To this end we aim at achieving the following objectives: i) developing the theoretical framework of territorial capital, highlighting the role of immobile resources in local economic growth and in its spatial differentials, and the role of human capital in resource valorisation; ii) building a national database of territorial capital in Italian provinces, containing synthetic endowment indicators for natural and cultural heritage, human capital, and structure and distribution of the tourism and leisure industries. Our methodology includes the application of multivariate, and later on econometric, analyses, with the relevant stateof-the-art techniques. We use already available European and national databases, making recourse to ad hoc integrations if and when needed. The study area is Italy; the optimal tier is NUTS3, i.e. provinces, in Italy. The time reference is the period from the early 1990s to the latest available year, to ensure a structural long-term approach.