Territories Categories: Europe

In March 2024, Sally Hardy retired after almost 40 years with the Association.

David Bailey is Professor of Business Economics at the Birmingham Business School and a Senior Fellow of the ESRC’s UK in a Changing Europe programme, exploring the impacts of Brexit on UK automotive and manufacturing. He has written extensively on industrial and regional policy, especially in relation to manufacturing and the auto industry. He has […]

Noela Mahmutaj (PhD) is an early-career researcher and lecturer at the Institute of European Studies at the University of Tirana, Albania. Her main research interests and publications focus on IR topics, especially those related to contemporary geopolitics and external influences in the Western Balkans and Black Sea regions. She has published several research papers and […]

Postdoc position for the project Inequality and Support for Long-Term Investment Policies. Focus: computational social science, analysis of political text, future-oriented policies (broadly conceived), rhetoric and positions of parties and social movements. We want to examine how social and economic inequalities influence support for long-term policies. The project explores whether and why individuals, political parties, […]

In 2020, a merger of the counties of Troms and Finnmark in northern Norway was implemented as part of a nationwide regional reform. Unlike some mergers that took place at the time, this merger was not based on an initial voluntary agreement between the respective county councils. A consultative referendum held in Finnmark two years […]

Applications are open for the Master of Science in Mobility Management, offered by the National School of State Public Works (ENTPE) – University of Lyon, in partnership with Université Gustave Eiffel.   This one-year, full-time, English-taught programme is designed to foster strong academic and professional connections across borders. It welcomes students seeking a high-level, specialised […]

Andy Pike is the Henry Daysh Professor of Regional Development Studies in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), Newcastle University, UK. His research interests, publications and research projects are focused on the geographical political economy of local, regional and urban development and policy. He has undertaken research projects for the OECD, UN-ILO, […]

Research project: Stuck in Place: Unpacking Residential Immobility in the UK Dr. Conor O’Driscoll is an Assistant Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Groningen’s Faculty of Spatial Science. Conor holds a PhD in Economics from University College Cork, Ireland, where he studied the determinants of travel behaviour, with particular attention to the relationship between […]

In recent years, industrial strategy has returned to the centre of political and economic debate. Governments across advanced economies are once again asking how they can shape growth, support innovation, and address deepening regional inequalities. For decades, however, much of industrial policy has rested on a powerful but often unquestioned assumption: that economic growth is […]

2026 ARL Congress | Cologne (“Maternushaus”) | 01 – 02 October 2026 Call for Abstracts  EUROPEAN REGIONAL POLICY IN TIMES OF TRANSITION  The ARL – Academy for Territorial Development in the Leibniz Association invites scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to submit abstracts for the upcoming ARL Congress 2026 on “European Regional Policy in Times of Transition”. […]

Powering Development? Solar Energy, Poverty Alleviation and Just Transition in Rural China Yunpeng Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin. His research interests lie at the intersection of social geography, political economy and development studies, with a focus on urbanisation, […]

Advances in Spatial and Network Modelling for Policymaking – 2nd Edition Join us in May 2026 in Sevilla for the second edition of this workshop, hosted by the JRC. The call for papers is open until 15 February 2026. The workshop aims to promote scientific exchange among researchers, academics, and practitioners working on Spatial Econometrics […]

David Bassens  is Professor of Economic Geography and Director of Cosmopolis: Centre for Urban Research at Vrije Universiteit Brussels (Belgium). He is Deputy-in-Chief of Finance and Space and one of the founding members of the Global Network on Financial Geography. His earlier work on financial geography has dealt with the geographies of Islamic Finance and […]

Our reliance on cars is one reason why domestic transport is the UK’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, 2024). Using alternatives, like walking and cycling, can cut these emissions quickly (Brand et al., 2021), much quicker than even the quickest shift towards electric vehicles. Yet we continue […]

Regional studies often treat the region as a sub‑national unit, and it spans from neighbourhoods to cross‑border macro‑regions. In Asia, this elasticity is intensified by language. Words that look equivalent on paper rarely carry identical histories, politics, or scales. This short piece reflects on the Chinese notion of quyu (区域) and how it travels between […]

The blog below offers a reflexive, research-informed reflection on regional perception and spatial scale, grounded in lived experience in Australia. While it begins with a personal anecdote, it develops insights that align with broader discussions around borders, mobility, and comparative spatial experience. It contributes to ongoing conversations about how regions are perceived, experienced, and constructed […]

Why do some firms weather crises while others disappear? And what role do productivity and geography play in determining who survives? These questions are at the heart of understanding how economies recover from downturns. Productivity is one of the main engines of long-term growth and competitiveness. A central lesson from economic research is that competition […]

WORLD PLANNING SCHOOLS CONGRESS 2026: Call for abstracts, roundtable proposals and PhD workshop applications is open! The 6th World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC) will take place from June 29th to July 3rd, 2026, in Espoo & Helsinki, Finland. The WPSC PhD workshop will be organized in Tampere prior to the congress (June 26-29, 2026). The […]

Rural areas are vulnerable to climate change but also contribute to it through their close ties to the natural environment through agriculture, forestry, tourism and resource extraction. Unsurprisingly, then, the local level is considered one of the key areas where reaction to climate change should be conceived (European Commission 2021); however, their responses are often […]

Lonely Teleworkers Remote work has become easier in the past years. For some employees, working fewer days at the office means fewer days of travelling, and they choose a longer travelling distance and settle in cheaper, greener, more spacious peripheral locations. However, there is a drawback to that spatial reorganization. Living away from the bustle […]