2026 RSA Regional Futures Conference

Organised by Andy Pike, CURDS, Newcastle University, and Mia Gray, University of Cambridge as part of the RSA Network MuniFisc led by Paul Gilbert, University of Sussex, and Calvin Chung, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

State Capitalism as Urban Nationalism
Heather Whiteside (University of Waterloo, Canada)

Set against the secular decline in municipal funding through long run austerity and program restructuring, a recent revival of state capitalist economic intervention is shaking up the fiscal-finance landscape for Canada’s largest cities. In an era of both deteriorating international conditions and unsustainably high housing sector costs, policymakers’ go-to solutions increasingly feature federal state owned enterprise (SOE) solutions, namely Build Canada Homes (BCH), Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB), Canada Lands Company (CLC), and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). Picking up on leading examples, this paper examines the extent to which national state capitalism unfolds in unique ways through SOE activity at the urban scale. Examples include: the CIB’s Infrastructure for Housing Initiative (affecting site preparation, zoning, and mobility), CLC’s Public Land Bank (involving land sales of federally owned property to urban commercial property developers), CMHC’s Housing Design Catalogue (offering regionally differentiated designs and building codes), and BCH partnerships with municipalities (fast tracking private development). The paper’s analysis thus highlights notable uneven impacts of state capitalism on urban planning, municipal finance, land ownership, the location of new build housing, and project design.

Locating blended finance in shifting state – capital relations in the age of climate change
Hulya Dagdeviren and Christina Wolf (University of Hertfordshire, UK)

The blended finance approach to advancing green transition has often been criticised as a means for states to de-risk private investment. In this paper, we argue that blended finance functions not only as a de-risking instrument but also as a mechanism for re-making markets that forecloses possibilities for public and collective forms of ownership and control over assets and resources. Decarbonisation and the transition away from fossil fuels open opportunities for decentralised energy supply, enabling the development of publicly, collectively, or individually owned systems with the potential to overcome existing market failures inherent in oligopolistic, privately operated energy regimes. Casting blended finance as the only viable option for financing transition is a statecraft that reconfigures state – private capital relations. Focusing on energy decarbonisation at the local level, we demonstrate how energy is re-commodified, energy markets are remade, and the dominance of private finance and supply is further entrenched.

Speculative statecraft?: Cape Town’s fiscal experiences with energy transition
Liza Rose Cirolia, (Université Gustave Eiffel, École d’Urbanisme de Paris (EUP), Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés (LATTS), France; University of Cape Town, African Centre for Cities, South Africa)

Historically, the City of Cape Town, and most other local authorities in South Africa, raised a considerable proportion of municipal revenue through the sale of electricity to local consumers. Buying in bulk from the monopoly utility, Eskom, the City used tariff design to capture surplus from energy sales. In the last 15 years, a rising block tariffing model was core to the developmental state project, at once enabling redistribution and fiscal security. Following the electricity crisis, the last four years have seen a transformation in the role of the local state in electricity. In this paper, I suggest that the developmental state is in transition, giving way to two distinct modes of fiscal statecraft: the platform state and the merchant state. The platform state speaks to Cape Town’s emerging role as a network intermediary. Using the material grid, new forms of legal contracts, and digital tracking/accounting to “remediate” the energy landscape, Cape Town’s fiscal architecture is being reformatted. This project is underpinned by a speculative imaginary of a distributed, modular, and interconnected network, where production is decentralized and risk spread among diverse players. An even more speculative potential is Cape Town’s role in the open energy market, already under development nationally but currently excluding municipalities. Cape Town, framed as (the most) exceptional local authority in South Africa, may be allowed direct participation in the open market (subject to changes in local government financial legislation). This open market would place considerable risk on the City, as it moves to buy energy at variable prices, while reselling it at fixed tariffs. I further argue that the somewhat banal municipal contract will be the site through which these speculative projects are made fiscally manageable, thus making their development and implementation central to contemporary debates about sub-national finance in South Africa.

Understanding persistent austerity and local fiscal distress
Hulya Dagdeviren (University of Hertfordshire, UK), Mia Gray and Hannah Hasenberger (London School of Economics, UK)

This paper provides a cross-country analysis of the depth and duration of subnational austerity across Western Europe.  We show that the UK is an outlier within the European experience of urban austerity – particularly in the depth and persistence of the subnational regime of austerity. Drawing on a constructivist approach and discourse analysis, we investigate four case studies of local government bankruptcy within the UK to highlight the techniques used to reinforce austerity as a solution to fiscal distress.  We show that local government failures are frequently framed as problems of internal mismanagement rather than systemic underfunding.

The ‘Agency’ of the Local State in Times of Financial Constraint
Jack Newman (University of Liverpool, UK)

Over the last two decades, the local state in many countries has faced increasing financial pressure. Reductions in income streams and increased demand for services have come on the back of decades of hollowing out of local capacity. National governments have contributed towards this crisis, from the steady tightening of budgets to intentional strategies to shift blame downwards. This paper considers the ‘agency’ of local institutions in response to these financial challenges. This first entails a conceptual discussion about the utility of ‘agency’ in this context: is agency is the right lens to understand the constrained powers of local institutions; and what does the wider structure-agency literature tell us about national-local relations? The paper then uses an empirical case study to explore these theoretical questions. In the UK, local government and local health services are both institutions of the local state. While the two have separate systems of funding and accountability to national government, they also try to work together on issues such as public health, social care, and complex need. In both institutions, local leaders employ various strategies to maximise their agency in the face of increasing financial constraints and service demand. Analysis shows that ‘institutional agency’ is a problematic oversimplification in this context, and that a focus on the agency of individual persons provides a more accurate lens to understand power and constraint within the local state. The powers and funding of institutions are better understood as a multi-level system of structural constraint that also constrains national policymakers in their attempt to realise policy objectives.

The impacts of local councils going bust and trying to recover on people and places
Andy Pike (Newcastle University, UK) and Mia Gray (University of Cambridge, UK)

The spate of local councils in England going bust from 2018 and trying to recover generated substantial impacts upon their people and places. These included: expenditure freezes, controls, and reductions; organisational restructuring and job losses; infrastructure and service withdrawal and rationalisation; asset sales and transfers; temporary local Council Tax increases; refinanced debts; industrial action; and local contestation and protest. Local statecraft and the inter-relations between agency and structure shift decisively once a Section 114 report for an unbalanced annual budget is issued. Current responses are somewhat ad hoc, opaque, and reactive, reflecting the acute national and local political sensitivities involved in councils going bust. National statecraft is struggling since temporary fixes for the councils have largely proved insufficient relative to the scale of their lingering and compounding financial problems. While such situations are complex, difficult, and time consuming to resolve, few of the councils with unbalanced budgets are heading towards financial recovery, sustainability, and resilience. National statecraft has reproduced the dual polity narrative that ‘Whitehall knows best’, local councils lack capacity and competence, and are undeserving of meaningful decentralisation of further powers and resources.

Session Organiser: Shiri M. Breznitz, University of Toronto, Canada

Universities are increasingly expected to act as anchor institutions that drive regional innovation, economic development, and societal resilience. Beyond their traditional missions of teaching and research, they are now central to entrepreneurship, knowledge exchange, collaborative research, talent development, and the mobilisation of public investment. At the same time, governments across many countries have adopted place-based innovation policies that position universities as key partners in addressing regional challenges and building innovation ecosystems. This session explores how universities fulfil these evolving roles and the institutional, organisational, and network capabilities that enable them to generate regional impact.

Bringing together conceptual, empirical, and policy-oriented perspectives, the session examines universities as organisations that mobilise people, partnerships, resources, and funding to strengthen regional innovation systems. It considers how universities contribute through entrepreneurial ecosystems, interdisciplinary collaboration, knowledge exchange, and strategic research investment, while recognising that these activities are shaped by institutional capabilities and the characteristics of the regions in which universities operate. Collectively, the papers highlight the importance of collaboration across universities, industry, government, and civil society, and demonstrate that universities’ contributions extend well beyond technology transfer and commercialisation to include broader innovation, capacity building, and societal value creation.

The session contributes to contemporary debates on entrepreneurial universities, regional innovation systems, and place-based development by offering new insights into how universities organise for regional engagement and how these efforts can be better understood and evaluated. It will be of interest to scholars of innovation, entrepreneurship, higher education, economic geography, and public policy, as well as policymakers and university leaders seeking to strengthen the role of universities in fostering inclusive and sustainable regional development.

The Role of Academic Entrepreneurship in Local Ecosystem Development

• David Charles, Northumbria University, UK

The growth of academic entrepreneurship has developed alongside the growing interest by both academics and policymakers in the concept of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This is no coincidence, as the focus of policymakers and universities on the opportunities for academic and graduate spin-offs created a rationale for investment in support programmes within the university and in the local area. The emergence of science parks, usually attached to universities initiated a wider concern for how to support entrepreneurial businesses in order to achieve regional development goals. As universities have sought to work with partners to develop their own local ecosystems for firm formation this has created demand for external support such as venture funding but also stimulated the wider entrepreneurship support system in the wider city and region. There has thus been a symbiotic development between the support developed in universities and the ecosystem in the wider region.

This paper examines the emergence of the concept of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and how both the concept and its implementation in policy has been shaped by academic entrepreneurship. The intellectual roots and definition of ecosystems are first developed, before an assessment of the role of university infrastructures in those ecosystems. Universities have played four main roles: as direct providers of support to the wider region (often with public funding), as partners in collaborative activities, as providers of knowledge and advice, and as inspiration for policy. The paper draws on examples from the UK from both high and low intensity regions illustrating the roles that universities have taken in each case.

HEIS, Graduate Labour, Innovation and Regional Economic Development

• Helen Lawton Smith, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
• Bill O’Gorman, South East Technological University (SETU), Ireland
• Richard Hayes, South East Technological University (SETU), Ireland

This study contributes to the literature on the regional innovation impacts of human capital formation by HEIs .as the primary driver of regional innovation, often surpassing physical infrastructure in importance (Martinidis et al. 2022). It does this by providing data on the inter-relationship between the changing economic profile South East Ireland (firms, sectors), national policies which have direct and indirect effects on university teaching strategies and the response of the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) (now part of South East Technological University, SETU) to its regional remit through recruitment and graduation of students leading to high levels of knowledge transfer.

It is argued that whilst evidence does exist that HEIs contribute significantly to innovation-led regional economic development through their graduates (Rérat, 2014, Krabel and Flöther, 2012, Venhorst, et al. 2011; Venhorst et al., 2010), much less is known about the extent to which graduates from HEIs have agency in intervening in processes of business innovation thereby contributing to the innovative capability and capacity of the region in which they are educated. This is through their choice of HEI and the degrees they take and then their first destination employment. As Incera et al. (2021) point out, such impacts are not evenly distributed geographically within countries.

From Research Excellence to Regional Innovation: How Canadian Universities Mobilize Large-Scale Public Funding

• Silvia Iossa, Santa Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy
• Shiri Breznitz, University of Toronto, Canada

Governments increasingly use competitive research funding to strengthen research excellence, foster collaboration, and support regional innovation. While previous research has examined the impacts of competitive funding on scientific performance, less is known about how universities organise and mobilise large institutional grants and how these processes shape research capacity and regional value creation.

This paper examines the first two Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) competitions, which funded eighteen major research initiatives across seventeen Canadian universities. Drawing on perspectives from research funding, regional innovation systems, and the geography of innovation, the study investigates how universities mobilise large-scale funding, how this influences research collaboration and organisational capacity, and why outcomes vary across institutional and regional contexts. By shifting attention from funding outcomes to funding mobilisation, the paper contributes new insights into the organisational capabilities that enable universities to translate major research investments into scientific, economic, and regional benefits.

Embedding Global R&D in a Regional Innovation Ecosystem – A Longitudinal Case Study of a University Spin-out in Scotland

• Fumi Kitagawa, University of Birmingham, UK

Over the years, a spinout company from a university can become a high value contributor to the regional innovation ecosystem. To capture the value of innovative spinout firms, coordinated ecosystem strategies that align national and regional industrial priorities, infrastructure investments, and market-building initiatives are needed (Roupakia and Ulrichsen, 2025). However, when ownership of the venture becomes foreign, the regional innovation community faces one of the most persistent policy dilemmas. On the one hand, acquisition is often a success indicator — it validates the technology, rewards founders and investors, and brings global visibility. On the other hand, it can lead to loss of local control, offshoring of high value activities, and erosion of regional spillovers if the acquiring firm relocates R&D, IP, or manufacturing. Drawing on a case study of an evolution of a university spinout over the years in Scotland, this study presents the role of university anchored inward investment and long term multinational R&D strategies being embedded within a regional innovation ecosystem. Relevant policy lessons and ecosystem-level recommendations to other regions in the UK and beyond will be identified.

Understanding Universities’ Internal Capabilities and Resources for Effective Regional Engagement

• Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo, University of Manchester, UK
• Elvira Uyarra, University of Manchester, UK
• Xiuqin Li, University of Manchester, UK
• Daniel Cuesta Delgado, Ingenio (CSIC-UPV), Spain

Universities are increasingly recognised as anchor institutions that support innovation, skills development, and regional resilience alongside teaching and research. In the UK, recent policy initiatives have placed universities at the centre of regional development, although their capacity to contribute varies across institutions and places. This study examines the institutional factors underpinning regional engagement and how these contributions are measured, combining a literature review with text-mining analysis of Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) narratives. The review highlights universities’ evolution towards entrepreneurial and mission-oriented roles, using both commercial and collaborative knowledge exchange mechanisms. Analysis of KEF3 (2023) narratives from 125 English higher education institutions examines four themes: stakeholders, mechanisms, resources, and impacts. Findings show growing emphasis on partnerships beyond industry and widespread public and community engagement, while growth narratives remain focused on commercialisation. Internal capabilities are largely framed through formal governance, and reported impacts remain dominated by economic outcomes, with less attention to social, cultural, and civic contributions. The findings highlight the need to align institutional capabilities with regional ecosystems, strengthen impact measurement, and adopt place-sensitive policy approaches.

Collaboration Networks Within and Emerging Interdisciplinary Field

• Shiri Breznitz, University of Toronto, Canada
• Paige Clayton, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
• Mircea Gherghina, Brown University, United States

We ask how researcher background characteristics shape the breadth and diversity of collaboration networks during a policy driven stage of interdisciplinary scientific field emergence. Scientific collaboration networks are critical for productivity and innovation, with the number, quality, and diversity of connections significantly influencing output. Specifically, we explore the heterogeneity of tie formation across three distinct network dimensions: field-specific ties, geographic homophily, and organizational foci. Our research context is a University of Toronto-based initiative, Medicine by Design (MbD) which was created through a Canadian national funding program to develop a regenerative medicine ecosystem in the region through targeted research funding. Our sample is all 168 funded principal investigators who received research funding through this interdisciplinary initiative. Using a panel dataset from 2015 to 2022, our findings demonstrate how researchers differentially form collaboration networks based on their individual characteristics, fostering interdisciplinary connections and driving research in an emerging field.

Organised by:

Shauna Brail, University of Toronto, Canada
Ilaria Mariotti, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

This session explores how remote and hybrid work, alongside wider changes in where and how people work, are reshaping regional futures. Drawing on empirical, conceptual, and methodological approaches, papers examine evolving media narratives of urban change, the reconfiguration of agglomeration economies and urban-regional proximity, shifting residential orientations among knowledge workers across diverse geographies and the socio-economic effects of digital nomadism. Together, the papers ask what has endured since the pandemic-era disruption to work patterns, how these shifts are playing out unevenly across space, and what questions regional studies scholars should now be asking about the future of cities, suburbs, rural areas, and peripheral regions. The session features several papers from the Horizon Europe REMAKING project.

Disrupting Downtown? Understanding Urban Transformation through Longitudinal News Media Analysis

Shauna Brail* and Shawn Capper

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a rapid shift toward remote and hybrid work, prompting widespread debate about the future of downtowns and the resilience of cities. While previous research has examined these changes using surveys, mobility data, and economic indicators, less attention has been given to how longitudinal media analysis can illuminate evolving narratives of urban transformation. Drawing on a novel database of 2,015 newspaper articles published between 2019 and 2025 in ten leading newspapers across Canada and the United States, this paper examines how news media coverage of remote and hybrid work evolved over time. Through a mixed analytical approach, the study traces the progression of media narratives from initial pandemic disruption to the normalization of hybrid work and broader discussions of urban adaptation. The findings demonstrate a shift in media narratives from framing remote work as a temporary public health response toward representing it as part of a longer-term process of urban transformation. The paper argues that longitudinal news media analysis complements conventional urban datasets by revealing how urban change is interpreted, debated, and normalized over time. More broadly, it demonstrates the value of longitudinal news media analysis as a complementary methodological approach for understanding trajectories of urban transformation following crisis.

Reconfiguring agglomeration economies: Hybrid work and the future of cities and regions

Shauna Brail and Stefania Fiorentino*

This article examines how hybrid working is reconfiguring the relationship between proximity, connectivity and agglomeration in contemporary urban economic geographies. While the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the normalization of remote and hybrid work across office-based occupations, the implications for cities remain contested: workforces appear increasingly spatially dispersed, yet office functions and high-value economic activities continue to cluster in central urban locations. To explore this puzzle, the article combines secondary evidence with a media analysis of the top four newspapers in the UK, the US and Canada, tracing the evolution of public discourse and interest in remote working and hybrid working in three countries where the phenomenon has become particularly prominent. The analysis situates changing work patterns within wider debates on the diseconomies of agglomeration, digitalization, infrastructure, housing affordability, commuting, urban inequality and the future of city centres. We argue that hybrid working does not simply weaken agglomeration. Rather, it reorganizes the scales and rhythms through which agglomeration operates, producing new combinations of physical proximity and digital connectivity. This reconfiguration has uneven implications across metropolitan cores, suburbs, commuting belts and regional labour markets, with potential to intensify existing inequalities while also opening new possibilities for polycentric urban development. The article contributes to urban economic geography by reframing hybrid work as a structural force reshaping urban form, mobility, land use and governance, and by identifying the policy challenges facing cities and regions as they respond to a changing geography of office-based work.

Remote Work without Urban Exit? Residential Orientations among Knowledge Workers across Six European Countries

Marco Rodolfo Di Tommaso; Patrizia Leone; Marco Castrignano; Michelle Costa;

Remote and hybrid work loosen the link between employment and residence and are expected to encourage repopulation towards peripheral regions. This paper examines residential satisfaction and residential orientations by cross-analyzing both territorial origins and potential destinations, along with working-time geography. The REMAKING survey, 14,000 knowledge workers across 6 European countries, covers selected regions, including metropolitan, suburban and non-urban regions. The study analyses the intention to move residence among different territorial urban and non-urban areas. Respondents responses are interpreted as orientations rather than relocation outcomes. Descriptively, remote workers demonstrate more interest in residential mobility (44 versus 51 percent) and more likely to prefer an urban alternative (39 versus 33 percent). The analysis also shows the territorial origin of remote workers, assessing whether the move to rural areas is an option for urban population. Working time remains concentrated: home and employers’ premises account for about seven tenths of it, collaborative spaces staying marginal across countries. Two-stage logit models estimate the probability of indicating any alternative and, among those considering one, a non-urban rather than urban orientation. We deepen the analysis underscoring how the socio-economic positions of individuals associated with remote-work intensity do shape the intentions to move and the territorial areas of interest. The paper contributes to regional futures debates by assessing whether remote work is associated with openness to residential change and to a potential shift to non-urban destinations.

Understanding the socio-economic effects of digital nomadism: Insights from Greece and Portugal

Antigoni Papageorgiou & Eugenia Pires

The paper contributes to emerging debates on digital nomadism (Angiello, 2022; Bednorz, 2024; Bonneau & Aroles, 2021; Reichenberger, 2018) by empirically grounding the concept of geo-arbitrage (Hayes, 2014; Hayes & Pérez-Gañán, 2016) in the comparative cases of Greece and Portugal, two paradigmatic “receiving” economies that have actively courted remote workers through visa schemes and tax incentives (Ma et al., 2026) in the postpandemic era (Thompson, 2021). In doing so, it situates digital nomads within broader structures of uneven economic development, showing how their mobility reproduces, deepens, and depends on asymmetries between high-skilled digital-labor-exporting and -receiving countries. By tracing digital nomads’ consumption patterns and their everyday interactions with destination communities, the paper highlights an underexamined dimension of this phenomenon: how these digitally-enabled mobilities reshape local labor markets, housing conditions, and everyday life in host communities. Particular attention is paid to the physical (such as coliving and coworking spaces) and digital infrastructure (such as online communities and field-configuring events) that eases nomads’ transition into the local lifestyle and mediates their relationship with destination communities. Yet, it will be argued that attraction policies such as digital nomad visas are, on their own, insufficient to embed digital nomads within local communities or to generate positive socio-economic spillovers. Despite the physical and digital infrastructures that ease nomads’ transition into destination communities, the absence of multi-scale, integrated sectoral policies limits their territorial embeddedness – that is, their meaningful economic and social integration into the local fabric. This gap risks widening socio-spatial divides by accelerating negative externalities associated with the growing touristification of the destination communities and transnational gentrification.

Beyond Density: Urban Agglomeration, Remote Work and the Uneven Geography of Life Satisfaction

Luca Alfieri, Carles Mendez-Ortega, Ilaria Mariotti*, Federica Rossi

Urban agglomeration enhances productivity, yet its implications for wellbeing remain contested. Using survey data for workers in Lombardy, linked to DEGURBA classifications and road distance to four urban poles, we examine how settlement density, metropolitan accessibility and flexible work relate to life satisfaction. This paper makes three contributions. First, it shifts the evaluation of agglomeration from productivity towards subjective wellbeing, and specifically life satisfaction. Second, it distinguishes settlement density from metropolitan accessibility by combining DEGURBA categories with road distance to four major urban poles in Lombardy region. Third, it examines whether territorial differences are particularly visible among workers with FWA, while avoiding a stronger moderation claim unless supported by formal interaction tests.

Results reveal an intermediate-density premium: compared with dense municipalities, the probability of above-median life satisfaction is 9.5 percentage points higher in intermediate areas and 19.3 points higher among flexible workers. Distance effects are weaker, and interaction tests do not confirm significant moderation. Life satisfaction appears highest where metropolitan access coexists with lower exposure to dense-urban costs.

Session Organisers:

Soren Scholvin, (Universidad Católica del Norte & University of Cologne)
Javier Diez (University of Cologne)
Ivan Turok (University of the Free State)
Emma Galbraith (University of Cologne)
Justin Visagie (University of the Witwatersrand)
Ivan Turok (University of the Free State)

This session features some articles from a forthcoming special issue in Area Development and Policy

The Expansion of South African Service Companies into Africa
Sören Scholvin (Universidad Católica del Norte & University of Cologne), Justin Visagie* (University of the Witwatersrand) & Ivan Turok (University of the Free State)

Tradable services offer development opportunities for Southern nations. Whilst academic debates have concentrated on offshoring and offshore outsourcing in global value chains, this presentation discusses regional value chains of services. We explain why and how South African service firms have expanded into Africa, and shed light on the value chains created this way. Against the backdrop of quantitative data from secondary sources and 28 semi-structured interviews, we argue that growth prospects across the continent and relative competitiveness in African business environments are the drivers of regionalisation. South African service firms also benefit from existing business relations with national and overseas clients to take the first steps abroad. Since trade without a foothold in the target market is difficult, they invest and relocate some activities or at least establish local partnerships. It would, however, be premature to conclude that complex RVCs are always being created.

Related Servitization as a Place-sensitive Pathway for Local Manufacturing Upgrading: A Territorial Regimes Approach for Mexico
José Antonio Cabrera (El Colegio Mexiquense)
Servitization has increasingly been considered a mechanism through which manufacturing firms use knowledge-intensive services to support industrial upgrading. Evidence from developing economies reveals such processes are highly uneven and conditioned by local industrial structures. This article examines whether servitization operates as a territorially mediated mechanism of manufacturing upgrading across Mexico’s municipalities. Drawing on Evolutionary Economic Geography, it develops a framework of related servitization regimes and applies a Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) approach to municipality-level Economic Census data. The results suggest distinct and persistent pathways of manufacturing-KIBS integration. Strongly embedded forms of servitization are concentrated within Northern Mexico and the Guadalajara-Bajío-Mexico City industrial corridor, while most municipalities follow intermediate or disconnected pathways characterized by weaker forms of embeddedness. Overall, the findings suggest that servitization in Mexico is not a generalized transition toward service-led manufacturing but a geographically selective and place-dependent process with differentiated opportunities for manufacturing upgrading.

Public Policies, Place-based Leadership and Schumperterian Entrepreneurs in Argentina’s IT Sector
Sören Scholvin* (Universidad Católica del Norte) & Ulises Girolimo (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Since the country’s financial and economic collapse in 2001, Argentina’s information technology (IT) sector has experienced considerable growth. Particularly successful start-ups founded about 25 years ago have become global players. Their business activities now go far beyond the low value-adding tasks that often characterise offshore outsourcing. The presentation analyses the Argentinean IT sector from the perspective of the ‘trinity of change agency’ literature. It draws attention to public policies (i.e., institutional entrepreneurship),
place-based leadership and, concentrating on the case of Globant, bold and disruptive Schumperterian entrepreneurship. The importance of the 2001 crisis as an external shock and structural conditions for path development is uncovered. It is also pointed out that distinct paths co-exist. Against the backdrop of the empirical findings, it is suggested that the trinity of change agency concept would gain from distinguishing more clearly between forms of agency that are decisive for path development and others that may, in specific cases, rather be background noise.

Peripheral Opportunity, Institutional Slack and Service Globalization in Uruguay
Johannes Glückler & Yannick Eckhardt* (tbc)

Uruguay’s transformation from an agrarian base into Latin America’s leading knowledge-intensive service economy challenges the manufacturing-centric model of
development. We argue that Uruguay bypassed the traditional industrialization phase through service-led leapfrogging, leveraging its status as a small, remote economy to cultivate peripheral opportunity. Drawing on a geographical model of service offshoring, we analyze how the state employed institutional slack to establish Free Trade Zones (FTZs) as legally distinct enclaves. These zones serve as regulatory testbeds, decoupling knowledge-intensive activities from domestic rigidities and attracting global service firms. Our empirical analysis reveals a qualitative shift from routine to knowledge-intensive digital service exports. This transition allowed Uruguay to sustain high national wages while resisting the relocation pressures typical of the global periphery. Ultimately, Uruguay represents a hybrid development model, modernizing its primary sector while building a world-class tertiary sector. The study suggests that for the Global South, high-quality institutions and strategic exploitation of institutional slack can help convert peripheral opportunity into a competitive advantage within global value chains.

Finance Piggybacking on Production: The Contingent Interconnectedness in Carbon-Credit Global Production and Financial Networks
Emma Galbraith* & Javier Revilla Diez (University of Cologne)

Voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) are widely promoted as a mechanism for mobilising private finance to support climate mitigation and sustainable development. Their institutional architecture is built on the assumption that carbon finance and physical emission-reduction projects are mutually dependent: renewable energy projects are expected to rely on carbon revenues for financial viability, while carbon credits can only be generated through verified physical production. Yet it remains unclear whether this institutionally constructed relationship translates into actual economic interdependence in practice.
This paper examines the relationship between production and finance by bringing carbon markets into conversation with the Global Production and Financial Network
(GPFN) framework. While the emerging GPFN research has so far primarily focused on physical commodities, carbon-credit production combines the generation of a material product (electricity) with the creation of an immaterial financial asset (carbon credits). We conceptualise carbon-credit GPFNs as institutionally mediated systems in which production–finance relations are established, maintained, and reshaped through changing institutional arrangements.
Empirically, the paper investigates renewable energy carbon projects in Vietnam, drawing on project documentation, monitoring and verification reports, and semi-structured interviews with project developers, carbon market intermediaries, and industry experts. The findings indicate an asymmetric relationship between renewable energy production and carbon finance. Moreover, the degree of interdependence between production and finance varies over time and is shaped by institutional and market conditions rather than being an inherent characteristic of carbon-credit production.
The paper extends the GPFN framework beyond physical commodities to dual-output production systems and demonstrates that production–finance interdependence is institutionally mediated, spatially contingent, and temporally dynamic. In doing so, it contributes to debates on voluntary carbon markets and their role in financing renewable energy and sustainable development.

Session Organisers:

Ilaria Mariotti, DAStU-Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
Dimitrios Manoukas, DAStU-Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
Carles Méndez-Ortega, Faculty of Economics and Business, Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona (Spain).
Oliver Rafaj, University of Economics in Bratislava (Slovakia)
Federica Rossi, DAStU-Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
Chiara Tagliaro, DABC-Politecnico di Milano (Italy)

This session focuses on the results of the RSA Policy EXPO grant FIERE “Fostering Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Rural Europe: Evaluating the Impact of Policy Support through Collaborative Spaces”. This Policy Expo investigates how public policies, funding programmes, and support mechanisms at European, national, regional, and local levels influence innovation and entrepreneurship in rural areas through collaborative spaces (CS), such as coworking hubs. It examines how these spaces contribute to economic resilience, sustainability, social regeneration, and brain circulation by fostering local innovation ecosystems. The study focuses on four countries—Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Slovakia—each representing distinct models of rural collaborative spaces. Case studies from networks such as Cowocat_Rural (Spain), Southworking (Italy), Connected Hubs (Ireland), and the Association of Coworking Centers (Slovakia) provide insights into how policy interventions support entrepreneurship, digitalisation, talent attraction, and rural revitalisation.

The papers evaluate the effectiveness of direct, indirect, and complementary policy instruments, including grants and public-private support mechanisms, in promoting innovation, sustainability, digital inclusion, and social cohesion. They identify best practices and develop evidence-based recommendations for improving policy design and implementation.

What Works for Rural Innovation? Comparative Evidence from Collaborative Spaces in Ireland, Italy, Slovakia and Spain.

Ilaria Mariotti, Dimitrios Manoukas, Carles Méndez-Ortega, Oliver Rafaj*, Federica Rossi, Chiara Tagliaro.

Abstract

The paper compares the results of the qualitative analysis, carried out within the FIERE project, about the four case studies in diverse rural contexts: the post-industrial, mountainous and border regions of Eastern Slovakia; the depopulated interior of Castilla y León in Spain; the rural west and south of Ireland; and the inner areas of Sicily in Italy. Across all cases, users value community, collaboration, and local accessibility far more than the physical workspace itself, yet they often remain unaware of the support available to them. Managers frequently sustain community-building activities through unpaid or under-resourced efforts, describing their spaces as inherently fragile. Associations consistently identify the role of the community animator or hub manager as indispensable, while policymakers acknowledge that simply providing a building is insufficient and that existing governance arrangements remain fragmented and poorly coordinated. The inclusion of the Irish and Italian case studies reinforces rather than complicates these findings. Ireland highlights the limitations of urban-centred innovation policies through its “acorns, not unicorns” perspective and demonstrates the importance of intermediary organisations, as illustrated by the Dingle Hub model. Italy contributes the concept of brain circulation, showing how collaborative spaces can reconnect rural areas with their diasporas, while also reimagining the hub as a modern “house of the people” that combines economic, social, and civic functions.

These shared insights suggest a clear shift in policy priorities. Rather than focusing predominantly on constructing new facilities, public investment should prioritise supporting the animation of existing communities and the individuals who sustain them. Policies should also improve the accessibility of support by communicating opportunities more effectively, aligning funding with the realities of rural initiatives, tailoring measures to local contexts, and reducing administrative complexity and technical jargon.

Empowering Rural Collaborative Spaces: Policy Priorities for Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Resilience

Ilaria Mariotti, Dimitrios Manoukas, Carles Méndez-Ortega*, Oliver Rafaj, Federica Rossi, Chiara Tagliaro.

Abstract

The paper founds on the comparative analysis of the FIERE case studies from four European countries (Ireland, Italy, Spain and Slovakia) and informs a set of policy recommendations aimed at strengthening the role of collaborative spaces (CS) in promoting rural innovation, entrepreneurship, resilience, and social cohesion.

The study identifies the following key policy recommendations to strengthen the contribution of collaborative spaces to rural development. These include prioritising investment in community managers alongside physical infrastructure; supporting existing community-led initiatives rather than creating new spaces without local demand; recognising the diversity of collaborative spaces and tailoring evaluation criteria accordingly; formally acknowledging their role as innovation intermediaries; improving the accessibility, reliability, and flexibility of funding; embedding collaborative spaces within broader place-based development strategies; introducing geographically differentiated fiscal incentives; promoting brain circulation by engaging diasporas through remote work, mentoring, investment, and knowledge exchange; .

Overall, the findings argue that collaborative spaces should be recognised as strategic elements of rural innovation ecosystems. Effective policies should focus on strengthening people, networks, and local communities, while integrating collaborative spaces into wider place-based development strategies to foster innovation, entrepreneurship, resilience, and sustainable rural development across Europe.

Brain circulation and the right to stay in peripheral Europe: mixed-methods evidence from collaborative workspaces in Ireland, Italy, Slovakia and Spain

Ilaria Mariotti*, Dimitrios Manoukas*, Carles Méndez-Ortega, Oliver Rafaj, Federica Rossi, Chiara Tagliaro.

Abstract

The EU approach to population decline in peripheral territories has already changed from a necessity to a question of rights: the European Commission’s Harnessing Talent strategy focuses on the right to stay, while the literature on rural stayers, returnees, and brain circulation now discusses the processes of retention and staying as deliberate and targeted (Saxenian, 2005; Stockdale & Haartsen, 2018). However, a small part of literature focuses on the infrastructures that allow making staying, returning, and circulating possible. This paper examines how rural collaborative workspaces and hubs, analysed within the FIERE project, affect such decisions in four European peripheries – Eastern Slovakia, Castilla y Leon, inland Sicily, and Northern, Western, and Southern regions of Ireland. In this study’s methodological design, two steps were followed. At first, 39 respondents from four different categories of participants (workspace users, managers, associations, and policymakers) have been interviewed in 2026 and coded in MAXQDA using one scheme consisting of ten thematic families and 35 codes. The obtained 355 coded segments have been quantified (Sandelowski et al., 2009, Onwuegbuzie, 2025): cross-tabulated by families, countries, and participant categories, and presented in percentages in relation to each national corpus with the help of heatmaps, where the measurements have to be understood as emphasis, not effect size. The second largest family, referred to as “Talent”, includes themes of departure, return, and right to stay with 50 segments, while nine out of fifteen users are returnees. The suggested mechanism is a connection between remote or export-oriented work and the nearby, actively used workspaces with binding challenges like housing, childcare, and last mile connectivity being external to the mechanism of support. Circulation does not presuppose return in many cases, but takes place via diaspora time banks, returnee incentives, and distant mentoring with the workspace being the local interface for such processes.

Session Organisers:

Robert Hassink, Kiel University, Germany
Han Chu, Keil University, Germany
Franziska Sielker, TU Wien, Austria

Place, Emotions, Ideology and Regional Development in Times of Transformation
Han Chu, Kiel University, Germany
Robert Hassink*, Kiel University, Germany
Franziska Sielker, Technische Universität Wien, Austria

In current times of political uncertainty and disruptions, place, emotions and identity are increasingly interrelated and politicized both in democracies and in authoritarian regimes. Not only at the national level and in international conflicts, but also at the regional level, place- and identity-related emotions are intensifying. In the context of climate transition, digital transformation, migration and socio-economic polarisation, emotions such as resentment, nostalgia, pride or hope are no longer peripheral to regional development; rather, they constitute a central driving force. Understanding these dynamics is key to grasping how place-based emotions shape identity formation, influence ideology and discourse in planning therefore structure both the challenges and opportunities for regional development.

In human geography, the concept of place has long been distinguished from abstract space through its experiential, emotional, and symbolic dimensions. At the heart of this distinction lies the notion of sense of place—the emotional bond between people and place, shaped by memory, identity, and lived experience. Place is thus understood not as a neutral, objective container, but as a concrete, subjective, and affectively charged entity. In recent years, economic geography and regional studies have increasingly emphasized the importance of place-based policies, while simultaneously shifting attention toward the affective, cognitive, and experiential dimensions of people–place relationships. This shift is reflected in a growing interest in agency over structure, particularly in how people perceive the future of places through narratives, imagined opportunities, perceived risks, and practices such as placemaking and place branding, and how these perceptions shape regional development outcomes. Emerging topics such as the geography of discontent, narrative constructions of place, and spatial imaginaries are all fundamentally connected to the concept of sense of place. At the same time, planning theory has increasingly engaged with questions of ideology and identity politics, demonstrating how spatial governance is embedded in broader hegemonic struggles. Furthermore, critical reflections on multiple and competing ideologies within planning remind us that spatial policies are never neutral instruments; they are always intertwined with contested imaginaries of belonging, entitlement, and collective futures.

This presentation will set the scene for the special session, which aims to explore how place-based emotions and practices both shape and are shaped by ideologies and development trajectories, especially under conditions of grand societal challenges, such as climate change, social polarization, and systemic uncertainty. Four key areas of empirical inquiry will be introduced: first, left-behind regions, discontent and populism will be introduced, secondly, environmental transformation and sustainability transition, thirdly, global cosmopolitans and transnational identities, and fourthly, digitalization, virtual space and placelessness. In addition to these four empirical areas, two theoretical sociological and philosophical perspectives will be introduced, namely loss in modernity and the concept of resonance.

Beyond the “Left Behind”: Rethinking Place through Solastalgia
Kate Penney, University of Manchester, UK
Dr Chay Brooks (University of Bristol)

The concept of solastalgia (Albrecht, 2005) has become an influential lens for examining the affective dimensions of social, political, and environmental disruption. While typically applied to environmental transformation, this paper extends solastalgia to examine the lived experience of places labelled as “left behind” in the context of the United Kingdom.

Debates on “left-behind” places often focus on economic and territorial narratives: economic decline, deindustrialisation, and uneven development. This paper focuses instead on how representations of place as peripheral, left behind, and in need of intervention (Tomaney et al, 2024; Mackinnon et al, 2022) frame spaces as deficient, deprived, and dysfunctional (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018; Slater, 2024). These labels are more than descriptive socioeconomic indicators; they are devices that construct an imagined geography that reinforces spatial hierarchies and topologies (Kirk, 2024; Chu and Hassink,2023).

Drawing on the concept of solastalgia, the paper argues that “left behind” should be understood not only as a material condition but also as an affective one. The loss experienced is not simply economic, but relational, encompassing a sense of estrangement from a place that remains physically present yet has been transformed by deindustrialisation, stigma, and narratives of decline. Recasting “left behind” through solastalgia offers a new perspective on the emotional and political consequences of spatial marginalisation and regional inequality.

Extraction Without Belonging: Loss, Resentment, and the Emotional Geography of Coal in Central India
Darshan Jain, Just Transition Research Centre, IIT Kanpur

Drawing on fieldwork across coal-affected villages in Jharkhand’s Chatra district and
Chhattisgarh’s Korba and Manendragarh-Bharatpur-Chirmiri districts, conducted as part of a just transition baseline survey, this paper examines how emotional geographies of loss and resentment shape rural discontent in India’s coal belt. Villages within a few kilometres of operating mines (Amrapali, NTPC, SECL, Dipka, Manikpur) recount a strikingly consistent narrative: land acquired without adequate compensation, employment promised but rarely delivered to local youth, and declining access to forests, groundwater, and agricultural land that residents describe as once abundant. These accounts extend beyond material grievance into an affective register — nostalgia for a pre-extraction relationship with land, embitterment toward mining companies and state institutions seen as extracting value while withholding development, and fatigue with repeated surveys that yield no visible change. Reading these narratives through Reckwitz’s concept of loss in modernity, the paper argues that the gap between extraction and reciprocity produces not only material deprivation but a structuring sense of dispossession that reshapes residents’ relationship to state and corporate authority.

This surfaces in disillusionment with regional governance — including scepticism toward statehood itself in Jharkhand — and in informal workarounds such as proxy leadership, both signalling eroding institutional trust. The paper extends “left-behind” regional literature to the distinct dynamics of an actively extracting, rather than declining, industrial periphery.

Keywords: sense of place; place attachment and loss; emotional geography; left-behind regions; coal mining and extraction; regional discontent; just transition, India

Tracing Emotional Responses to Climate Policy: Socio-economic Marginalisation and Experiences of Misrecognition in the German Domestic Energy Transition.
Christina Wolf*, and Aleksandra Peeroo*
University of Hertfordshire Business School, Department of Economics and Finance, UK

This article investigates the formation of place-based emotional responses to climate policy based on reactions to legislation introduced to advance the decarbonisation of domestic heating systems in Germany (Building Energy Act, so-called “Heating Law”), which triggered substantial green discontent, especially in socio-economically marginalised regions of East Germany.

Using a sequential mixed-methods design, we combine an attitudinal segmentation of national survey data (n=2,048) with 33 semi-structured interviews. Controlling for household income, the attitudes of East and West German homeowners diverge significantly with East German homeowners being more likely to perceive climate policy as “going too far” especially in lower income brackets. We followed up the place-based reactions to the “Heating Law” with qualitative interviews recruiting participants from districts that constitute negative outliers in terms of net wealth in Thuringia (East) and North-Rhine-Westphalia (West).

Our interview data show that East German homeowners perceived climate policy as monetised, which served as an acute reminder of uneven development. Discontent emerged where households experienced themselves as materially constrained to participate while simultaneously perceiving these constraints as unrecognised in policy design and public discourse. Respondents interpreted the policy’s assumptions about households’ financial capacity as denying the existence of lived realities, including persistent inequalities, financial vulnerability, and the enduring consequences of post-reunification development trajectories. These (repeated) experiences of misrecognition generated emotions of invisibility, disrespect, fear, and betrayal, creating fertile ground for populist narratives around credit traps, expropriation and elite hypocrisy. The spatial clustering of income and wealth inequality solicited reactions of solidarity out of concern over social cohesion even among financially secure households and those who had carried out energy efficiency improvements to their properties. The article contributes to debates on green discontent in left behind places by demonstrating how historically accumulated inequalities become politically consequential through processes of recognition.

Shaping an ‘Enclave’ Regional Imaginary: How Can Cooperation Industrial Parks Promote Regional Path Development?
Luo Chang; University of Liverpool, Department of Geography and Planning, UK

Existing studies have acknowledged that regional path development should be linked to the reconfiguration of the regional innovation system (RIS), achieved through the formation and functioning of specific reconfiguration agencies. While there are explanations for how and why such agencies can form from the perspectives of asset conditions, knowledge bases, and institutional settings, very few studies pay attention to the role of regional imaginaries of stakeholders. By understanding regional imaginaries as a system selectivity that promotes specific reconfiguration agencies, this research provides a framework to explain how regional imaginaries are shaped by conventions (existing conditions and previous events) and expectations (imaginations about the future). Specifically, this research examines how Cooperation Industrial Parks (CIPs), a joint development tool for an underdeveloped region by strategically leveraging the strengths of a specific developed region based on a state-to-state agreement, can influence regional imaginaries, thereby influencing regional path development. Based on a case study of Suzhou, China, the author finds that the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), a CIP jointly established by Suzhou and Singapore, shaped a favourable regional imaginary for pharmaceutical path development among stakeholders within and beyond Suzhou, by transplanting Singapore’s successful development experience as a convention and constructing its current status as an expectation through discourse. This research contributes to the literature on regional path development and lagging regions by providing a framework for understanding regional imaginaries as a path-development mechanism and demonstrating that CIPs are effective tools for promoting the development of lagging regions.

Recapturing a Place-Based Story in Universities
Jeannie Holstein & Kate Broadhurst, Loughborough Business School, UK; Andrew Greenman, Norwich Business School, UK

Place matters, to individuals, communities, and policymakers. However, there is a weak understanding of the intertwining of place, emotion, and ideology, shaping regional development. This is a critical oversight in so-called left-behind places, at times of disruption and uncertainty and concomitant discontents (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018; MacKinnon & Béal, 2024).

Similarly, while universities have been implicated in regional development, this role is neither automatic nor necessarily aligned to their strategic priorities (Benneworth & Fitjar, 2019). Moreover, in Higher Education policy universities have largely benefitted from a disentanglement from their ‘places’, despite loose connection at an emotional and an ideological level to their founding purpose (Holstein et al. 2018). In ‘left behind places’ this disentanglement is potentially more telling, coupled with the challenge to their institutional legitimacy (Whitty & Wheeldon, 2025) and the hollowing out at a regional level of institutions including universities.

Building on the work of Holstein et al. (2018) and the sociology of hope (Welch et al., 2020), we explore further the (dis)connects around societal hope, place, and universities. In archival and textual research, we examine the founding and current strategic texts in two universities formed mid-20th century (Shattock, 2012), in so-called ‘left behind’ places’, exposing the changing narrative of hope and place. Building on Rodríguez-Pose, 2018, and applying Holstein et al. (2018), we explore the narrative of the university in policy post 2010. We show how emotional and ideological underpinning has institutionalised its place-based role and offer insight around the subsequent and possible improving resonance to place.

Between Placemaking and Placelessness: Digital Transformation and Emotional Geographies of Dubai
Manju Bala, University of Liverpool, UK

Digital transformation is increasingly reshaping how urban places are produced, experienced, represented, and emotionally understood. In rapidly transforming cities such as Dubai, digital platforms, smart technologies, virtual environments, and digitally mediated urban experiences are becoming increasingly embedded within everyday spatial practices. While digitalization can enhance connectivity, accessibility, and new forms of placemaking, it can also contribute to placelessness by weakening traditional relationships between people, memory, identity, and physical environments. This paper examines the relationship between digital transformation and the emotional geographies of Dubai, focusing on how digital technologies influence sense of place, place identity, belonging, and attachment within a rapidly changing urban landscape. Drawing on conceptual perspectives from placemaking, sense of place, emotional geography, and placelessness, the paper explores whether digital transformation produces disconnection from physical place or creates new forms of digitally mediated belonging and reterritorialization. Dubai provides a significant context for this inquiry because of its rapid urban transformation, highly globalized population, digitally enabled infrastructure, and evolving public-space environments.

The paper argues that digitalization should not be understood simply as a force producing placelessness; rather, it can transform the ways emotional connections to place are constructed, mediated, and experienced. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the interaction between digital transformation, emotional attachment, place identity, and contemporary urban placemaking.

From Loss to Renewal: Narrative Entrepreneurship and the Reimagining of Left-behind
Juliette Keohane, École Polytechnique (IP Paris), France

Recent debates on left-behind places have highlighted how emotions such as resentment, nostalgia and loss influence regional development trajectories (MacKinnon et al., 2024). While existing studies mainly focus on political discontent and populist reactions, this paper explores how these emotions can also support entrepreneurial mobilisation and regional renewal.

The paper draws on two cases of French industrial renewal, 1083 and Le Slip Français, two brands that emerged in the wake of the decline of the French textile industry. Although neither company possesses its own industrial heritage, both have built their identity around the preservation and revitalisation of historical textile know-how. Their narratives emphasise the disappearance of workshops, the erosion of manufacturing skills, and the need to safeguard productive capabilities threatened by decades of deindustrialisation. Through storytelling practices, workshop visits, social media communication, crowdfunding campaigns and partnerships with local manufacturers, these firms seek to reconnect dispersed skills, surviving workshops and fragmented value chains.

Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews with founders, managers and manufacturing partners, complemented by field observations and documentary materials, the paper examines how entrepreneurs mobilise industrial heritage, local memories and productive capabilities to construct new narratives of regional futures. Building on work on place identity (Williams, 2014; Cresswell, 2014) and practices of placemaking and place branding (Cartel et al., 2022; Gong, 2024), it argues that these narratives reshape territorial identities and perform an economic function.

By making industrial know-how and local capabilities visible, entrepreneurs transform industrial legacies into resources for value creation and value capture. The findings show how narratives of loss and nostalgia can finance the rebuilding of productive capacities and contribute to new pathways of regional development.

Keywords: Left-behind places; Industrial legacies; Narrative entrepreneurship; Place identity; Regional renewal.

Can Street Art Transform Places? Local Development and Wellbeing Effects of Public Murals in Australia
Arturo German-Totosaus, GSSI, Italy

Street art is increasingly used as a place-based cultural intervention to revitalise urban areas, strengthen local identity, and attract visitors, yet its broader effects on host communities remain poorly understood. This paper examines whether large-scale street-art installations generate measurable changes in tourism activity, property prices, and subjective wellbeing across Australia. It will combine georeferenced and time-stamped data on street-art installations with spatial data on visitor activity, housing markets, and wellbeing. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, the study will compare changes in treated areas before and after installations with changes in comparable areas not yet exposed to such interventions. It will also test whether

effects vary according to local characteristics, particularly an area’s pre-existing tourism orientation and socioeconomic conditions. The central hypothesis is that the impacts of street art are context-dependent: tourism-oriented areas may experience stronger increases in visitor activity and property values, while effects on subjective wellbeing may vary with local socioeconomic conditions and the extent to which residents benefit from neighbourhood change. The paper contributes to the literature on creative placemaking and regional development by providing causal evidence on how the economic and wellbeing effects of street art vary across local contexts.

Edgenet and the Political Studies Association Local Governance and Politics Specialist Group.

Session Organisers:

Joanie Willett, Universdity of Exeter, UK
Grete Gansauer, University of Wyoming, USA
Jack Newman; University of Liverpool, UK

The United Kingdom is one of the most regionally unequal countries worldwide.  According to the OECD 2023 Regional Outlook, Regional inequality in the UK has grown since the early 2000’s.   Power and economy has long been pooled in London, meaning that much of the UK has become peripheral and the core has long had an outsize power.  With a new Prime Minister promising to ‘rewire the state’ and deliver ‘growth in every postcode’, the UK represents an important opportunity to observe what decentralisation can do to address regional inequalities. There is also the distinct possibility (in line with global tendencies), that processes implemented mean that the big cities capture an even greater share of the wealth while the periphery becomes increasingly peripheralised.

In this session, our panellists consider the opportunities and challenges involved with spatial rebalancing and decentralisation. The discussion seeks to foreground peripheries and cross-national learning, from ensuring that rural regions are valued for their contributions, to looking around the world for good (and bad) examples of models to follow.

This panel is comprised of two halves.  In the first, contributors provide the background to decentralisation in the UK and the potential for peripheries. In the second, we look to the USA and Canada as examples of highly decentralised governance which grew from the same political systems as the UK, but which offer very different kinds of decentralisation.  However, we also see that despite this decentralisation, both Cananda and the USA also are highly regionally unequal, although with different kinds of safety nets.   In this session, we consider good examples, and pitfalls to avoid for the UK as decision makers design a new, decentralised governance.

This panel is the first event in an exciting new collaboration between the Regional Studies Association and the Political Studies Association. Led by Edgenet (RSA) and the Local Governance & Politics Specialist Group (PSA), the session will be open to members of both organisations. We aim to facilitate the cross-fertilisation between these two groups, which holds huge potential for sharing ideas, building networks, and developing future collaborations. Please come along to support this initiative and find out how you can be involved.

Chair: Jack Newman: University of Liverpool

Decentralisation in the UK: Opportunities and challenges for peripheries.

Mark Sandford: House of Commons Library

Sarah Ayres: University of Bristol

Janice Morphet: University College London

Decentralised Government in North America: What helps or harms peripheral inequality?

Zack Taylor: Western University

Grete Gansaur: University of Wyoming

Joanie Willett: University of Exeter

Mia Gray: Cambridge University