2026 RSA Annual Conference Submitted Open Sessions

Session Organiser(s):
David Bassens, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Matt Zook, University of Kentucky, USA
Michael Grote, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Germany

Session Description:

At a time when societies are increasingly dependent on digital technology for everyday and strategic action, the session seeks papers analyzing the positionality of firms, regions and states in digitizing and platformizing global economy. Existing frameworks such as GPN and GFN do not generally include the digital as a strategic and endogenous part of value extraction or regional development. While scholars are exploring ways to include digital technology as active and independent forces in the spatial development of the economy (Butollo et al., 2022; Foster and Graham, 2017; Grabher, 2025; Howson et al., 2022; Langley and Leyshon, 2025) making sense of the digital in the global economy both in the realm of production and finance, remains a challenge and provides the motivation for this call.

Building on our ongoing work at framing this phenomenon (Bassens et al., 2024; Zook and Grote, 2024) we propose the concept of Global Digital Networks (GDN) as a productive lens for understanding changes to the spatial organization of the economy. We define GDN as the structuring of materiality (infrastructure, hardware, energy) and digitality (data, algorithms) (cf. Amoore, 2018), mediated by a layer of technology (cloud services, virtual machines, APIs) by firms, states and regions that results in global networks of cross-territorial action that enables value extraction and insertion in GFNs and GPNs. In other words, we seek to insert digital technology as an active, albeit non-deterministic, force shaping economic geography, structuring both the tech sector and broader economic and spatial arrangements.

The goal of these session(s) is to bring together researchers grappling with firm-level strategies, state efforts to control and regional interdependencies that are emerging from the interaction between digital technology and the materiality of infrastructure, production, finance, consumption, logistics and extraction. We are deliberating casting a wide net including, but not limited to:

• Political economic questions: How do states seek to maintain sovereignty/power by regulation of the digital? How does this shape connectivity and economic geographies?
• Regional development questions: How does a region’s role in and centrality in the digital contribute to local economies? What are practices of strategic (de) coupling in GDN?
• Firm governance questions: How are firms managing data and digital resources across territories? How does territorial embeddedness (e.g., US vs. Chinese firms) bring advantage and disadvantage? How does insertion in GDN enable new modes of control in GPN and GFN?
• Micro-level questions: How is data is generated, enhanced and used across these dimensions? And what are the connections between infrastructural, technological, and digital data layers.

Submission and Contact
Please submit your abstract by 12 February 2026 via the RSA portal: https://lounge.regionalstudies.org/Meetings/Meeting?ID=565.

We are happy to answer any questions and looking forward to the session! David Bassens, david.bassens@vub.be; Matthew Zook, mattazook@gmail.com, and Michael Grote, m.grote@fs.de].

References

• Amoore, L. (2018). Cloud geographies: Computing, data, sovereignty: Computing, data, sovereignty. Progress in Human Geography, 42(1), 4-24.
• Bassens, D., Pažitka, V., Hendrikse, R. (2024). Banking in the cloud: mapping big tech’s global digital technology networks, Regional Studies, 58 (12), 2241-2255.
• Butollo, F., Gereffi, G., Yang, C., Krzywdzinski, M. (2022). Digital transformation and value chains: Introduction. Global Networks, 22 (4), 585-594.
• Foster, C., & Graham, M. (2017). Reconsidering the role of the digital in global production networks. Global Networks, 17(1), 68-88.
• Grabher, G. (2025). The Disruption Delusion: Machines, Networks, and the Platformization of Industrial Production. Sociologica, 19(1), 125–153.
• Howson, K., Ferrari, F., Ustek-Spilda, F., Salem, N., Johnston, H., Katta, S., Heeks, R., & Graham, M. (2022). Driving the digital value network: Economic geographies of global platform capitalism. Global Networks, 22(4), 631–648.
• Langley, P., & Leyshon, A. (2025). Embedded finance and FinTech disappearance, Finance and Society, 1–10. doi:10.1017/fas.2025.10020
• Zook, M., Grote, M. (2025). Global Digital Networks, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 18(1), 93-110.

Session Organiser(s):
Nayara Albrecht, UNILA, Brazil

Session Description:

The research literature on regional governance and development remains largely dominated by theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses rooted in the Global North, particularly those focused on the European Union and the United States. This persistent imbalance not only restricts the diversity of analytical perspectives but also reinforces a hierarchical structure in global knowledge production. This session seeks to disrupt this dynamic by centring perspectives from beyond the so-called developed economies—foregrounding research on regional governance and development in diverse contexts and drawing upon conceptual frameworks developed by scholars working in or on the Global South. Importantly, it also recognises that the very terms “Global South” and “Global North” are themselves contested and insufficient to capture the complexity of geopolitical, economic, and epistemological differences. As such, the session invites contributions that critically engage with these classifications, offering alternative analytical frameworks and reimagined concepts of development that move beyond traditional binaries. It aims to foster a more pluralistic and inclusive dialogue on how regions organise, govern, and pursue development in different parts of the world. The session invites scholars who challenge orthodox and traditional concepts of development and seek to explore new definitions based on a wider and more varied range of countries and regions. It encourages contributions that critically engage with inherited classifications and offer alternative analytical frameworks that reflect the plural and evolving nature of development experiences across the globe. Themes include, but are not limited to, alternative conceptualisations of development, regional governance models, institutional arrangements, and theoretical approaches grounded in diverse regional experiences.

Submission
Please submit your abstract by 12 February 2026 via the RSA portal: https://lounge.regionalstudies.org/Meetings/Meeting?ID=565.

#globalsouth #regionalgovernance #policymaking #decolonisation

Session Organiser(s):
Nayara Albrecht, UNILA, Brazil

Session Description:

Data is a critical asset for informed decision-making. Yet, despite the scale and importance of governments worldwide, most studies on data use continue to focus on the private sector. This session seeks to foster dialogue on how data and artificial intelligence can be harnessed to enhance decision-making in the public sector, with particular attention to place-based approaches that recognise local specificities and needs. Evidence-informed policymaking refers to the systematic use of the best available data, research, and practical experience to guide policy decisions—balancing rigorous evidence with contextual knowledge and political realities. Place-based approaches, in turn, emphasise tailoring policies to the unique characteristics of specific regions, rather than applying universal solutions, thereby improving policy relevance and effectiveness. The session invites both practitioners and academics to share case studies, strategies, and reflections on the evolving role of data in shaping policy. It welcomes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that explore how to use and govern local data to design better, more responsive policies for different regions.

Submission
Please submit your abstract by 12 February 2026 via the RSA portal: https://lounge.regionalstudies.org/Meetings/Meeting?ID=565.

#data #policymaking #evidence

Session Organiser(s):
Ashira Beutler-Greene, The George Washington University, USA
Sarah Lieberman, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
Nazmiye Balta-Ozkan, Cranfield University, UK
Nicole Viola, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Session Description:

Novel aerospace operations require an ecosystem of support for success. Ensuring reliability through public and private sector investments, regulatory frameworks and infrastructure development, as well as understanding public acceptance for the novel aircraft overhead and possible adoption of new aerospace systems are all essential to enable innovation.

However, there is regional variation in innovation appetites which have the ability to influence budgetary allocations, coalition development, and testing environments. There are also a range of interactions between economic development at the local and regional levels and national regulation, which can create uneven approaches to energy transition, novel aircraft, and commercial space sector development.

This session considers regional stakeholder networks, relationships between local and national governments, and how innovation in aerospace functions as part of a region’s investment priorities. We welcome submissions which straddle interdisciplinary discussions of readiness for emerging aerospace technologies and provide a context for understanding current challenges and prospective opportunities.

Topics for discussion could include:

• Frameworks for balancing energy needs, infrastructure costs and economic development prospects
• Policymaking, regulation, and economics of the space sector
• System-level approaches to air and space transportation design, and how the stakeholder ecosystem responds to the complexity and integration of design and technology
• Tensions around novel aircraft certification requirements

Submission
Please submit your abstract by 12 February 2026 via the RSA portal: https://lounge.regionalstudies.org/Meetings/Meeting?ID=565.

#aerospace #aerospaceinnovation #futureofaviation #energypolicy #energytransition #innovationpolicy #research

Session Organiser(s):
Artem Korzhenevych,  Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER), Germany
Sebastian Losacker, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany

Session Description:

Research on spatial dimensions of transformations towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption, including the role of innovation in driving such transformation processes, has received much scholarly attention in recent years (Truffer and Coenen 2012; Losacker et al. 2023; Hansmeier and Kroll 2024; Binz et al. 2025). Particularly important conceptual and empirical contributions on this matter stem from geographical innovation research, mapping and explaining the uneven geographical landscape of “sustainability-oriented innovations” (Mazzanti, 2018). The latter can be viewed as a broad taxonomic category including several widely used concepts: eco-innovation, environmental innovation, sustainable innovation, green innovation, clean innovation, among others. Moreover, an understanding of innovation and development has been put forward that sees the innovative capacity of regions not only in terms of their economic output, but especially in terms of the contribution to the development dynamics of all social structures on the path to citizens’ well-being and ecological sustainability, much of which is conceptualised as “transformative innovations”, “challenge-oriented” and “mission-oriented” regional innovation systems (Capellano et al. 2024; Tartaruga et al. 2024; Trippl et al. 2024; Castellacci et al. 2025).

While many relevant contributions have already been made in this regard (among others: Hansen and Coenen 2015; Grillitsch and Hansen 2019; Strambach and Pflitsch, 2020; Jolly et al. 2020; Kanger, 2022), further research is needed to better understand the role of regional factors (e.g. agglomeration effects, cluster formation, transregional production and knowledge networks, labour mobility, infrastructure and accessibility, roles of key local actors and governance structures) that lead to the emergence and spatial diffusion of sustainability-oriented innovations, providing an overarching understanding of the (regional) geography of sustainable innovation.

This Special Session aims to bring together researchers studying the emergence and diffusion of sustainability-oriented innovations in clearly defined spatial contexts, using both quantitative (e.g., innovation statistics) and qualitative (e.g., comparative case studies) methods to address the above-mentioned gaps.

References:

• Binz, C., Coenen, L., Frenken, K., Murphy, J. T., Strambach, S., Trippl, M., & Truffer, B. (2025). Exploring the economic geographies of sustainability transitions: Commentary and agenda. Economic Geography, 101(1), 1-27.
• Cappellano, F., Santos, A. M., & Dotti, N. F. (2024). Regional R&I ventures to tackle climate change: A new geography of challenge-oriented innovation landscape. Papers in Regional Science, 103(5), 100052.
• Castellacci, F., Evenhuis, E., & Frenken, K. (2025). Geographies of innovation and well-being. Review of Regional Research, 1-18.
• Grillitsch, M., & Hansen, T. (2019). Green industry development in different types of regions. European planning studies, 27(11), 2163-2183.
• Hansen, T., & Coenen, L. (2015). The geography of sustainability transitions: Review, synthesis and reflections on an emergent research field. Environmental innovation and societal transitions, 17, 92-109.
• Hansmeier, H., & Kroll, H. (2024). The geography of eco-innovations and sustainability transitions: a systematic comparison. ZFW–Advances in Economic Geography, 68(2), 125-143.
• Jolly, S., Grillitsch, M., & Hansen, T. (2020). Agency and actors in regional industrial path development. A framework and longitudinal analysis. Geoforum, 111, 176-188.
• Kanger, L. (2022). The spatial dynamics of deep transitions. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 44, 145-162.
• Losacker, S., Hansmeier, H., Horbach, J., & Liefner, I. (2023). The geography of environmental innovation: A critical review and agenda for future research. Review of Regional Research, 43(2), 291-316.
• Mazzanti, M. (2018). Eco-innovation and sustainability: dynamic trends, geography and policies. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 61(11), 1851-1860.
• Strambach, S., & Pflitsch, G. (2020). Transition topology: Capturing institutional dynamics in regional development paths to sustainability. Research Policy, 49(7), 104006.
• Tartaruga, I., Sperotto, F., & Carvalho, L. (2024). Addressing inclusion, innovation, and sustainability challenges through the lens of economic geography: Introducing the hierarchical regional innovation system. Geography and Sustainability, 5(1), 1-12.
• Trippl, M., Baumgartinger-Seiringer, S., & Kastrup, J. (2024). Challenge-oriented regional innovation systems: towards a research agenda. Investigaciones Regionales-Journal of Regional Research, (60), 105-116.

Please submit your abstract by 12 February 2026 via the RSA portal: https://lounge.regionalstudies.org/Meetings/Meeting?ID=565.

#sustainability #transformation #regionalinnovation #innovationgeography @IOER

Session Organiser(s):
Jean-Paul Addie, Georgia State University, USA
Jen Nelles, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Michael Glass, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Session Description:

Regions are shaped by a wide variety of infrastructures that marshal the movement and management of goods, commodities, energy, and waste. These connective systems – literal and figurative pipelines – regularly bridge the spaces between where value is extracted and where it is consumed, bypassing but profoundly influencing communities along the way. Ports, by contrast, serve as vital placed infrastructures that both facilitate and regulate the movement of goods, people, and capital, simultaneously integrating local economies into transnational networks while reinforcing barriers (physical, regulatory, and socio-technical) that define territorial boundaries. Through pipelines and ports, places can be abruptly linked, or truncated, by networks and forces across incredible distances. Regional spaces and regional futures are defined in relation, or response, to such infrastructures.

In this special session, organized by the RSA Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR), we are interested in examining how key stakeholders and communities within regional envelopes leverage the presence of infrastructural pipelines and ports (as with labor markets, for example) and pursue infrastructural-based investments to release desired regional futures. We are also concerned with understanding what occurs to regions defined by infrastructural pipelines and flows but are removed from their material benefits, as well as port cities and regions that are ‘left behind’ by the locations of high-value transformation of commodities, and those that are marginalized by their conscious opposition to the transformations that infrastructure can compel.

We invite infrastructural and regional scholars examining the planning, governance, and maintenance of pipelines and ports to submit papers exploring different types of infrastructure and infrastructural regions, including:

• Ports, marine freight infrastructure, and shipping routes
• Blue highways: intercoastal and river freight transport networks
• Inland ports and logistics nodes
• Freight rail and intermodal terminals
• Planning and protesting pipelines
• Dams and reservoirs
• Energy generation and transmission networks
• Carbon capture and storage and other environmental remediation
• Remote infrastructure for extractive industries
• Wastewater and sewage

By exploring these infrastructural regionalisms engendered by such systems, we hope to encourage the interrogation of infrastructural and regional dynamics in peripheral as well as metropolitan regions while opening the conversation to different problematiques and varieties of governance. Centering questions of transport, transmission, and treatment also broadens our focus to include and account for private infrastructure and its influence on regional spaces. As such, we are inviting contributions that engage with ‘ports and pipes’ to unpack the key themes animating the NOIR network: interdisciplinary dialogues, cross-border governance, seeing like a region, and infrastructure and regional lives.

Please submit your abstract by 12 February 2026 via the RSA portal: https://lounge.regionalstudies.org/Meetings/Meeting?ID=565 and contact the sessions organizers at infrastructural.regionalism@gmail.com if you have any questions.

To find out more about NOIR, visit the network’s website: www.noir-rsa.com

Session Organiser(s):
Ralph Richter, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Germany
Ilaria Martiotti, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Suntje Schmidt, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Germany

Session Description:

For a significant proportion of the working population, remote work has the potential to de-couple the close spatial intertwining of home and work locations. With this new flexibility, cities, towns and villages are hoping to attract (new) inhabitants who have previously been unable to combine working in central (most often urban) locations with living in rather rural places. For high-skilled individuals who did not want to endure long commutes, moving to rural communi-ties was rarely a viable option due to lacking working possibilities nearby. The incompatibility between professional and private life has contributed to population decline and socio-economic disadvantage in rural regions (McCollum, 2025). However, the rise of remote working models such as working from home (WFH), hybrid working (HW) and digital nomadism (ILO, 2020; Eurofound, 2023) means that the strong barrier effect of long commutes is diminishing. Rural communities and second-tier cities are becoming more attractive places to live for skilled workers implementing new work forms. Respective workers spend more time on-site, either at home or in third places (Oldenburg, 1991) like collaborative work spaces. This may diversify ac-tivities in oftentimes mono-functional (sleeping) villages (Richter, 2018), increase the attrac-tiveness of second-tier cities and contribute to decongesting large cities and metropolitan are-as. These developments may breathe new life into rural communities and neighborhoods and intensify civil society engagement. In short, the increased compatibility of work and life in rural and urban areas, brought about by new working practices, may foster the revitalization of rural communities, peripheral towns and second-tier cities.

As plausible as these expectations are, initial empirical results are all the more sobering. McCollum (2025) shows, using England as an example, that new opportunities for remote work-ing tend to increase inequalities between the core and the periphery rather than levelling it. Brewer et al. (2022) and Farmer & Zanetti (2021) found that regions where people already had the opportunity to WFH and HW benefited the most. These include affluent commuter belt ar-eas rather than remote regions.

While these are interesting results, there are indications that they do not show the full picture. Firstly, many of the studies were conducted during the COVID pandemic and only examined the increase in remote working and decentralized living and working during or shortly after this period (González-Leonardo et al., 2022; Stawarz et al., 2022; McCollum, 2023; Vogiazides/Kawalerowicz, 2023). Empirical evidence for the post-COVID period is still limited. Secondly, research is dominated by quantitative studies at higher aggregate levels, which dif-ferentiate less between places with varying degrees of rurality and urbanity. Thirdly, the results obtained in a specific context may not be readily reproducible in other countries and regions. For example, while Knuepling et al. (2025) show that rural regions in Germany are benefiting from an influx of remote working residents and Tammaru et al. (2023) made a similar observa-tion in Estonia, McCollum (2025) demonstrated contrary results for England.
This open session is organized as part of the REMAKING Horizon project titled “Remote-working multiple impacts in the age of disruptions: socio-economic transformations, territorial rethinking, and policy actions”. The project examines the positive and negative effects of re-mote working on individuals, organizations and territories.

Against this backdrop, the planned session will examine questions such as – but not limited to:

• What spatial reconfigurations arise from remote working? For example, how do urban-rural linkages, multilocality and the interplay between globalized online spaces and the local environment change?
• In what ways are rural regions and communities impacted by new forms of remote work, e.g. regarding the demand for social and commercial services, new perspectives, civic engagement, and new labor potential?
• To what extent do rural regions and second-tier cities benefit from the influx of WFH, HW and digital nomads, both permanent and temporary?
• What characterizes the newcomers to rural communities and neighborhoods who work remotely?
• In how far do new arrivals in rural areas and second-tier cities affect social life and cohe-sion within communities?
• To what extent can collaborative work spaces help to support development dynamics in rural regions by offering a working environment for remote workers?

We appreciate contributions that address these and further questions from a theoretical and/or empirical perspective. Both qualitative and quantitative research contributions are welcome, as are studies that use newer empirical methods such as tracking, go-alongs, or digital diaries. In the event of numerous presentation proposals, we intend to divide the session into one part on remote work in urban contexts and one part focusing on rural areas.

References

• Brewer, Mike; Leslie, Jack; Try, Lalitha. 2022. Right Where You Left Me?: Analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on local economies in the UK. The Resolution Foundation. https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Right-where-you-left-me.pdf.
• Eurofound. 2023. Hybrid work in Europe: Concept and practice, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg.
• Farmer, Harry; Zanetti, Oliver. 2021. Escaping the City? How COVID-19 might affect the UK’s economic geography. Nesta. https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/Escaping__the_City_v6.pdf.
• González-Leonardo, Miguel; Rowe, Francisco; Fresolone-Caparros, Alberto. 2022. Rural revival? The rise in internal migration to rural areas during the COVID-19 pandemic. Who moved and where? Journal of Rural Studies. 96: 332-342. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2022.11.006.
• ILO 2020. COVID-19: Guidance for labour statistics data collection: Defining and measuring remote work, telework, work at home and home-based work, 5 June, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—stat/documents/publication/wcms_747075.pdf
• Knuepling, Louis; Sternberg, Rolf; Otto, Anne. 2025. Rural areas as winners of COVID-19, digitalization and remote working? Empirical evidence from recent internal migration in Germany. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. 18(1): 227-248. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsae033.
• McCollum, David. 2023. Covid geographies of home and work: privileged (im)mobilities? People, Place and Policy. 17(2): 82-99. https://doi.org/10.3351/ppp.2023.955439479.
• 2025. Post-pandemic geographies of working from home: More of the same for spatial inequalities? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12749.
• Oldenburg, R. 1991. The great good place: Cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts at the heart of a community. New York: Marlowe.
  Richter, Ralph. 2018. Sozialer Wandel ländlicher Gesellschaften. in: Nell/Weiland (eds.), Dorf. Berlin: J.B. Metzler: 129-136.
  Stawarz, Nico; Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge, Matthias; Sander, Nikola; Sulak, Harun; Knobloch, Vanessa. 2022. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on internal migration in Germany: A descriptive analysis. Population, Space and Place. 28(6). https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2566.
• Tammaru, Tiit; Kliimask, Jaak; Kalm, Kadi; Zalite, Janis. 2023. Did the pandemic bring new features to counter-urbanisation? Evidence from Estonia. Journal of Rural Studies. 97: 345-355. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2022.12.012.
• Vogiazides, Louisa; Kawalerowicz, Juta. 2023. Internal migration in the time of Covid: Who moves out of the inner city of Stockholm and where do they go? Population, Space and Place. 29(4). https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2641.

Session Organiser(s):
James W. Scott, University of Eastern Finland, Finland & Institute for Regional Studies, Hungary
Réka Horeczki Institute for Regional Studies, Hungary
Szilárd Rácz Institute for Regional Studies & University of Pannonia, Hungary

Session Description:

Borders, which can be interpreted in many ways, play a decisive role in the development of territorial structures and policies. Borders exert their essential influence as elements of the relationships between various active and passive actors. Border studies is currently experiencing a boom worldwide. The border issue, as a political concern and a development opportunity, will remain a permanent feature of the European Union, which is constantly changing, both in terms of its internal and external borders and border regions. The issue of borders as a political concern and as an opportunity for development will remain a constant in the ever-changing European Union, both in terms of internal and external borders and border regions. The study of borders can help us to better understand the processes of change that affect the countries of which we are citizens and the communities in which we live. From the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe, borderlessness is a traditionally researched topic that exists in many spatial dimensions.

This special session welcomes contributions that deal with the different as well as changing impacts of borders on regional development, cross-border flows and cooperation in any form. It is open to theoretical and empirical foci, comparative and case studies, as well as qualitative and quantitative approaches. Some more specific topics:

• Borders as development resources and as conditioning factors for development;
• Macroregions as borderlands (e.g. Central Europe, Western Balkans);
• Macro-regional strategies (Danube, Carpathian) and spatial imaginaries;
• European integration, Europeanisation, Schengen enlargement;
• Regional consequences of the European polycrisis & changing geopolitical thinking;
• Small state geopolitics in a multipolar World;
• Neighborhoods and borderlands as case studies;
• Socio-economic cohesion in borderlands, geographies of discontent;
• Conflicts at borderlands and their impact on local and regional development.

This session will be organized by the Research Group in Border Studies and Geopolitics of the Institute for Regional Studies.

Session Organiser(s):
Joanie Willett, University of Exeter, UK
Grete Gansauer, University of Wyoming, USA
Rhiannon Pugh, CIRCLE, Lund University, Sweden
Madeleine Eriksson, Umeå University, Sweden
Michael Howcroft, University of Glasgow, UK

Session Description:

EdgeNet is the Regional Studies Association network for interdisciplinary research on peripheral places and regions. EdgeNet aims to advocate and amplify impactful research on the diverse places that are ‘non-core’ or on the ‘edge’ of core activities, including but not limited to rural, peri-urban, post-industrial, de-populating, and remote areas. In collaboration with policy makers, practitioners and local communities, we aim to explore new ways of analysing our edgy spaces that can help us to understand where we are now, how we got here, and what we can do in the future.

Over the past few years a combination of the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and political leaders who are no longer bought in to the post war liberal consensus has seen the world become more unstable.  In turn, this has meant that nations have become increasingly aware of geopolitical questions.

For peripheries, there are two intertwined issues which play out here.

Firstly, it means that some peripheries have become newly important as suppliers of resources as governments seek to re-shore production and supply chains to their own shores, or to regional allies.  This is interesting as peripheries have often been suppliers of resources, although this hasn’t always meant that resource peripheries have mattered in core social and political consciousness.

Secondly, we know that people in many Left Behind peripheries that feel overlooked in contemporary politics are being pushed towards extremist parties who amplify geopolitical instability.  Potentially, this means that the ‘discontent’ of ‘regions that (purportedly) don’t matter’ is contributing to the scenario which see’s other peripheral regions taking on a new (securitised) significance.

This Edgenet panel will explore these questions.  Potential threads include

• How is securitisation language being used, and where?
• Is there any difference between types of resources?  For example, is food security still important in regional discourse?
• Do we see any shifts in how left behind regions are being addressed?
• Do current geopolitical questions mean that some left behind regions become more marginalised?
• Do regions that have found themselves to be newly geopolitically important find themselves treated better?  Or do the old languages that marginalised and othered peripheries, just change their focus and emphasis?
• What happens to industries that are not securitised?
• Do these shifts impact on the kinds of skills that people invest in, and the kinds of work that local people do?
• To what extent is technological expertise being brought in from outside of the region, rather than fostering local skills innovation systems?
• Is it ok for regions to become militarised?
• Do these processes mean that peripheral and rural areas become better understood?  Or are they still framed through urban, and core lenses?
• What impacts do these processes have on local politics and feelings of discontent?
• Are some regions becoming moreleft behind and left out?
• What are the political mobilisations and flows that emerge in left behind regions, and how do these feed in to political mobilisations elsewhere?

Papers should consider novel analyses of development questions, policy learning from other regions, and empirical and theoretical material which address solutions and approaches to economic, societal, and environmental challenges in peripheries.  You might like to consider past and present examples of major investment opportunities that were capitalised on, or missed, or places which have been simply overlooked.  We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions

Session Organiser(s):
Susanne Frick, Cardiff University, UK
Paula Prenzel, RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany

Session Description:

This session invites contributions that examine the relationship between finance and regional and local development, with a particular focus on the role of state-led and hybrid financial arrangements as well as spatial variations in access to private finance. In the past decades, concerns over spatial inequality, uneven development, and the limits of market-based finance have renewed interest in public and quasi-public financial institutions as instruments of territorial development.

We particularly welcome papers that engage with the role of State Development Banks (SDBs), other state investment vehicles, and public–private partnerships (PPPs) in shaping regional and local development trajectories. These institutional arrangements are increasingly deployed to mobilise long-term capital, de-risk private investment, and support strategic sectors, infrastructure, green growth and place-based development initiatives. Yet their effectiveness, governance structures, and developmental impacts remain contested and uneven across contexts.

Contributions may explore how these financial set-ups operate in practice, the political and institutional logics underpinning them, and their impacts on regional economies, social outcomes, and territorial inequalities. The session is open to both theoretical and empirical work, including comparative, historical, and case-study approaches across different national and sub-national settings.

Indicative themes include (but are not limited to):
• The role of State Development Banks in sustainable regional and local development
• State investment vehicles, sovereign and sub-sovereign funds, and place-based finance
• Public–private partnerships and their developmental, financial, and governance implications
• Financial instruments for infrastructure, industrial policy, regional transformation and green growth
• The governance, accountability, and political economy of state-led finance
• Impacts of public and hybrid financial arrangements on spatial inequalities and development outcomes
• Comparative perspectives on financial architectures for regional development

The session aims to foster dialogue across disciplines and to critically assess whether and how public and hybrid financial institutions can contribute to more inclusive and territorially balanced development.

Session Organiser(s):
Sania Dzalbe, Umeå University, Sweden
Emelie Hane-Weijman Umeå University, Sweden

Session Description:

Over the past decades, economic geography has undergone significant transformations, from spatial analyses of production and industry to increasingly complex understandings of networks, labor markets, and everyday economies. Yet, questions remain about whose experiences and perspectives are centered, and how gendered relations of power continue to shape the production of space, work, and value.

This special session focuses on feminist and gender-sensitive approaches within economic geography by highlighting the multiple ways in which economic processes are embedded in gendered structures of labour markets, social reproduction, mobility, and everyday life. We aim to bring together scholars interested in expanding the conversations of economic geography, broadening established narratives and exploring how gender relations intersect with class, race, and place in shaping economic landscapes.

We invite theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:
– Gendered and racialized mobilities and immobility, labor migration, commuting, and uneven access to movement
– Social reproduction and everyday economies, care work, household labor and transnational care chains
– Gendered division of labour, sex segregation in labour markets
– Workers access to work, career opportunities as well as risk to end up in precarious employment
– Feminist economic geography and epistemology, rethinking whose voices are being represented in knowledge production in economic geography
– Creative approaches to quantitative analysis, including novel techniques for mapping, measuring, and communicating gendered and marginalized economic spaces
– Intersectional and embodied approaches to economic life

By gathering diverse perspectives, this session aims to engage in a dialogue around how feminist and gendered analyses can deepen, challenge, and transform the field of economic geography today.

Keywords: Gender; Social reproduction; Mobilities and immobilities; Everyday geographies, Unpaid labor, Care work.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us!
Sania (sania.dzalbe@umu.se)
Emelie (emelie.hane-weijman@umu.se)

Session Organiser(s):
Luke Green Newcastle University, UK
Liz Shutt Newcastle University, UK
Louise Kempton Newcastle University, UK
Grete Gansauer, University of Wyoming, USA

Session Description:

Strengthening the foundational economy — the zone of the economy encompassing the social and physical infrastructures, goods, and services essential to everyday life (transport, food, energy, education, health, and care) — is increasingly recognised by scholars and policymakers as crucial for achieving inclusive growth, economic resilience and societal well-being.

While a growing body of research has advanced conceptual and empirical understandings of the foundational economy, its translation into concrete policy instruments and delivery mechanisms at local and regional scales remains uneven. This is despite a rapidly growing interest in foundational economy thinking among policymakers, which has driven several attempts at policy experimentation in local and regional contexts globally.

This session engages with the challenge of bridging the gap between theoretical and conceptual work on the foundational economy and the development of actionable policy recommendations and practical frameworks for local and regional policymakers and practitioners. We seek contributions that directly address the transition from research to real-world impact, focusing on how academic research can be translated into effective, place-based interventions that strengthen the foundational economy and drive more inclusive forms of local and regional development.

Papers may be theoretical, conceptual, methodological, or empirical in focus and may draw on any local, regional, or national context. We are especially interested in contributions that demonstrate the practical application and impact of foundational economy research on local and regional development, including that which has been informed through collaborative work with local or regional partners in policy, practice, or community settings.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
• Developing practical policy models (e.g., Local Growth Plans, regional industrial strategies) to strengthen foundational economies within and across regions.
• Intersections between the foundational economy and related concepts and approaches (e.g. community wealth building, everyday economy).
• Empirical analyses of regional inequalities in the quality, accessibility, governance, and affordability of foundational services.
• Workforce conditions in foundational sectors, including pay, precarity, skills development, and labour market restructuring.
• Improving productivity, sustainability, and resilience in foundational sectors, including challenges of measurement and evaluation.
• Co-produced or action-oriented research methods that generate policy-relevant insights and support learning across places.
• New data, indicators, and metrics to make foundational sectors more visible in regional analysis and policymaking.

By bringing together critical analysis and applied research, this session aims to contribute to a growing scholarly and policy agenda on the foundational economy by moving from theory to action and by facilitating policy learning across regions.

Session Organiser(s):
Dzamila Bienkowska, Linköping University, Sweden
Romulo Pinheiro, University of Agder, Norway
Markku Sotarauta, Tampere University, Finland
Vito Laterza, University of Agder, Norway

Session Description:

Regional green transitions are neither linear nor uniform. Some regions and universities act as agenda-setters, leveraging local coalitions and innovation ecosystems. Others sit in “waiting mode,” observing leading regions and institutions before committing to particular pathways. Still others must navigate structural pressures shaped by national funding systems, global supply chains, or sectoral dependencies (e.g., oil, minerals, tourism). These dynamics produce a map of regions moving at different speeds for different reasons, engaging different stakeholders, and encountering different obstacles.
Universities occupy a complex and often ambiguous position within these processes: sometimes conveners and vision-setters, sometimes cautious followers, and often institutions struggling to reconcile competing expectations. Building on insights from recent workshops and ongoing research, this panel seeks empirical and conceptual contributions that illuminate the multiple roles universities play in regional green transitions and how they can act constructively under conditions of uncertainty and complexity.

Important questions to consider include, but are not limited to:

• Under what conditions do universities become agenda-setters versus followers in regional green transitions?
• How can universities sustain a long-term strategic focus amid political and economic short-termism?
• What institutional forms best support deliberative and democratic debate about contested transition pathways?
• How can universities advance “just transitions” practically through curricula, research design, community engagement, or partnerships?
• What are the trade-offs and tensions between scientific/technical leadership and democratic, locally-grounded decision-making processes?

We invite submissions that:

• Map and explain the varied roles universities play in regional green transitions.
• Identify strategies universities use to sustain long-term visions, host democratic debate, support just transitions, and enable cross-disciplinary collaboration.
• Examine how national funding regimes, global supply chains, sectoral dependencies, and local political economies shape university engagement.
• Offer comparative or single-case studies that reveal why and how universities become leaders, followers, or intermediaries.
• Propose practical frameworks, policy recommendations, or institutional innovations for strengthening universities’ positive contributions to equitable and effective green transitions.

Topics of interest (non-exhaustive):

• Universities as conveners: practices for inclusive, reflexive, cross-sector dialogue.
• Institutional mechanisms to sustain long-term transition visions (strategies, governance, funding models).
• Universities and just transitions: methods to surface and address distributional and intergenerational equity.
• Cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary models: barriers, enablers, and outcomes.
• Universities in resource-dependent regions (e.g., oil, mining, tourism): pathways, constraints, and conflict management.
• University relations with local, regional, national, and global actors: multi-level governance and coalition-building.
• Waiting modes and follower strategies: why some universities delay commitment and the political/economic logic behind such positions.
• University-led innovation ecosystems and their role in regional decarbonisation or resilience-building.
• Evaluation metrics and indicators for assessing university contributions to regional green transitions.
• Methodological reflections: co-production, participatory research, reflexive mapping, and process-tracing in transition studies.

Theoretical and methodological approaches (disciplinary or interdisciplinary) are particularly welcomed:

• Comparative regional political economy
• Science and technology studies (STS) and socio-technical transitions
• Institutional analysis and organizational studies
• Co-production and participatory action research
• Qualitative case studies, process tracing, and ethnography
• Mixed-method and quantitative assessments of impact and networks

We welcome contributions from scholars, practitioners, and university leaders with empirical, comparative, conceptual, or policy-oriented work that advances understanding of how universities can—realistically and ethically—contribute to equitable regional green transitions.

Session Organiser(s):
Vasco Barbosa, University Portucalense, Portugal

Session Description:

This open session explores how artificial intelligence and data-driven approaches are reshaping the spatial economy of cities, influencing patterns of urban growth, productivity, firm location and socio-spatial inequality. By bringing together contributions from regional science, urban economics and urban studies, the session examines how AI-based methods and big spatial data are transforming the analysis, governance and outcomes of city development across different urban contexts. The objective of this session is to critically assess the role of AI and advanced spatial analytics in understanding and guiding city development within the spatial economy. It aims to bridge methodological innovation with policy-relevant insights, highlighting both opportunities and risks related to productivity gains, uneven development, algorithmic bias and the governance of data-driven urban decision-making.

Key Topics
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning in spatial and urban economic analysis
• Data-driven urban growth, productivity and economic performance
• Firm location, agglomeration and spatial dynamics in AI-enabled cities
• Socio-spatial inequality and uneven development in data-driven urban economies
• Big spatial data, urban modelling and policy evaluation
• Governance, ethics and bias in AI-supported urban economic decision-making
• Comparative perspectives on AI, spatial economy and city development

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Spatial Economy; City Development; Urban Productivity; Socio-spatial Inequality; Data-Driven Urban Analysis

Session Organiser(s):
Muzamil Farooq, University of Stavanger, Norway
Huiwen Gong, University of Stavanger, Norway
Suyash Jolly, University of Ostrava, Czechia
Tim Rottleb, Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany

Session Description:

Over the past decade, economic geography and regional studies have experienced a growing ideational turn (Benner, 2024; Peck et al. 2025; Riekötter 2025), alongside a broader futures turn in human geography (Blackman, 2025; Crawford et al. 2025; Gong 2024; Jeffrey and Dyson 2021; Simandan 2025). Increasing attention has been paid to how various forms of ideas, such as imaginaries, expectations, narratives and visions shape economic action and spatial development (Roessler et al., 2025; Rottleb, 2024; Gong and Truffer, 2024), as well as to how anticipations of the future, rather than inherited structures alone, actively inform present-day strategies, policies, and investments (Cantó-Milà & Seebach, 2024). Together, these shifts have foregrounded the temporal, symbolic, and performative dimensions of regional development.

Accordingly, research investigates how regions are not only shaped by path dependence, material conditions, and institutional structures, but also by collectively imagined and strategically mobilized conceptions of how the future – supposedly – will, and should, look like (Oomen et al., 2021; Reinekoski, 2025). Concepts such as regional visions, growth imaginaries, green transition pathways, smart specialization priorities, and mission-oriented innovation policies illustrate how futures increasingly function as governing devices in regional policy and planning (Neuhoff et al., 2022). A wide range of futuring practices, including foresight, scenario building, visioning, experimentation, and backcasting, are now deployed to coordinate actors, manage uncertainty, and legitimize intervention in an era marked by climate crisis, digital transformation, demographic change, and intensified geopolitical and geoeconomic competition (Barendregt et al., 2024). These strategies and practices materialise in various spatial forms aimed at conjuring the envisioned future in the now, including purpose-built infrastructures, growth corridors, special economic zones and technology parks (Lawhon et al., 2023; Rottleb, 2025; Tups & Dannenberg, 2021).

At the same time, these future-oriented processes are deeply uneven. Regions differ markedly in their capacity to imagine, articulate, and realize particular futures, and dominant visions often privilege specific actors, sectors, and places while marginalizing others (Hajer & Oomen, 2025; Farooq, 2025). Often, enacted future politics, while claiming transformatory language, are rooted in existing power structures and stabilize the political-economic status-quo (Kallert et al., 2021). Futures are thus not merely anticipated; they are governed, contested, and distributed unequally across space. Yet despite the proliferation of future-oriented concepts and tools, existing research remains theoretically dispersed, methodologically uneven, and contextually under-examined. There is a need for more systematic and critical engagement with whose futures are being promoted and for whom, through which methods, and with what distributional and socio-political consequences.

This special session brings together these concerns by proposing an integrative focus on regional futuring and uneven geographies of futures. Building on and extending debates in economic geography, regional studies, planning, (cultural) political economy, and sustainability transitions, the session seeks to advance critical dialogue on how futures are imagined, negotiated, institutionalized, and contested at the regional scale. By foregrounding both regional futuring and uneven geographies of futures, this special session aims to foster a more explicit, critical, and theoretically grounded conversation on the role of futures in shaping regional development under conditions of uncertainty and polycrisis.

The session will consist of two segments: presentations addressing the themes outlined below (Open segment), followed by a panel discussion on the topic (closed segment). It invites conceptual papers, methodological innovations, and empirical research from diverse geographical contexts and scales. Submissions employing qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods approaches are all welcome. We invite contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

Theories of Regional Futuring and Uneven Futures
• Conceptualizations of the future in regional studies and associated analytical categories (e.g. imaginaries, expectations, visions, utopias, hope, despair, anticipation)
• Regional futuring in relation to innovation, transitions, crises and resilience, and path creation
• Temporalities, uncertainty, and competing regional visions and contradictions.
• The role of history, memory, and inherited structures in constraining or enabling future pathways
• Regional innovation cultures shaping the regional futures
• Materialisation and failure of the regional futures

Methods and Practices of Researching Futuring
• Foresight, scenario analysis, visioning, backcasting, and other future-oriented methods in regional research and policy
• Participatory, deliberative, and co-creative approaches to regional futuring
• Experimental, speculative, and performative methods (e.g. living labs, urban and regional experiments)
• Methodological challenges in studying regional futures that are multiple, uncertain, and not yet realized

Politics, Governance, and Spaces of Futures
• The role of the state, firms, experts, and civil society in governing regional futures
• Sites and arenas of future-making
• Geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics shaping regional futures
• Justice, long term social acceptability, responsibility, and the unintended consequences of future-oriented regional strategies

Futures, Power, and (Counter-)Hegemony Projects
• Who gets to imagine, define, and institutionalize regional futures, and who is included and excluded?
• Futuring as a site of power, contestation, and depoliticization
• Alternative futures and futuring practices that challenge the status quo
• Futures producing uneven development

Universities and Regional Futuring
• Universities as knowledge producers and legitimizers of regional future visions and transition pathways
• Academic expertise, foresight capabilities, and the role of university-based research in regional scenario building and strategic planning
• Universities as institutional anchors in regional innovation systems: shaping expectations, coordinating actors, and enabling mission-oriented policies
• The politics of knowledge production: whose futures are prioritized in university-led regional research, and which regional voices are included or excluded?
• Tensions between academic autonomy, regional engagement, and the performativity of university-generated future visions
• Universities’ role in capacity building for regional futuring: education, training, and participatory methods for diverse stakeholders

#RegionalFuturing #GeographiesOfTheFuture #FuturesStudies #EconomicGeography #RegionalStudies #SpatialInequality #UnevenDevelopment #FutureMaking

References:

• Benner, M. (2024). An ideational turn in economic geography? Progress in Economic Geography, 2(1), 100014.
• Blackman, T. (2025). Performing the future of work: Examining discourses of the future of work and the ideal worker through event ethnographies. Geoforum, 167, 104461.
• Crawford, G., Christiansen, J., & Rojas-Marchini, F. (2025). Developing methods for future-gazing economic geographies. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 0308518X251347428.
• Farooq, M. (2025). Review of Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics by Maarten A. Hajer and Jeroen Oomen. Regional Science Policy and Practice.
• Gong, H. (2024). Futures should matter (more): Toward a forward-looking perspective in economic geography. Progress in Human Geography, 48(3), 292-315.
• Gong, H., & Truffer, B. (2024). Changing from within: the interplay between imaginary, culture and innovation system in regional transformation. GEIST–Geography of Innovation and Sustainability Transitions.
• Jeffrey, C., & Dyson, J. (2021). Geographies of the future: Prefigurative politics. Progress in Human Geography , 45 (4), 641-658. Peck, J., Meulbroek, C., & Phillips, R. (2025). Ideas and ideation in geographical political economy. Progress in Human Geography, 49(3), 239-265.
• Kallert, A., Belina, B., Miessner, M., & Naumann, M. (2021). The cultural political economy of rural governance: Regional development in Hesse (Germany). Journal of Rural Studies, 87, 327–337.
• Lawhon, M., Follmann, A., Braun, B., Cornea, N., Greiner, C., Guma, P., Karpouzoglou, T., Diez, J. R., Schindler, S., Schramm, S., Sielker, F., Tups, G., Vij, S., & Dannenberg, P. (2023). Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south. Futures, 154, 103270.
• Riekötter, N. (2025). Contradiction as Method A Critical-Theoretical Approach to Ideational Economic Geography. Progress in Economic Geography, 100050.
• Roessler, M., Grillitsch, M., Miörner, J., & Schiller, D. (2025). Shaping opportunity spaces: the role of narratives in place leadership. Regional Studies, 59(1), 2471541.
• Rottleb, T. (2024). Building the Knowledge Economy, Transforming Cities? Transnational Education Zones as a Multi-Scalar Development Strategy in the Arab Gulf Region. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
• Rottleb, T. (2025). Offshore campus development and the worlding of Dubai as an international education hub. Urban Geography, 46(1), 180–200.
• Simandan, D. (2025). The future as an emergent problematic in geographical scholarship. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space,
• Tups, G., & Dannenberg, P. (2021). Emptying the future, claiming space: The southern agricultural growth corridor of Tanzania as a spatial imaginary for strategic coupling processes. Geoforum, 123, 23–35.

Session Organiser(s):
Han Chu, Kiel University, Germany
Huiwen Gong, University of Stavanger, Norway
Robert Hassink, Kiel University, Germany
Jesse Sutton, McGill University, Canada
Michaela Trippl, University of Vienna, Austria

Session Description:

In current times of crises, the notion of resilience is often used in economic geography and regional studies to analyse both the recovery processes from a shock and the building up of capabilities to deal with future shocks (Sutton & Arku, 2022; Sutton et al., 2023, 2024; Martin & Sunley, 2020; Gong & Hassink, 2017). However, so far, this literature strongly focuses on the resilience of regional economies, whereas much less literature has explicitly dealt with the resilience of clusters and regional industrial paths as part of a regional economy. Some studies empirically focus on clusters, industrial districts, or regionally concentrated industries when analysing crisis responses. However, these contributions often continue to conceptualize resilience primarily through the lens of regional resilience, treating clusters as empirical manifestations of regional dynamics rather than as analytically distinct units of resilience in their own right (Dueñas & Campi, 2024; Schmidt et al., 2022; Hervas-Oliver et al., 2011). While cluster research has a long tradition in economic geography (Chu & Hassink, 2022), the term cluster resilience has only emerged in recent years (Henry et al. 2021; Li et al. 2022; Rothgang and Lageman 2024). The same counts for the rich literature on regional industrial path development (Hassink et al., 2019; Breul et al., 2025), which only recently has been put in relation to resilience (Baumgartinger-Seiringer et al., 2025). This raises a more fundamental conceptual question: resilience of clusters and regional industrial paths should not be understood as merely a scaled-down version of regional resilience. The two operate through different mechanisms. For example, regional resilience research often emphasizes structural features such as related variety, sectoral composition, and regional institutional environments, cluster resilience may hinge more strongly on firm heterogeneity, the role of leading firms, collective and fragmented forms of agency, and the strategic interactions among different types of firms within production networks.
We see scope for studying the resilience of clusters and regional industrial paths from seven perspectives.

First, we see in particular scope for research of clusters and industrial paths from a transformative resilience perspective. This recently discussed form of resilience refers to a situation in which the severity of a shock causes an economy to shift to entirely new functions, structures, and performances (Sutton et al., 2023; Trippl et al., 2024). It is also discussed from a perspective of a window of opportunity for a sustainability transition and related innovations during and after crises. Rather than studying whole regional economies from a transformative resilience perspective, it might make sense to have a nuanced look at the transformative resilience of individual clusters or paths within a regional economy.

Secondly, and relatedly, the role of agency in clusters and regional industrial paths is key in understanding (transformative) resilience of clusters and regional industrial paths (Lemke, 2025). Change agencies are inclined to foster transformation, particularly at critical junctures providing opportunity spaces, whereas maintenance and reproductive agencies hinder it and reproduce existing structures.

Thirdly, in current times of poly-crisis, the resilience of clusters and industrial paths is increasingly complex, as clusters and regional industrial paths are often confronted with several crises at the same time, with partly contradictory effects. So far, few resilience studies in economic geography and regional studies have analyzed resilience from a poly-crisis perspective.

Fourthly, we see scope for studying the interrelations between cluster and industrial path resilience and overall regional economic resilience. Are some clusters and paths more resilient than other clusters and paths and how does that affect the overall resilience of a regional economy?

Fifthly, clusters and regional industrial paths are often embedded in global production networks / value chains. How do dependencies on international supply chains, geopolitics, or trade disruptions affect resilience at the cluster / path level? Contributions could examine the role of strategies like diversification, regionalization, or strategic autonomy in buffering resilience.

Sixthly, resilience is not only economic but also encompasses social inequalities and ecological impacts. How do resilience processes in clusters / paths affect workers, vulnerable groups, or the environment? Contributions could examine how productive links to the “just transitions” literature could be established.

Seventhly, policy-making, support programs, and institutional frameworks play a key role in fostering resilience. How do supranational, national and regional industrial policies, cluster initiatives or crisis management influence the adaptability of clusters and paths. Empirical analyses of policy effects and/or governance failures are particularly welcome.

Against this background, this session aims at presenting recent research on the resilience of clusters and industrial paths from a transformative, agency and poly-crisis perspective, but we are of course open to other new directions (e.g., the role of resilience of clusters in global production networks and global value chains). We welcome theoretical, conceptual, and (quantitative and qualitative) empirical papers.

We are happy to answer any questions and looking forward to seeing you in Gothenburg! Robert Hassink hassink@geographie.uni-kiel.de

References

• Baumgartinger-Seiringer, S., Páger, B., & Trippl, M. (2025). Regions in industrial transitions: a transformative resilience perspective on the uneven geographies of vulnerability, preparedness, and responsiveness. Economic Geography, 101(4), 191-217.
• Breul, M., Atienza, M., Grillitsch, M., & Pugh, R. (2025). Towards studying the developmental consequences of regional industrial path development. Regional Studies, 59(1), 2517884.
• Chu, H., & Hassink, R. (2022). Regional Clusters. In: Dilworth, R. (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Urban Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Dueñas, M., & Campi, M. (2024). Regional resilience during COVID-19: evidence from Colombian exporting clusters. Regional Studies, 58(11), 2129-2145.
• Gong, H., & Hassink, R. (2017). Regional resilience: The critique revisited. In Creating Resilient Economies. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Hassink, R., Isaksen, A., & Trippl, M. (2019). Towards a comprehensive understanding of new regional industrial path development. Regional Studies, 53(1), 1636–1645.
• Henry, N., Angus, T., & Jenkins, M. (2021). Motorsport Valley revisited: Cluster evolution, strategic cluster coupling and resilience. European Urban and Regional Studies, 28(4), 466-486.
• Hervas-Oliver, J. L., Jackson, I., & Tomlinson, P. R. (2011). ‘May the ovens never grow cold’: regional resilience and industrial policy in the North Staffordshire ceramics industrial district–with lessons from Sassoulo and Castellon. Policy Studies, 32(4), 377-395.
• Lemke, L. K. G. (2025). Reproductive agencies in regional economic resilience: insights from Covid-19 in Tyrol. European Planning Studies, 1-28.
• Li, P., Turkina, E., & Van Assche, A. (2022). The tortoise and the hare: Industry clockspeed and resilience of production and knowledge networks in Montréal’s aerospace industry. ZFW–Advances in Economic Geography, 66(2), 81-95.
• Martin, R. & Sunley, P. (2020). Regional economic resilience: evolution and evaluation. In: G. Bristow & A. Healy, eds., Handbook on Regional Economic Resilience, 10-35. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
• Rothgang, M., & Lageman, B. (2024). Is ambidexterity crucial for cluster resilience? Conceptional consideration and empirical evidence. Competitiveness Review: An International Business Journal, 34(3), 519-537.
• Schmidt, V. K., Zen, A. C., & Bittencourt, B. A. (2022). The influence of regional resilience elements on the performance of clustered firms. International Regional Science Review, 45(5), 503-533.
• Sutton, J., & Arku, G. (2022). Regional economic resilience: towards a system approach. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 9(1), 497-512.
• Sutton, J., Arcidiacono, A., Torrisi, G., & Arku, R. N. (2023). Regional economic resilience: A scoping review. Progress in Human Geography, 47(4), 500-532.
• Sutton, J., Arku, G., Sadler, R., Hutchenreuther, J., & Buzzelli, M. (2024). Practitioners’ ability to retool the economy: The role of agency in local economic resilience to plant closures in Ontario. Growth and Change, 55(1), e12716.
• Trippl, M., Fastenrath, S., & Isaksen, A. (2024). Rethinking regional economic resilience: Preconditions and processes shaping transformative resilience. European Urban and Regional Studies, 31(2), 101-115.

Session Organiser(s):
Bettina Knoop, TU Dresden (IHI Zittau), Germany
Robert Knippschild, Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development/TU Dresden (IHI Zittau), Germany

Session Description:

Processes of socio-spatial polarization have intensified in many countries. While metropolitan cores face growth-related pressures, peripheral towns and regions increasingly experience population decline, economic restructuring, and the proliferation of vacancies and voids, ranging from abandoned buildings and brownfields to underused infrastructures.

Rather than framing these vacancies solely as development deficits, this session conceptualizes them as contested, socially produced spaces situated at the intersection of demographic decline, uneven developments and power relations between cores and peripheries, and sustainability ambitions.

The session explores the role of vacancies and voids in peripheral areas in relation to sustainable social and spatial development. It asks to what extent such spaces can function as resources for alternative development pathways beyond growth-oriented paradigms, including social innovation, new forms of land use, energy transitions, and ecological regeneration. Particular attention is paid to the conditions that enable or constrain vacancies to become spaces of experimentation for transformative practices. These include issues of perception and relevance, property, access and appropriation, as well as governance structures, path dependencies and the distribution of decision-making power across scales and between cores and peripheries.

Contributions are invited that empirically or conceptually examine both the potentials and limits of vacancies and voids for sustainable transitions across different spatial contexts and scales. Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:
• Conceptualizations of vacancies and voids in peripheral towns and regions
• Social production of vacancies and voids
• Questions of access and appropriation
• Governance structures, path dependencies and power relations
• Vacancies as spaces of experimentation for sustainable transitions
• Limits, conflicts and unintended effects of revitalizing vacancies and voids

#peripheralization #shrinkingcities #socialinnovation #geographyresearch #IZS

Session Organiser(s):
Amelie Bernzen, University of Vechta, Germany
Mirka Erler, University of Vechta, Germany
Sonja zu Jeddeloh, University of Vechta, Germany

Session Description:

Agriculture stands at a pivotal crossroad, simultaneously shaped by intensifying climate pressures, biodiversity loss, demographic shifts, changing dietary patterns, and rapid technological advancements (Bernzen and Braun, 2014; Dhillon and Moncur, 2023; Follmann et al., 2024). While the sector has long been and is still characterized by a strong path dependence (Brenner and zu Jeddeloh, 2024; David, 1985), it is also undergoing a profound structural transformation, increasingly influenced by digitalization, automation, and data-driven decision-making support tools. At the same time, (new) technologies are increasingly applied for human nutrition, for instance, in the creation of individualized dietary advices (Arshad et al., 2025; Belhadi et al., 2024; Mehta et al., 2025; Oikonomou and Khera, 2023). These shifts signal profound transformation of agri-food systems (Morris and Evans, 2008, 2004). Some actors see these shifts as a contribution to more dynamic, knowledge-intensive, and innovation-driven agri-food systems central to planetary health, food security, and human well-being (Darlan et al., 2025; Rossi et al., 2025; Trabelsi et al., 2023). However, especially geographers have also pointed out how new technologies also increase corporate power and deepen marginalization processes (Cieslik, 2025; Legun and Burch, 2021; Rotz et al., 2019).

This special session brings together interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners to explore how emerging technologies and food innovations are reshaping (regional) agri-food trajectories, (ostensibly?) legitimized by sustainability and resilience motives. We want to discuss if and how far drones, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled decision tools contribute to and influence an agroecological or sustainable intensification (Abe and Bernzen, 2019), more sustainable and healthy diets, or deviating versions thereof. Moreover, we are interested in how (newly emerging) risks are discussed within this field and which socio-political impacts the establishment of technologies might have.
In this session, we want to take a balanced look at the progress and pitfalls of (new) technologies. To this end, we would like to examine how these technologies affect regional and social disparities, how unequal conditions (e.g., unequal technical knowledge) affect access to them, and whether and how they can influence human health. Last but not least, we will also discuss whether and how political frameworks need to be designed in order to use (new) technologies for a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable agri-food system.

Connecting Technology, Food Systems, and Health

This session welcomes conceptual, empirical, and policy-oriented contributions on themes including, but not limited to:
• Technological innovation in agriculture, such as AI, drones, robotics, decision-making tools
• Integration of agricultural and health-related innovations, such as biofortification, nutrition-sensitive developments
• Resilience, risk, and sustainability within digitalized agricultural systems
• Governance, regulation, and politics in digitalized food and farming systems
• The geography of agricultural technological change and regional inequalities

References

• Abe, S., Bernzen, A., 2019. Alternative Landwirtschaft. Geographische Rundschau 3, 44–49.
• Arshad, M.T., Ali, M.K.M., Maqsood, S., Ikram, A., Ahmed, F., Aljameel, A.I., AL‐Farga, A., Hossain, Md.S., 2025. Personalized Nutrition in the Era of Digital Health: A New Frontier for Managing Diabetes and Obesity. Food Science & Nutrition 13, e71006. https://doi.org/10.1002/fsn3.71006
• Belhadi, A., Kamble, S., Subramanian, N., Singh, R.K., Venkatesh, M., 2024. Digital capabilities to manage agri-food supply chain uncertainties and build supply chain resilience during compounding geopolitical disruptions. IJOPM 44, 1914–1950. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOPM-11-2022-0737
• Bernzen, A., Braun, B., 2014. Conventions in Cross-Border Trade Coordination: The Case of Organic Food Imports to Germany and Australia. Environ Plan A 46, 1244–1262. https://doi.org/10.1068/a46275
• Brenner, T., zu Jeddeloh, S., 2024. Path dependence in an evolving system: a modeling perspective. Cliometrica 18, 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-023-00266-z
• Cieslik, K., 2025. The Dismal Harvest: The Uneven Landscapes of AI in Agriculture. Trans Inst British Geog e70043. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70043
• Darlan, D., Ajani, O.S., An, J.W., Bae, N.Y., Lee, B., Park, T., Mallipeddi, R., 2025. SmartBerry for AI-based growth stage classification and precision nutrition management in strawberry cultivation. Sci Rep 15, 14019. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-97168-z
• David, P.A., 1985. Clio and the Economics of QWERTY. The American Economic Review 75, 332–337.
• Dhillon, R., Moncur, Q., 2023. Small-Scale Farming: A Review of Challenges and Potential Opportunities Offered by Technological Advancements. Sustainability 15, 15478. https://doi.org/10.3390/su152115478
• Follmann, A., Dannenberg, P., Baur, N., Braun, B., Walther, G., Bernzen, A., Börner, J., Brüntrup, M., Franz, M., Götz, L., Hornidge, A.-K., Hulke, C., Jaghdani, T.J., Krishnan, A., Kulke, E., Labucay, I., Nduru, G.M., Neise, T., Priyadarshini, P., Revilla Diez, J.,
• Rütt, J., Scheller, C., Spengler, T., Sulle, E., 2024. Conceptualizing Sustainability and Resilience in Value Chains in Times of Multiple Crises—Notes on Agri-food Chains. DIE ERDE – Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin 155, 29–48. https://doi.org/10.12854/erde-2024-692
• Legun, K., Burch, K., 2021. Robot-ready: How apple producers are assembling in anticipation of new AI robotics. Journal of Rural Studies 82, 380–390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.01.032
• Mehta, S., Huey, S.L., Fahim, S.M., Sinha, S., Rajagopalan, K., Ahmed, T., Knight, R., Finkelstein, J.L., 2025. Advances in artificial intelligence and precision nutrition approaches to improve maternal and child health in low resource settings. Nat Commun 16, 7673. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-62985-3
• Morris, C., Evans, N., 2008. Agricultural turns, geographical turns: retrospect and prospect, in: Munton, R. (Ed.), The Rural: Critical Essays in Human Geography. Routledge, London. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315237213
• Morris, C., Evans, N., 2004. Agricultural turns, geographical turns: retrospect and prospect. Journal of Rural Studies 20, 95–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-0167(03)00041-X
• Oikonomou, E.K., Khera, R., 2023. Machine learning in precision diabetes care and cardiovascular risk prediction. Cardiovasc Diabetol 22, 259. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12933-023-01985-3
• Rossi, S., Gemma, S., Borghini, F., Perini, M., Butini, S., Carullo, G., Campiani, G., 2025. Agri-food traceability today: Advancing innovation towards efficiency, sustainability, ethical sourcing, and safety in food supply chains. Trends in Food Science & Technology 163, 105154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2025.105154
• Rotz, S., Gravely, E., Mosby, I., Duncan, E., Finnis, E., Horgan, M., LeBlanc, J., Martin, R., Neufeld, H.T., Nixon, A., Pant, L., Shalla, V., Fraser, E., 2019. Automated pastures and the digital divide: How agricultural technologies are shaping labour and rural communities. Journal of Rural Studies 68, 112–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.01.023
• Trabelsi, M., Casprini, E., Fiorini, N., Zanni, L., 2023. Unleashing the value of artificial intelligence in the agri-food sector: where are we? Br. Food J. 125, 482–515. https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-11-2022-1014
  

Session Organiser(s):
Lucia Piscitello, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Mafini Dosso, University of Johannesburg, College of Business & Economics, South Africa
Bo Nielsen, University of Sidney, Australia

Session Description:

Africa has long been described as “open for business,” yet its potential as a geographical cluster of hubs for investment, innovation, and strategic value creation remains underrealized. Persistent challenges —political volatility, economic instability, institutional diversity, and environmental pressures—continue to shape uneven business landscapes across the continent. Additionally, Africa’s economic geographies are deeply influenced by historical legacies, inadequate infrastructures, and governance systems that condition both opportunity and constraints (Baruah, Henderson, & Peng, 2021; Bertazzini, 2022).
The role of innovation and entrepreneurial dynamism is highly related to foreign direct investments, both inward (as foreign companies may originate knowledge spillovers and positive externalities that trigger virtuous circles of development) and outward (as indigenous African companies that succeed in foreign markets often bring back knowledge and growth opportunities in the local context of origin).
However, FDI, while expanding, often encounters political and institutional risks often associated with the need to combine global integration with a strong local embeddedness.
Indigenous African firms on the one hand struggle to join global networks, mainly due to dimensional constrains and dynamic entrepreneurial activities struggle amid regulatory uncertainty; on the other, large African companies — such as Dangote Group, MTN, and Sasol—are developing context-specific governance and innovation models that are redefining competition and challenge conventional theories of business organization and adaptation (Alford, 2024).
Additionally, diaspora networks are increasingly transforming from “brain drain” to “brain bridges,” enabling knowledge transfer, capacity building, and science diplomacy (Ito et al., 2025).
These dynamics, taking place in a highly heterogeneous context, position Africa as a vital setting for better understanding (and rethinking?) the interdependencies between the role of different actors (foreign firms and indigenous firms, entrepreneurial activities also from return migrants/diaspora) and the role of context-specificities (places and spaces).

Indicative Topics

1. Location and Strategic Advantages: How locational characteristics, spatial dependencies, and institutional contexts shape the internationalization strategies of firms operating in/with/from Africa, and the rise and success of entrepreneurial ventures.
2. FDI and Institutional Complexity: Why FDI inflows in several sectors, and outflows (especially those involving African multinationals) have not fully catalyzed transformation and positive externalities.
3. Migration, Labour Markets and Diaspora Networks: The contribution of diaspora scientists and entrepreneurs as knowledge brokers in fostering innovation, capacity development, and global linkages, addressing sociological and economic integration (Ito et al., 2025).
4. Knowledge Spillovers, Relatedness, and Innovation: How firms, both local and international, innovate under resource constraints but leveraging technological relatedness? How knowledge transfers across borders and knowledge networks (Ito et al., 2025).
5. Regional Integration, Connectivity and Spatial Clustering: How regional trade corridors, urban clusters, and infrastructural networks shape patterns of investment and business coordination (Baruah et al., 2021; Bertazzini, 2022; Shilpi et al., 2024).
6. Entrepreneurship and Innovation: How do entrepreneurial and innovation dynamics unfold within the diverse institutional and spatial environments across the African continent? What factors are driving or hindering the emergence of born-in-Africa technological and innovative ventures, and the related clustering patterns? How corporate-led entrepreneurship support organizations shape local innovation dynamics in African countries? (Daniels et al., 2021; Abdulai & Hussain, 2023)
7. Theory extension/refining/building from Africa: How Africa’s institutional and spatial diversity challenges and extends existing theories of international economics and business, economics of innovation and development, and economic geography (Barnard et al., 2017).

Keywords: Africa, Foreign Direct Investment, Regional Development and Growth, Innovation, Entrepreneurial dynamics, Diaspora and return migrants, Geographical Clusters

Session Organiser(s):
Mads Bruun Ingstrup, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Nils Grashof, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
James Wilson, Basque Institute of Competitiveness and Deusto Business School, Spain
Emily Wise Lund University, Sweden

Session Description:

Intermediaries play a central role in shaping regional development trajectories and innovation dynamics. Positioned between firms, governments, research organizations and civil society, the roles of these actors include facilitating knowledge exchange, coordinating collective action, and reducing systemic failures. In current transformative times, regional policy aims not only to promote economic growth and competitiveness, but also to guide regions through the significant changes required by industrial, green, and digital transitions, which in turn influences the demands on intermediaries.

This session explores the evolving functions, roles, forms, and impacts of intermediaries in regional development, with particular attention to how they are evolving to maintain their relevance in the face of contemporary challenges. Drawing on perspectives from economic geography, innovation studies and business studies, the session seeks to examine how intermediaries—such as innovation agencies, cluster organizations, innovation platforms, technology transfer offices, incubators, living labs, and public–private partnerships—operate across multiple spatial and institutional scales. Rather than acting as neutral brokers, such intermediaries can actively shape innovation directions, influence power relations and contribute to the construction of regional narratives and development pathways in ways that are especially pertinent in times of rapid transformation.

A key focus of the session is the diversity and contextual embeddedness of intermediary roles. Contributions are welcome that among other things:

• Analyze how intermediaries adapt to the specific challenges emerging in different regional contexts, including peripheral, rural and less-developed regions, as well as metropolitan hubs.
• Explore how intermediaries respond to the institutional complexities, path dependencies and place-specific capacities that influence regional responses to societal challenges.
• Address tensions and limitations faced by intermediaries, such as mission drift, accountability challenges, and dependence on public funding.

Overall, the session aims to advance conceptual and empirical understanding of intermediaries as strategic actors in regional contexts. We invite papers that shed light on when, how, and for whom intermediaries contribute to regional development and transformative innovations.

Indicative References

• Friedrich, C., & Feser, D. (2024). Combining knowledge bases for small wins in peripheral regions: An analysis of the role of innovation intermediaries in sustainability transitions, Review of Regional Research, 44, 211-236.
• Howells, J. (2006). Intermediation and the role of intermediaries in innovation, Research Policy, 35(5), 715-728.
• Ingstrup, M.B., Korsgaard, S., & Hansen, T. (2026). Paradoxes and dilemmas in local climate missions, Regional Studies, 60(1), 2591446.
• Ingstrup, M.B., & Damgaard, T. (2013). Cluster Facilitation from a Cluster Life Cycle Perspective, European Planning Studies, 21(4), 556-574.
• Kivimaa, P., Boon, W., Hyysalo, S., & Klerkx, L. (2019). Towards a typology of intermediaries in sustainability transitions: A systematic review and a research agenda, Research Policy, 48(4), 1062-1075.Mignon, I., & Kanada, W. (2018). A typology of intermediary organizations and their impact on sustainability transition policies, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 29, 100-113.
• Uyarra, E., Flanagan, K., Magro, E., Wilson, J., & Sotarauta, M. (2017). Understanding regional innovation policy dynamics, Environment and Planning C, 35(4), 559-568.
• Wise, E., Eklund, M., Smith, M., & Wilson, J. (2022). A participatory approach to tracking system transformation in clusters and innovation ecosystems—Evolving practice in Sweden’s Vinnväxt programme, Research Evaluation, 31(2), 271-287.

Session Organiser(s):
Stefania Fiorentino, University of Cambridge, UK
Grete Gansauer, University of Wyoming, USA
Crhistian Joel González-Cuatianquis, Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy
Max Roessler, University of Greifswald, Germany

Session Description:

In recent years, debates on spatial inequality have increasingly moved beyond purely material indicators to engage with how inequalities are perceived, experienced, and narrated across territories. A growing body of research shows that objective disparities in income, employment, services, or opportunities only partially explain contemporary patterns of social discontent, political polarization, and declining trust in institutions. Instead, feelings of left-behindness, rooted in perceptions of neglect, unfairness, and limited future prospects, have emerged as a crucial lens for understanding regional divergence and place-based dissatisfaction. Therefore, this special session aims to bring together contributions that examine the subjective, emotional, symbolic, and narrative dimensions of spatial inequalities, with a particular focus on how individuals and communities interpret their position within broader territorial hierarchies. We particularly welcome contributions that focus on the perceptual dimension, the role of spatial imaginaries, and how they shape local identities, feelings of exclusion, and, in turn, visions of regional futures. The session is explicitly linked to the Regional Studies Special Issue “Spatial inequalities and feelings of left-behindness: perceptions, imaginaries, and policy responses”, to provide a forum for early discussion, feedback, and refinement of papers that may be part of the Special Issue. Participation is not restricted to those who submitted their work to participate in the special issue, nor does participation in the session imply publication, but selected contributions may benefit from targeted feedback aligned with the Special Issue’s aims and scope.

We are particularly interested in contributions which address the following topics:
• Theorisations and empirical examples of perceived left-behindness;
• Construction of narratives and imaginaries of and within ‘left behind regions’;
• Significance of regional identities, histories, or social memories within peripheralized places for perceptions of the future;
• Material effects of spatial imaginaries, emotional associations of marginality, or feelings of discontent/left-behind-ness on regional development policy and planning;
• Epistemological assumptions and methodologies to examine imaginaries, narratives and visions within ‘left behind’ places and policy;
• Policy responses and best-practice examples to tackle feelings of perceived left-behindness, and/or empowering local agencies, contrasting feelings of neglect and institutional mistrust, etc.;
• The commonalities and differences of spatial imaginaries and perceptions of left-behindness across a variety of geographies (e.g., Global North versus Global South).

Session Organiser(s):
Juste Rajaonson, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Sébastien Bourdin, IESEG School of Management, France
Karel Van den Berghe, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
Younghyun Kim, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Marcin Dabrowski Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands

Session Description:

This session brings together contributions that examine how circular economy–oriented activities can be enabled and scaled within cities whose spatial organization, market structures, and regulatory frameworks remain largely shaped by linear development logics (Willams, 2021). The session will focus on the urban geographies of local circular activities, including repair, reuse, resale, sharing and rental services, and small-scale material recovery, which operate through everyday services and retail transactions rather than industrial-scale recycling.

Existing literature suggests that these local circular activities remain marginal and difficult to scale in many developed cities due to diverse barriers, including zoning, land-use, regulatory, policy and infrastructural barriers (Bourdin et al., 2024; Guibrunet et al., 2025; Dabrowski et al., 2025). Conversely, in many developing cities, similar activities are widespread, economically vital, and socially embedded, yet structurally precarious, informal, and largely unrecognized by policy despite functioning as key forms of livelihood and survival (Schröder et al., 2019; Valencia et al., 2024; Okyere et al., 2024). By juxtaposing these contrasting realities, the session aims to identify the enabling conditions (planning, infrastructural, institutional, and policy-related) that could support more viable, recognized, and just circular urban futures.

A central objective of the session is to revisit core traditions in urban and regional economics and urban planning, particularly theories of location choice, accessibility, land markets, and agglomeration economies (Bingham & Mier, 1993), and to question whether and how these frameworks hold in the context of circular economy objectives. The session invites contributions that critically assess whether established explanations of firm location and urban economic organization adequately capture the spatial requirements of circular activities, or whether new or adapted theoretical perspectives are needed.

Contributions may engage with, without being limited to, themes such as:
• spatial localization and clustering
• land-use and planning issues
• accessibility, proximity, and logistics
• informality and livelihoods
• labour and market dynamics
• infrastructures and facilities
• neighbourhood dynamics and displacement
• governance and policy frameworks
• comparative urban perspectives

Empirical and conceptual papers are welcome, drawing on urban planning, urban and regional economics, economic geography, development studies, or public policy. Contributions may examine how land-use regulation, infrastructure, access to demand and material flows, labour markets, and neighbourhood characteristics influence the localization and viability of circular economic activities, using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methodological approaches.

International perspectives are encouraged in order to foster dialogue on how different urban contexts address the tension between inherited linear urban-economic structures and emerging circular ambitions. Comparative cases (e.g., Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia) are particularly welcome.

The session is part of a broader research initiative on articulating urban planning and the circular economy in Canada, led by the Department of Urban Studies and Tourism at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It is co-organized with scholars from Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands), IESEG School of Management (France); Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and the Alliance of Guangzhou International Sister-City Universities (GISU).

Furthermore, the session aims to build international research bridges and lay the groundwork for an upcoming peer-reviewed special issue that reinterprets urban economics and planning theories to support local circular economic activities across regions worldwide.

For additional queries: rajaonson.juste@uqam.ca

#RSA2026, #CircularEconomy, #CircularCities

References

• Bingham, R. D., & Mier, R. (Eds.). (1993). Theories of local economic development: Perspectives from across the disciplines. Sage.
• Bourdin, S., Torre, A., & van Leeuwen, E. (Eds.). (2024). Regions, Cities and the Circular Economy: Theory and Practice. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Dąbrowski, M., Van den Berghe, K., Williams, J., & van Bueren, E. (Eds.). (2025). Going Circular: Unlocking the potential of regions and cities to drive the circular economy transition. Taylor & Francis.
• Guibrunet, L., González, E. B., Ruiz, M. H. M., Pérez, C. P. O., Villalón, V. A. R., & Patio, D. T. (2025). Spatial planning for a popular circular economy. Urban Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251387826
• Okyere, S. A., Boateng, F. G., Abunyewah, M., & Erdiaw-Kwasie, M. O. (2024). Introduction: The Embeddedness of Circularity in Everyday Slum Living in Global South Cities. In Urban Slums and Circular Economy Synergies in the Global South: Theoretical and Policy Imperatives for Sustainable Communities (pp. 1-10). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
• Schröder, P., Anggraeni, K., Anantharaman, M., & Foxon, T. J. (2019). The circular economy and the Global South. London: Routledge.
• Valencia, M., Craps, M., Yepez, M., & Soliz, M. F. (2024). Sociomaterial networks for a systemic circular economy transition in an intermediate Global South city. Journal of Cleaner Production, 483, 144257.
• Williams, J. (2021). Circular cities: a revolution in urban sustainability. Routledge.

Session Organiser(s):
Sören Scholvin, Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile
Emma Galbraith, University of Cologne, Germany

Session Description:

Since the early 1990s, the share of manufacturing in total employment across much of the Global South has remained remarkably stable at around 20 per cent, whereas services have expanded from 40 to 50 per cent. A similar trend holds true for the sectoral shares in GDP, with services now accounting for almost 60 per cent. These patterns have fuelled debates about whether developing countries can leapfrog from agriculture and mining directly into service-based growth trajectories, and whether service-led development is replacing industrialisation.

Academic debates concentrate on processes of offshoring and outsourcing by corporations from Europe and North America. There are, undoubtedly, opportunities for Southern nations in these global value chains: employment creation and possibilities for upgrading from routine to more knowledge-intensive tasks. At the same time, offshoring and outsourcing are often associated with strong dependencies on Northern lead firms. Critics further argue that export-oriented service sectors may remain weakly embedded in national development processes.

Against this background, alternative pathways to service-led development are gaining attention. They include the independent internationalisation of Southern service firms, which appears to be focused on the near abroad and may trigger regional value chain formation. Another relevant topic is how service activities in the developing world are closely intertwined with infrastructures, manufacturing and financial flows.

The session brings together presentations on:
– opportunities and constraints for development associated with offshoring and outsourcing,
– the independent internationalisation of Southern service firms, including prospects of regional value chains,
– public policies and institutional frameworks that shape service-led development, and
– linkages with primary and secondary-sector activities as well as financial flows.

Session Organiser(s):
Lorenzo Mascioli, Sciences Po, Paris, France

Session Description:

Since the turn of the millennium, territorial inequalities have deepened across Europe, defying expectations of convergence and reigniting scholarly and policy interest in uneven development. While there is broad agreement among researchers and practitioners that development policy is essential to address these challenges, its performance continues to vary markedly across territories. This heterogeneity has been documented across different policy instruments – not only Cohesion Policy but also other EU- and national-level development programs – and across multiple stages of the policy process – as local communities mobilize financial and non-financial resources; as they use these resources to design and implement policy interventions; and as they harness these interventions to activate sustained development processes.

The dominant explanation for this uneven performance emphasizes institutional differences, but substantial limitations remain. Much of the existing literature focuses on institutional factors that are largely exogenous to development policy, such as the administrative capacities of national, regional, and local governments. More recent contributions, however, draw attention to institutional factors that are endogenous to policy interventions – that is, differences that emerge across space and time as interventions are planned, implemented, and maintained over time. These include variation in the regulatory frameworks adopted, the policy instruments deployed, and the ways relationships among policy actors are structured and sustained. Collectively, these endogenous factors can be conceptualized under the label of governance.

This special session aims to advance theory and empirical analysis of governance as a key institutional determinant of development policy performance. Contributions that engage with one or more of the following themes are particularly welcome:
• Theorizing the mechanisms through which governance shapes development policy performance across different stages of the policy process, and how these mechanisms vary across space and time;
• Developing innovative empirical strategies to document variation in governance arrangements and/or to estimate the causal effects of governance on policy performance;
• Proposing evidence-based policy recommendations on how governance arrangements may be reformed, at different territorial levels, to enhance the effectiveness of development policy.

#unevendevelopment #developmentpolicy #institutions #governance

If you have any questions, feel free to contact the session organizer at lorenzo.mascioli@sciencespo.fr

Session Organiser(s):
Robert Panitz, University of Applied Sciences Weihenstephan-Triesdorf, Germany
Johanna Hoehl, LMU Munich, Germany
Lukas Pieroth, University of Koblenz, Germany

Session Description:

Numerous publications argue that the sustainability hype is over (Park & Grundmann, 2025; Rasche et al., 2025). In some regions, we observe a declining number of “green” investments (Bloomberg, 2025). Simultaneously, there is a rising number of doubts about the effectiveness of newly established regulatory instruments (Di Tullio et al., 2025) that are often treated as indicators of a sustainability transition. To some extent, private and public interests in sustainability transitions appear to have been replaced by other priorities. This situation can be understood as a moment of truth that offers an opportunity to reassess the robustness of sustainability policies and governance processes at both national and corporate levels. At the same time, it opens space to critically challenge existing theories of sustainability transition and transformation in industrial and regional change (Binz et al., 2025; Coenen & Truffer, 2012; Truffer et al., 2015).

Against this background, we invite original contributions that seek to unpack the mechanisms of governance instruments and policies involved in sustainability transitions and their outcomes, as well as theoretical contributions that help to explain the underlying processes. Contributions may range from empirical case studies and theoretical analyses to systematic studies of industrial change. We welcome diverse methodological approaches, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research.
The goal of this session is to provide an open platform for discussion and exchange on the governance of sustainability transitions.

References

• Binz, C., Coenen, L., Frenken, K., Murphy, J. T., Strambach, S., Trippl, M., & Truffer, B. (2025). Exploring the Economic Geographies of Sustainability Transitions: Commentary and Agenda. Economic Geography, 101(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2024.2445530
• Bloomberg. (2025). Global Renewable Energy Investment Still Reaches New Record as Investors Reassess Risks. https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/global-renewable-energy-investment-reaches-new-record-as-investors-reassess-risks/
• Coenen, L., & Truffer, B. (2012). Places and Spaces of Sustainability Transitions: Geographical Contributions to an Emerging Research and Policy Field. European Planning Studies, 20(3), 367–374. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.651802
• Di Tullio, P., La Torre, M., & Rea, M. (2025). Sustainability reporting regulation: Hypes, myths and reflections. Management Decision. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-10-2024-2462
• Park, H., & Grundmann, P. (2025). Institutional work after hype: The case of biogas in Germany. Energy Research & Social Science, 119, 103820. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103820
• Rasche, A., Jain, T., Aguilera, R. V., Vernis, A., Berrone, P., & Gonzalez-Perez, M. A. (2025). The Hype Is Over, Now What? How Corporate Governance Can Safeguard the Future of Sustainability. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2025(1), 11051. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2025.11051symposium
• Truffer, B., Murphy, J. T., & Raven, R. (2015). The geography of sustainability transitions: Contours of an emerging theme. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 17, 63–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2015.07.004

Session Organiser(s):
Paolo Veneri, Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy
Lewis Dijkstra, EU Joint Research Centre, Italy

Session Description:

Functional geographies are widely used in regional analysis to represent spatial interdependencies beyond administrative boundaries. Functional areas, commonly identified through commuting flows, have long offered a pragmatic way to operationalise these relationships. However, changing mobility and consumption patterns, digital connectivity, and shifts in daily habits increasingly challenge both the conceptual adequacy and the empirical feasibility of commuting-based approaches.
This special session focuses on recent advances in measuring functional geographies, both around cities and across sparsely populated territories. It approaches functionality from a multidimensional perspective, in which spatial interactions are shaped by employment, access to services, consumption and leisure, capturing the spatial and temporal organisation of everyday life. Rather than relying on a single dominant flow, contributions explore how different dimensions of functionality can be integrated to better reflect contemporary spatial behaviours.

A central theme of the session concerns measurement under data constraints. In many national contexts, commuting data are unavailable, outdated or poorly aligned with emerging patterns of interaction, while internationally comparative research requires methods that are transferable across heterogeneous data environments. The session therefore explores the use of alternative data sources and methodological strategies, including accessibility-based indicators, service catchments, grid-based approaches and hybrid frameworks.

Functional geographies are considered at multiple scales. The session examines approaches that aim for comprehensive territorial coverage across urban, rural and peripheral areas, addressing the systematic underrepresentation of internal and sparsely populated regions. At the metropolitan level, new methods for delineating cities and their areas of influence without commuting data are discussed, with applications ranging from single-country analyses to global mappings.

By foregrounding issues of measurement, scalability and comparability, the session aims to advance a more flexible and empirically robust understanding of functional geographies, with implications for regional analysis, spatial planning and place-based policy in diverse and rapidly changing territorial contexts.

Session Organiser(s):
Huiwen Gong, University of Stavanger, Norway
Roman Martin, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Tobias Wuttke, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Chun Yang, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

Session Description:

The transition to electric mobility is reshaping the global automotive industry. At the center of this transformation lies battery production, which turns out to be a challenge, particularly for the European automotive sector. Access to battery technologies, raw materials, production capacities, and skills, is increasingly central to competitiveness, sustainability, and industrial sovereignty. At the same time, Europe is struggling to establish a fully functional and competitive battery industry.
This session invites papers that examine the evolving geography of battery and automotive production from the perspectives of regional studies and related disciplines, including innovation studies, political science, political economy, and management. We particularly welcome contributions that engage with regional innovation systems (RIS), multilevel governance approaches, and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) perspectives to analyze how multiscalar stakeholders adapt to, shape, or are constrained by the transition to electric mobility.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):
• The reconfiguration of the geography of battery value chains and challenges
• Battery industries as green industrial projects in regions: agency, power, discourses and structure
• China’s role in battery technologies, raw materials, manufacturing, and overseas investment and market expansion
• Industrial policy, geoeconomic competition, state intervention, and strategic autonomy in the EU
• Path dependence, path creation, and industrial branching into battery industries
• Relatedness, knowledge recombination, and capability building in regional battery industries

By stressing regional dynamics and evolutionary processes, the session aims to advance understanding of how battery production is reshaping the automotive industry in spatially uneven ways, and what this implies for regional development.

References

• Gong, H., and Hansen, T. (2023). The rise of China’s new energy vehicle lithium-ion battery industry: The coevolution of battery technological innovation systems and policies. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 46, 1-19.
• Hassink, R., Isaksen, A., and Trippl, M. (2019). Towards a comprehensive understanding of new regional industrial path development. Regional Studies, 53(11), 1636–45.
• Martin, H., R. Martin, and E. Zukauskaite. (2019). The Multiple Roles of Demand in New Regional industrial Path Development: A Conceptual Analysis. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51 (8): 1741–1757.
• Trippl, M., S. Baumgartinger-Seiringer, A. Frangenheim, A. Isaksen, and J. Rypestøl. (2020). Unravelling Green Regional Industrial Path Development: Regional Preconditions, Asset Modification and Agency. Geoforum, 111, 189–97.
• Umar, I. A. and Yang, C. (2025) Geoeconomic Bridging Node in Global Production: Chinese Electric Vehicle Battery Investments in Morocco. Contemporary Social Science, 20 (2-3), 193-219.
• Whitfield, L., and Wuttke, T. (2026). China’s technological catch-up and leapfrogging in electric vehicles: A firm-level study of BYD and CATL. Progress in Economic Geography, 4(1), 100054.
• Yang, C. and Umar, I. A. (2026) Strategic coupling in global production networks under geopolitical risk: Chinese lithium investment in Nigeria. The Extractive Industries and Society, 26, 101849. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2025.101849.

Session Organiser(s):
Dieter F. Kogler, University College Dublin, Ireland
Rikard Eriksson, Umeå University, Sweden
Martin Henning, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Session Description:

Nearly twenty years have passed since Boschma and Frenken (2006) posed the seminal question: “Why is economic geography not an evolutionary science?” In the two decades since, Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) has matured into a vibrant and influential research paradigm. A substantial body of work has deepened our understanding of technological change, regional diversification, path dependence, and the evolution of regional capabilities.

More recently, EEG has proven highly relevant in addressing pressing societal and economic challenges. New contributions have clarified the paradigm’s core conceptual elements, demonstrated its relevance in the context of the ongoing “polycrisis”, and strengthened links to policy-making, i.e., most notably regarding Smart Specialisation strategies, labor market transitions, and sustainable, inclusive regional development (Kogler et al., 2023). Building on the success and stimulating discussions of our previous special sessions at the RSA2025 in Porto, we aim to continue this dialogue by focusing on the next frontier of EEG research.

Despite these advances, critical questions remain regarding how EEG can further contribute to our understanding of the micro-determinants of regional change. To address these gaps, we invite empirical and theoretical papers that offer new perspectives on, or are closely related to, evolutionary economic geography. We are particularly interested in contributions that address:

• Skills and Technological Change: How do regional skills evolve in relation to green and digital transitions and shifting industrial structures?
• Inclusive Development: How can evolutionary processes be steered toward more inclusive regional outcomes?
• Micro-Foundations: What are the firm- and individual-level drivers that underpin regional economic evolution?
• Novel Methodology: We especially welcome submissions that approach empirical data through novel and theoretically profound lenses.

We look forward to your contributions and to furthering the evolutionary discourse.

References

• Boschma, R. A., & Frenken, K. (2006). Why is economic geography not an evolutionary science? Towards an evolutionary economic geography. Journal of Economic Geography, 6(3), 273-302.
• Kogler, D. F., Evenhuis, E., Giuliani, E., Martin, R., Uyarra, E., & Boschma, R. (2023). Re-imagining evolutionary economic geography. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 16(3), 373-390.

Session Organiser(s):
Steven Millington, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Evgenia (Jenny) Kanellopoulou, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Nikos Ntounis, Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Session Description:

This session invites contemporary research that advances understanding of place management and leadership. Despite the widespread “place based turn” in regional and local governance, significant concerns remain about how well place management is conceptualised, operationalised and supported in policy and practice.

While the commitment to deliver better place based outcomes is welcome, attempts to retrofit traditional governance institutions into “place-facing” roles often mask deeper structural issues. Too many strategies for local and regional revitalisation continue to be shaped by centralised or regional bodies, operating through top down systems that have repeatedly failed to address economic, social and environmental inequalities. The ecosystem required for effective place-based delivery, capacity, capability, collaborative structures and shared knowledge, remains uneven and underdeveloped.

At the same time, promising research and practice is emerging. New models of partnership, innovative governance experiments, and richer understandings of place experience are helping to define what viable, equitable and resilient place-based development can look like.

We therefore welcome papers that critically examine any facet of place management and leadership, including but not limited to:

Repositioning Places
• Critical analysis of spatial visions and strategies
• Aligning regional ambitions with local change and vice versa
• Evidencing post retail high streets and town centre futures
• Understanding and measuring place experience, identity and civic pride
• Innovative tools, data and methods for researching place-based development
Reinventing Places
• Integrating placemaking within local and regional structures
• Place resilience and adaptability
• Inclusive placemaking and place activation
• Heritage, culture, festivals, events, sport and markets as place-shaping assets
• Social infrastructure and its role in everyday placemaking
• Place-based anchors and local synergies
Rebranding Places
• Reconciling local, regional and national place branding agendas
• Critical perspectives on place marketing and branding
• Participatory and co-produced place branding
• Destination marketing and identity formation
Restructuring Places
• Negotiating place leadership across local–regional boundaries
• Experiments in partnership development and governance innovation
• Devolution and its implications for place-based delivery
• Integrating the place agenda within planning, development and investment systems

This session aims to bring together scholars, practitioners and policymakers to deepen theoretical understanding, share empirical insights and explore the future of place management and leadership in regional development.

Session Organiser(s):
Łukasz Komorowski, Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Alena Harbiankova, Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Sławomir Kalinowski, Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland

Session Description:

Just a few decades ago, economics focused almost exclusively on economic growth. John Maynard Keynes (1930), presenting his vision of today’s reality, assumed that the world’s economic problems would be solved and that people would generally be many times wealthier than they were at the time. However, this does not seem to have happened, as by their very nature, ‘some problems remain relevant for decades or even centuries’ Wilkin (2011: 35). Today, new and often unexpected challenges are emerging, of an economic, social and environmental nature, and their scale threatens global sustainable development. Michel Camdessus (2017) describes them as hypertendencies, including unequal demographic dynamics, growing inequalities, increasing integration and market instability, the shift in the centre of the global economy, urbanisation, increased consumption, dwindling natural resources, climate change, rapid technological progress and armed conflicts.

All these processes affect rural areas as well, increasing the uncertainty of their inhabitants. Institutions responsible for development policies are therefore looking for tools to mitigate the effects of global change and adapt to them. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2018) promotes The Rural Policy 3.0, which identifies ageing populations, migration, urbanisation, climate change, economic transformation and technological progress as key challenges of the 21st century. It recognises the countryside as a complex socio-economic system in which the effectiveness of actions depends on local needs, resources and the cooperation of many actors. It also emphasises the need to strengthen social, economic, environmental and cultural resilience and to adapt the scale of intervention to the specific characteristics of each territory.
The session aims to discuss rural resilience, the challenges that may test it now and, in the future, and ways to strengthen it. We invite submissions for the session, focusing on, but not limited to, the following questions:

• What are the current and future development challenges of rural areas?
• How can rural resilience be strengthened in its various dimensions?
• Are public policies effective in enhancing rural resilience?
• How do new concepts of regional/local development seek answers to development challenges?
• How can we balance top-down public policies with the bottom-up needs and actions of local communities?

Should you have any further enquiries, feel free to contact the session organisers at lkomorowski@irwirpan.waw.pl and aharbiankova@irwirpan.waw.pl.

References
• Camdessus M. (2017). Vers le monde de 2050 [Towards the world of 2050]. Fayard, Paris.
• Keynes J. M. (1930). Economic possibilities for our grandchildren. In Essays in Persuasion (321–332). Palgrave Macmillan UK, London.
• OECD. (2018). Rural 3.0. A Framework for Rural Development. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2018/03/rural-3-0_fe038f7c/618f702b-en.pdf (accessed on: 19.01.2026).
• Wilkin J. (2011). The multifunctionality of rural areas and agriculture for sustainable development. Village and Agriculture, 4(153), 27–39.

Session Organiser(s):
Alice Borchi, University of Leeds, UK
Dimitra Gkitsa, University of Southampton, UK
Matilde Ferrero, Fondazione Santagata, Italy
Giulia Avanza, Fondazione Santagata, Italy

Session Description:

This session originates from the Horizon Europe project “Democracy in Action”, which serves as its conceptual and practical starting point. The practice-based research project explores how arts and culture-based grassroots organizations—both in physical spaces and across metaverse environments—can foster democracy, participation and civic engagement. The project investigates how grassroots cultural practices generate critical spaces for political expression and inclusion in four key areas: nightivism (urban nighttime cultural life for political engagement), women’s rights mobilization, ethnic civic participation through cultural expression, and youth activism and civic education. Through a transnational network of pilot organisations (spanning Central Europe, Southern Europe, the Balkans and extending to countries in South America and Africa) the project aims at mapping diverse grassroots practices and examines their organizational models, spatial configurations, funding mechanisms and evaluation processes.

The session contextualises the project within current debates on the cultural commons, which frame grassroots cultural practices as collective processes of governance where cultural policy happens outside institutions, and where people create their own cultural opportunities. Seen through this lens, “Democracy in Action” provides a comprehensive, cross-contextual case study for exploring how the commons can foster democracy through culture.

Within this context, we welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that address the following questions and themes:

• Practices and processes: How do grassroots cultural organizations operate? Where and how do they emerge? What environment enables the creation of spaces?
• Interaction and technology: How do these spaces enable new forms of engagement, dialogue and cultural access using or not using technology?
• Flexibility and adaptability: How do grassroots initiatives respond and adapt to local identities, needs and socio-political contexts?
• Evaluation: How to capture and evaluate the social and cultural impact of informal and creative practices using unconventional and value-based methodologies?
• Policy and governance: How can grassroots challenge existing cultural policies and legal frameworks and foster models of participatory governance? How can enabling environments sustain cultural rights, protect artistic and cultural production and reinforce diversity of expression?

Session Organiser(s):
Guendalina Anzolin, UNIMORE, Italy
Elvira Uyarra, University of Manchester, UK

Session Description:

Value creation and value capture mechanisms in the digital economy are characterised by complex product and process innovations and a high technological interrelation and cumulativeness. The actors in charge of the innovation process have also changed, for example, the decline of big corporate R&D labs and the emergence of service engineering specialised firms and of technology start ups, together with the growing importance of innovation intermediaries, have changed the landscape of innovation ecosystems in many sectors and regions. This session explores the key role played by innovation intermediaries in terms of orchestrating innovation and knowledge transfer by filling scaling-up/commercialisation gaps along the innovation cycle. Such organisations are also becoming key players within regional ecosystems and are likely to increasingly contribute to regional restructuring and diversification processes through related and unrelated innovation processes, leveraging their role as knowledge repositories and facilitators within and across industrial value chain structures.

Description of the session
Over the past two decades, regions have faced mounting pressures to transform their productive structures in response to the diffusion of digital technologies, the imperative of greener growth, renewed geopolitical tensions and repeated shocks, including the Global Financial Crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic (Martin et al., 2016). On the technological front, knowledge transfer has become more intricate as modern technologies evolve through frequent gaps, dead ends, and coordination failures (Antonelli, 2010). These dynamics have widened the space for public intervention to address system failures and coordinate a proliferating set of actors and activities that underpin innovation and industrial capability building (Flanagan et al., 2022). A prominent avenue for such intervention is the funding and empowerment of innovation intermediaries (IIs) (Caloffi et al., 2023; Holland et al., 2024). Encompassing a variety of organisations that include research and technology organisations, incubators, and knowledge-intensive business service firms, IIs translate early-stage ideas into scalable, usable products and processes. They orchestrate networks, fill gaps along innovation cycles (Arnold et al., 2010), and convene cross-sectoral coalitions to tackle complex problems (Rossi et al., 2022).

These shifts, and the growing centrality of IIs, require a fundamental reconsideration of their roles, functions, and activities in regional development. Recent scholarship frames IIs as “boundary organisations” (Chataway et al., 2019; Hanlin et al., 2018) operating at the interfaces of universities, firms, and governments. Their business models, revenue streams, and portfolios have evolved markedly over the past three decades (Preissl and Farina, 2000; Larrue and Strauka, 2022; Rossi et al., 2022), shaped by the institutional and production ecosystems in which they are embedded. IIs are redefining how knowledge is created, scaled, and captured in specific places, and how regional innovation policy is conceived and implemented (Kitagawa et al., 2025).

IIs are thus pivotal within regional ecosystems and increasingly positioned to steer restructuring and diversification. Even when they lack an explicit regional mandate, they operate within dynamic local contexts where institutional, technological, and economic linkages continually evolve, and there is a growing emphasis on reinforcing a regional mandate (Bonvillian, 2017; Anzolin and O’Sullivan, 2025). At the same time, the structure of an ecosystem conditions the design and functioning of IIs and is crucial for supporting the processes of knowledge search and generation to which they contribute (Reischauer et al., 2021). By leveraging their roles as repositories, shapers, and facilitators of knowledge creation and transfer in specific places/clusters within and across industrial value chains, IIs can drive both related and unrelated diversification (Randhawa et al., 2022).

While there has been growing scholarly attention to innovation intermediaries, the focus has not often been on their relationships with the place (region, cluster) where they operate. This thematic session invites scholars to reflect on the role of innovation intermediaries in knowledge transfer processes at the regional and local level. We welcome empirical, methodological and conceptual papers related to (but not limited to) the following research questions:

1. Which organisational forms of IIs (public, private, hybrid) are best suited to the achievement of various regional policy objectives, and should policy selectively fund some models over others?
2. What regional or/and sectoral failures are different types of IIs trying to solve, and how does this shape their knowledge transfer activities over time?
3. How are IIs engaging with different types of regional actors in order to support institutional, economic and/or societal change within the region? How do IIs make sure to align with SMEs and other actors’ needs?
4. What local organisational structures maximise efficiency and absorptive capacity for SMEs in a given ecosystem?
5. What capabilities to IIs need to possess and/or develop in order to contribute to regional development and restructuring processes?
6. What role do intermediaries play in workforce activities and skill formation at regional level?

The session proponents are currently developing a proposal for a Special Issue on the topics mentioned in this session proposal. Should the Special Issue proposal be accepted, we will advertise the Special Issue to potential participants to the session and invite promising papers which could eventually be submitted to the Special Issue.

Session Organiser(s):
Elli Papastergiou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Kai-Ti Wu, Humboldt University Berlin, European Citizen Science Association, Germany
Maria Tsouri, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway
Dimitris Ballas, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Anne Devlin, Economic and Social Research Institute, Ireland

Session Description:

Places have a profound impact on the quality of life and well-being of their residents (Layard & De Neve, 2023), and the implications of this are increasingly visible in today’s ever-changing and hyperconnected global landscape. Cities and regions face multidimensional challenges that frequently escalate into crises. Ecosystem degradation, the climate crisis, and resource exploitation, mental health challenges (including depression, stress, loneliness, and burnout) that reach epidemic levels, interact with rising interpersonal, intra-urban, and inter-territorial inequalities, imposing a substantial human and economic cost for societies (WHO, 2025; World Economic Forum, 2025; OECD, 2024; OECD, 2025).

For years, conventional economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have been used as proxies for well-being and societal progress. However, relying solely on economic output obscures the quality side of development and several other dimensions of urban and regional realities (Veneri & Edzes, 2017). The disconnection between economic growth and life satisfaction is becoming increasingly evident, particularly in developed countries (Beja, 2017; Di Tella & MacCulloch, 2010). The discourse, which was first highlighted by the Easterlin paradox about happiness and income (Easterlin, 1974), gained momentum with the seminal report by Stiglitz et al. (2009). Today, an increasing discontent with GDP as the primary measure of social progress is observed (the Beyond GDP movement).

Incorporating a broader range of economic, social, and environmental outcomes is essential to understanding whether policies actually improve lives. The concept of well-being does exactly that; it interweaves “questions of development, social progress, sustainability, and individual happiness” (Schwanen & Atkinson, 2015), allowing for a holistic understanding of human experience. By centering well-being, we can unravel complex urban and regional geographies, better understand the root causes of inequality, and design policies that address socio-spatial despair (Panori et al., 2025).

We invite theoretical and empirical contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:
– Methodologies for measuring place-based subjective well-being and social progress beyond traditional economic metrics.
– Unraveling the interpersonal, intra-urban, and inter-territorial disparities in quality of life and subjective well-being.
– Understanding the impact of environmental (urban and physical) quality on subjective well-being.
– Subjective well-being along the urban-rural continuum.

References

• Beja, E. L. (2017). The Asymmetric Effects of Macroeconomic Performance on Happiness: Evidence for the EU. Intereconomics, 52(3), 184–190. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10272-017-0670-y
• Di Tella, R., & MacCulloch, R. (2010). Happiness Adaptation to Income Beyond “Basic Needs.” In E. Diener, D. Kahneman, & J. Helliwell (Eds.), International Differences in Well-Being (p. 0). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732739.003.0008
• Easterlin, R. A. (1974). Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence. In P. A. David & M. W. Reder (Eds.), Nations and Households in Economic Growth (pp. 89–125). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-205050-3.50008-7
• Layard, R., & De Neve, J.-E. (2023). Wellbeing: Science and Policy. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009298957
• Panori, A., Kalogeresis, A., Papastergiou, E., Ziogas, T., & Ballas, D. (2025). Unraveling the nexus: Subjective well-being and left-behind places. Regional Science Policy & Practice, 17(10), 100222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rspp.2025.100222
• OECD. (2024). How’s Life? 2024: Well-being and Resilience in Times of Crisis. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/90ba854a-en
• OECD. (2025). To Have and Have Not – How to Bridge the Gap in Opportunities. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/dec143ad-en
• Schwanen, T., & Atkinson, S. (2015). Geographies of wellbeing: An introduction. The Geographical Journal, 181(2), 98–101. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12132
• Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009). Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. The Commission. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/8131721/8131772/Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Commission-report.pdf
• Veneri, P., & Edzes, A. J. E. (2017). Well-being in cities and regions: Measurement, analysis and policy practices. REGION, 4(2), E1–E5. https://doi.org/10.18335/region.v4i2.188
• World Economic Forum. (2025). Global Risks Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2025/
  WHO. (2025). World mental health today: latest data. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240113817

Session Organiser(s):
Marcin Spyra, Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
Gert-Jan Hospers, University of Ostrava, Czechia
Felicia Akinyemi, Karlstad University, Sweden

Session Description:

Open spaces (OS) are increasingly recognised as critical regional assets for ecological resilience, social well-being, and spatial justice. In this session, OS are understood as unsealed terrestrial areas whose land cover and land uses are not part of the built urban fabric, functioning as common resources within broader landscape systems and providing essential services and benefits to both human and non-human actors. Despite their importance, the governance of OS remains uneven and contested across regions, shaped by divergent institutional capacities, planning traditions, socio-economic conditions, and power relations.

The session examines how regional planning frameworks shape the governance of OS across Global North (GN) and Global South (GS) contexts, with particular attention to governance arrangements, stakeholder inclusion, informality, and the translation of planning objectives into practice.

In GN contexts, OS governance is typically embedded in relatively formalised, multi-level planning systems that emphasise ecosystem services, climate adaptation, public health, and participatory governance. Data-driven tools and regulatory instruments support inter-municipal coordination, yet persistent challenges remain, including socio-spatial inequalities, gentrification, public accessibility and the influence of growth-oriented policies on OS provision and access.

In GS contexts, govern ance is often shaped by rapid urbanisation, high densities, informal land use, fragmented institutional responsibilities, and limited enforcement capacity. Moreover, planning in those contexts is typically shaped by parallel governance where a customary land tenure co-exists with formal (statutory) land governance. Customary authorities in such arrangements may see OS as communal heritage, social infrastructure, or future residential land for community members, while formal planners may see the same land as green buffers, parks, stormwater areas, or future development zones. Such situation leads to site specific conflicts, displacement, and exclusion and trade-offs when formal planning frameworks fail to recognise informal users and practices.

Rather than employing a rigid binary, this session uses the GN–GS framework as a heuristic device to highlight the structural differences in governance conditions, such as institutional capacity, informality and access to resources, that shape OS governance. This approach will facilitate mutual learning regarding governance strategies for addressing OS in GN and GS regions.

By bringing GN and GS experiences into dialogue, the session aims to foster comparative learning and theory-building, particularly at the regional scale where socio-ecological systems, land-use dynamics, and social inequalities transcend administrative boundaries. Contributions are invited that critically examine formal and informal governance and planning approaches, capable of supporting more inclusive, adaptive, and resilient governance of OS.

Session Organiser(s):
Lucas Barning, University of Vienna, Austria
Sarah Ware, Central European University, Austria
Astrid Krisch, University of Technology Vienna, Austria

Session Description:

Over the past decade, regional studies has deepened understanding of how sustainability transitions unfold through uneven geographies of infrastructure, finance and governance. Research has documented persistent peripheralisation, inequality and path dependence (Brad & Moldovan 2020; Cortinovis et al. 2024; Hopkins et al. 2024) and underlined that transitions are non-linear and conflictual (Steinböck & Trippl 2023; Østergaard et al. 2024). Contestation, as a form of political negotiation, thus appears across scales and arenas: local opposition to energy or land-use projects, organised political backlash against environmental policy, and everyday frictions around mobility, place and distributional justice (Grodach & Guerra-Tao 2025; Alster et al. 2025; Cherrington 2025; Morales et al. 2022).

However, much existing work treats contestation as a disruption to be managed. This session instead aims at reframing contestation as a constitutive process that reveals struggles over power, legitimacy and alternative pathways. Its ambiguous character as both a source of democratic renewal and of reactionary mobilisation is often shaped simultaneously by legitimate local grievances and by populist or authoritarian actors (Patterson 2023). To advance regional studies, we argue for analytic attention to the spatial and temporal dimensions of contestation, its links to distributional, procedural and recognitional justice, and its embedding in narratives, imaginaries and governance arrangements (Seto et al. 2016) at local and regional scales.

This special session aims to bring together empirical and theoretical work that treats contestation as central to, and unavoidable in, eco-social transformation. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How do spatio-temporal and socio-cultural drivers (local histories, identities, narratives) shape contestation in transitions? How does populist instrumentalisation intersect with local grievances and uneven environmental burdens?
• How do material, technological, institutional and behavioural lock-ins sustain unsustainable trajectories, and in what ways does contestation challenge or reinforce those lock-ins?
• Which governance and planning designs enable constructive engagement with contestation while protecting democratically legitimised transition pathways? Which arrangements risk suppressing dissent or enabling backlash?
• How do practices of resistance and prefiguration generate new modes of organising and doing that materially reconfigure transition pathways?

#ContestingTransitions, #EcoSocialTransformation, #RegionalStudies, #JustTransitions, #SpatialJustice, #PoliticalEcology, #RegionsInTransition, #RSA26

We are happy to answer any questions and look forward to the session! Lucas Barning, lucas.barning@univie.ac.at, Sarah Ware, WareS@ceu.edu, and Astrid Krisch, astrid.krisch@tuwien.ac.at.

References

• Alster T, Nachmany H and Avni N (2025) Residents’ expectations from the municipality in an age of urban-national polarisation. Urban Studies 62(12): 2363–2382.
• Brad A and Moldovan A (2020) Development frames in peripheralized areas of Romania. Regional Studies, Regional Science 7(1): 1–9.
• Cherrington R (2025) Can local communities redefine regional identity? Regional Studies, Regional Science 12(1): 201–220.
• Cortinovis N, Zhang Y and Boschma R (2024) Regional diversification and intra-regional wage inequality in the Netherlands. Regional Studies 58(12): 2050–2064.
• Grodach C and Guerra-Tão N (2025) Zoning a productive city? A typology of clustering, diversity and specialisation in Melbourne’s urban industrial areas. Urban Studies 62(12): 2177–2196.
• Hopkins J, Currie M, Schurch N, Martínez-Sánchez G and Farinelli V (2024) Enhancing inclusive growth to create new evidence of rural diversity: Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Regional Studies, Regional Science 11(1): 121–140.
• Morales A, Ramos J and Segovia F (2022) Migration, identity and inequality in regional contexts. Regional Studies, Regional Science 9(1): 214–229.
  Østergaard CR, Park E, Hain D and Tanner A (2024) Understanding green regional path development: A systematic study of Nordic regions. Regional Studies 58(11): 2101–2117.
• Patterson J (2023) Backlash to climate policy. Global Environmental Politics 23(1): 68–90.
• Seto KC, Davis SJ, Mitchell RB, Stokes EC, Unruh G and Ürge-Vorsatz D (2016) Carbon lock-in: Types, causes, and policy implications. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 41: 425–452.
• Steinböck K and Trippl M (2023) Contested green path development: Bioplastics in Lower Austria. Regional Studies, Regional Science 10(1): 47–62.

Session Organiser(s):
David Charles, Northumbria University, United Kingdom
Ane Izulain, Orkestra – Basque Institute of Competitiveness and Deusto Business School, Spain
Emily Wise, CIRCLE, Lund University, Sweden
Bruce Wilson, RMIT University, Australia
Rhiannon Pugh, CIRCLE, Lund University, Sweden
James Wilson, Orkestra – Basque Institute of Competitiveness and Deusto Business School, Spain

Session Description:

Urban and regional policymakers are faced with continuing needs for advice and intelligence on their localities, on the nature of economic and social problems and challenges in their jurisdictions, on policy options and on the effectiveness of existing policies. Much existing data and knowledge is available from research and higher education institutions, but can be difficult to access, and often policymakers are unaware of what is available or how to identify appropriate expertise. New studies may be commissioned but can be a costly activity and without interrogating previous work the questions posed may be inappropriate. There is therefore an expressed need from policymakers for better means to access university expertise. University researchers also seek better means to inform policy, partly arising from a global trend towards the measurement of impact and the engaged or civic university, and partly from the recognition of the insights involving dialogue and engagement with research users, key actors and the wider public.

Whilst there is a very extensive literature on knowledge exchange with business, and to a lesser but growing extent with the public, knowledge exchange with policymakers is not so well studied, yet there is a growing base of new institutions and programmes to support policy knowledge exchange. Some of this activity is specifically directed at the sub-national level of governance, the region or metropolitan area. This dimension has gained increasingly in priority in recent years with the growing emphasis on interventions to promote place-based innovation systems. There are a variety of models of policy hubs and centres emerging though. Some are based on research institutes and develop research programmes in partnership with policymakers. Others focus on brokerage and making existing academic knowledge available to policymakers. Some are based in a single university whilst others bring together all the universities in their region. Governance and funding vary also. There is thus a proliferation of models for regions to choose from, and differences in process and forms of engagement.

This session is based on a current RSA Policy Expo on this topic and brings together emerging findings from this study with a call for presentations on the wider experiences of regional policy hubs, drawing together experiences of policy engagement to identify the range of options and existing good practices.

Contributions are welcome to explore:
• What structures are being developed by universities, individually and collectively, to better support regional-level policy development?
• How can local policy hubs better match local academic expertise to local policy needs?
• What skills are needed both for university and policy organisation staff for facilitating the effective uptake of academic knowledge by regional policymakers?
• How can regions best combine local expertise and global exemplars and practices to develop high impact policies?
• Do university-structures initiated (and funded) by regional authorities differ in structure and impact from university-initiated (and funded) structures?

#RegionalPolicyHubs

If you have any questions about this session or the RSA Expo project on Regional Policy Hubs, please contact david.charles@northumbria.ac.uk.

Session Organiser(s):
Mia Gray, University of Cambridge, UK
Andy Pike, Newcastle University, UK

Session Description:

Local government appears to be in a perpetual state of crisis in many countries internationally. As national states have downloaded austerity and expenditure reductions to the local scale, municipal governments have struggled to cope in the contemporary era marked by disruption, volatility and uncertainty. The challenges to local government are many – with demographic shifts, increasing demand for more complex essential services, affordability and cost of living pressures, and economic and infrastructural transition amidst climate change confronting local politicians and officers with unprecedented and pressing challenges. In different ways in different places, local governments are compelled into making savings and finding new and innovative sources of income. Risks have increased amidst tightening margins for error given more rapid depletion of reserves and growing indebtedness, leading to cases of ‘bankruptcy’ and failure. Increasing local taxation which seem disconnected to improved services seem to rupture trust around local governance. Rolling crisis is generating adverse implications for people and places internationally of disrupted local public services, jeopardising local democracy and accountability, and increasing local discontent with the potential for local government and politicians to make their lives better.

Yet explaining the contemporary moment for local government is divided between agency and structure-oriented accounts. Identifying causes by blaming the plight of local governments on the agency of their bad decisions, weak governance, and unmerited risk taking, or emphasising austerity and broken and dysfunctional governance and funding systems. The consequences of crisis are spatially and temporally uneven, concentrating the impacts of rationalised and withdrawn infrastructures and services, increased local taxes, and a hollowed out public realm in some places compared to others. Few studies have examined the contestation and mobilisation of people in places to engage local government in crisis and its responses. The political economies of resolving and avoiding local government in crisis into the future are underdeveloped.

This session aims to deepen our understanding and debate the issue of local government in crisis. We are specifically interested in discussing the causes, consequences, and solutions in a wide range of geographical and historical settings internationally as more general relations and processes play out in various ways to produce differentiated landscapes of local government and public finance. Submissions are welcome from across disciplines and geographies that address the question of local government in crisis. Contributions can be conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and/or empirical and focus on any geographical and temporal setting.

Potential themes include:
• Agency and/or structure in explanation
• Crisis of the local state as exception or institutionalised, ongoing, and normalised condition
• Austerity as cause and/or consequence of local fiscal crisis
• Local government commercialism and commercialisation
• Financialisation, financial innovation and experimentation
• Assetisation and local government as creator of assets and investor
• Impacts and implications of local government in crisis on people and places
• Local government bankruptcy, failure, and recovery
• Local-central state relations
• Contestation of crisis and mobilisation of local communities and residents
• New strategies and models of local public provisioning and services
• Comparative analysis of local government crisis
• Solutions and futures for local government in crisis

Depending on the contributions, we will aim to identify discussants for each of the papers and close the session with a panel comprised of the paper presenters and session chairs to reflect on the contributions and identify future research directions.

Constituting part of the activities of the cross-disciplinary and international RSA MuniFisc Network, the session seeks to enable and encourage dialogue and debate across disciplines and critically engage with the causes, consequences, and potential solutions for local government in crisis.

Session Organiser(s):
Erika Nagy, ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary

Session Description:

The session addresses three of the conference themes, i.e. just transition, diversity and equity in regional development, and peripherality by looking into the dynamics of social relations in the non-metropolitan regions of CEE which have been transformed by the influx of productive capital in the past decade. Local development paths have been shaped by macro-scale processes such as disruption, rearrangement and changing power relations of global production networks due to subsequent crises, by interventionist national policies seeking for balance and competitive advantages (Szabo et al, 2025; Domański et al, 2024), and also by European industrial policies shifting ‘from passive, open, pro-competitive, and horizontal to active, assertive, green and sectoral’ (Ambroziak, 2025:23). This entailed the revival of old and the rise of new spaces of industrial production throughout CEE, which exhibited diverse development paths, structural conditions and multiplicity of social agents and interactions (Pavlínek, 2022; Sass, Szalavecz, 2023; Blazek, Kvéton, 2023). Nevertheless, (re)industrialization produced unintended outcomes such as new dimensions and patterns of social inequalities, unforeseen (non-considered) harms to the environment and living conditions, and changing relations within communities and between localities.

The session aims to grasp:
• the population dynamics (demography/migration) in spaces of peripheral (re)industrialization,
• the emerging patterns of social mobility and inequalities along intersecting relations (labour, gender, race, health and culture),
• the social conflicts stemming from the deficits of social and technical infrastructure, and draining off natural resources,
• the scope and interactions of local agents articulating and dealing with social problems which are emanating from industrial restructuring.

We propose to focus on small and medium size towns in non-metropolitan regions which have been targeted by major investors entailing a dependent position in (GPN, intra-firm and also state) institutional architectures. In this way, we should reveal hidden mechanisms producing inequalities, tensions, and vulnerability in economically dynamic spaces. We also aim to get engaged in current debates on peripherality and uneven development, on the scope of local agency, and state interventions in the European periphery, encouraging theoretical and cross-disciplinary debates on (re)industrialization in CEE. Empirical and conceptual papers are equally welcome.

Papers focused on the following themes particularly welcome:
(i) How population dynamics has changed in industrial small land medium size towns in CEE;
(ii) How the intersecting dimensions of gender, race, health conditions, etc. impact labour market position, mobility and well-being;
(iii) How local labour markets have been re-shaped by new commuting patterns, contract labour including foreign guest workers;
(iv) Changing intra-community inequalities and conflicts stemming from large-scale investment projects;
(v) The agents of mitigating social inequalities locally: the welfare policies of the state/municipalities; community initiatives, NGOs’ agency;
(vi) Alternative narratives of development; how the narratives of social inequality, social infrastructure, foundational economy, income and livelihood, well-being are related to industrialisation and local economic development;
(vii) The scope (power) of local agents to articulate community interests in changing (state) institutional contexts and the rearrangement of GPNs;
(viii) Industrialization and uneven development at multiple scales: placing small and medium size towns in broader processes of transformation of urban networks, such as metropolitanization and changing regional contexts.

References:
Ambroziak, A.A. (2025): The New EU Industrial Policy. A paradigm shift in need of coordination and funding. Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies. Report 2025:2.
Blažek, J., & Květoň, V. (2023). Towards an integrated framework of agency in regional development: the case of old industrial regions. Regional studies, 57(8), 1482-1497.
Domański, B., Micek, G., Guzik, R., Gwosdz, K., & Kocaj, A. (2024). The evolution of European manufacturing industries: the dynamics of core-periphery relationships. Routledge.
Pavlínek, P. (2022). Relative positions of countries in the core-periphery structure of the European automotive industry. European Urban and Regional Studies, 29(1), 59-84.
Szabó, D., Drdlova, H., & Csontos, T. T. (2025). Return of Industrial Policy in the V4 Countries: Insights From the NIPO Database. Köz-gazdaság, 20(3S), 60-94.
Szalavetz, A., & Sass, M. (2023). Disentangling the semi-periphery: evolutionary trajectories and perspectives of the Austrian and Hungarian automotive industries. Post-Communist Economies, 35(3), 211-235

Session Organiser(s):
Allen Xiao, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Session Description:

Existing work on traveling urban models in global urban studies is built on the concept of policy mobilities: urban policies are not simply transferred but also dynamically translated and transformed from one city to another (Peck and Theodore 2010; McCann and Ward 2010; 2011). In this vein, scholars sometimes use “urban model” and “urban policy” interchangeably (i.e. Robin and Nkula-Wenz 2021) or more often combine them as urban policy model (i.e. McCann 2011; Martinez and Bunnell 2024). As Peck and Theodore (2010: 170) argue, “mobile policies rarely travel as complete ‘packages’; they move in bits and pieces—as selective discourses, inchoate ideas, and synthesized models,” rendering policy models more abstract than individual policies. McCann (2011: 109) distinguishes “policy model” from “policy knowledge”: the former refers to “more general statements of ideal policies, combining elements of more than one policy, or statements of ideal combinations of policies”, while the latter refers to “expertise or experienced-based know-how about policies, policymaking, implementation, and best practices”. In this sense, urban policy models are instantiated through specific sets of policies under certain political ideology, such as the model of Business Improvement Districts (McCann & Ward 2010; Didier et al. 2012; Silva et al. 2024).

This session extends the notion of urban models beyond urban policy models. We conceptualize urban models as encompassing broader, city-wide imaginaries that are recognized not only by policymakers but also by citizens in other national contexts. Detaching urban models from a narrow policy focus allows us to avoid “methodological city-ism”—the tendency to privilege city-to-city exchanges while overlooking the role of national visions, state strategies, and wider processes of urbanization. In proposing future directions for research on policy mobilities, Silva and Kevin (2024) call for renewed attention to interscalar conditions and the influence of the nation-state through comparative and conjunctural approaches that emphasize reflexive theorizing, socially engaged inquiry, and historically grounded analysis (see also Peck 2024). From this perspective, city-making is not solely an urban phenomenon but a multiscalar political process through which states pursue broader national objectives.

We therefore welcome contributions drawing on diverse empirical contexts and case studies that engage with these ideas, without regard to conventional distinctions between the Global North and South. In this new global world, regional networks may be weakening or reconfigured, while cities increasingly connect through unconventional and fragmented pathways along which urban models circulate, mutate, and take root. This session aims to explore and critically engage with these emerging dynamics.

Please contact the session organizer at allenxh@nus.edu.sg if you have any questions.

Session Organiser(s):
Federica Rossi, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
Tiziano Pavanini, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

Session Description:

A salient world issue is the gradual process of population ageing (Navaneetham and Arunachalam, 2025). Projections indicate that by the year 2050, the global population of individuals over the age of 65 will exceed that of children under the age of 5 (Khan et al., 2024). In this context, it is imperative to implement public policies that facilitate mobility for older adults, with the objective of preventing economic and social isolation, and the development of chronic loneliness (Zhang et al., 2023; Hajek et al., 2025). Nevertheless, this demographic frequently encounters constrained access to public transportation as a consequence of the lack of policies tailored to their travel requirements (Wong et al., 2018; Jahangir et al., 2022; Močnik et al., 2022). Consequently, older adults may become isolated or continue to rely on private transportation (Wang et al., 2022). The main goal of this special session is to solicit contributions that address the barriers to smart mobility faced by older people, promote alternatives to car use, foster social inclusion through shared mobility solutions and adapt service provision to an ageing population.

Session Organiser(s):
Jack Newman, University of Manchester, UK
Charlotte Hoole, University of Birmingham, UK

Session Description:

Tackling spatial inequality depends heavily on the capacity of local and regional actors in disadvantaged places to deliver transformative change – economically, socially, and environmentally. In this context, ‘capacity’ is a crucial concept but it has not received sufficient attention. Capacity can be understood in individual terms (e.g. place leadership), in organisational terms (e.g. quality of governance), or in systemic terms (e.g. network governance). This special session will explore the strategies and pathways through which disadvantaged regions can build capacity across these different levels. It aims to reflect on existing capacity-building programmes and to explore innovative approaches to growing capacity, especially in disadvantaged regions.

We invite papers that address, but are not limited to, the following key thematic areas of interest:
– The challenges facing disadvantaged places/regions in building capacity
– The meaning of capacity and/or capacity-building
– Relations between individual, organisational, and systemic capacity
– The success or failure of capacity-building programmes
– Innovative mechanisms that could support capacity-building in disadvantaged places/regions

Session Organiser(s):
G. Pelin Olcay, Istanbul Kent University, Turkey
Kerstin Meyer, Institute for Work and Technology, Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Jani Kozina, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia

Session Description:

Urban manufacturing has re-emerged as a central concern in debates on sustainable urban development and economic resilience. In the context of climate change, digitalisation, geopolitical uncertainty, and circular economy agendas, cities are increasingly repositioning manufacturing as a strategic urban function (Angstmann et al., 2025). At the same time, critical research highlights growing tensions around land use, governance, and social inclusion within contemporary reindustrialisation strategies.
Recent scholarship points to the risks of a “hyper-competitive” industrial land market, in which processes of intra-industrial gentrification intensify displacement pressures within the manufacturing sector itself (Ferm, 2023). Other studies criticise urban and regional policies that privilege advanced, innovation-driven industries while marginalising essential “low-tech, high-touch” forms of production that remain crucial for employment, services, and everyday urban economies (Grodach & Martin, 2021). These dynamics raise fundamental questions about the role, value, and future of production in cities.

At the same time, alternative perspectives and planning approaches are emerging. Calls for more inclusive and proactive industrial planning emphasise the need to move beyond the mere protection of zoning boundaries and toward strategies that actively promote the visibility, accessibility, and societal relevance of urban manufacturing spaces (Pendras et al., 2023).

We particularly welcome comparative perspectives on urban manufacturing across different national, regional, and socio-economic contexts. Contributions may address one or more of the following questions:
– Conceptional and descriptive:
– What is urban manufacturing today?
– How is urban manufacturing changing across different territorial contexts?

We invite papers that explore transformations along economic, spatial, social, environmental, technological, and cultural dimensions, including production modes, sectoral structures, skills and labour conditions, digitalisation, circularity, and local embeddedness.
Sustainability and future orientation of cities:
– Which types of manufacturing are considered desirable or undesirable in urban contexts, which sectors benefit from urban locations, and which struggle or face exclusion?
– How do these firms connect with the urban space? Do they integrate with it (acting also as agents of urban requalification), or, conversely, do they represent, as often in the past, an abrupt break in the urban tissue?
– Is urban manufacturing indeed environmentally advantageous, under what conditions holds this true, and which types of production contribute meaningfully to socio-ecological urban sustainability?

This includes research on circular economy strategies, industrial symbiosis, resource and energy efficiency, waste reduction, and new production technologies.
Policy:
– Which urban, regional, and metropolitan policies currently shape urban manufacturing?
– Under what conditions are firms able to remain embedded in cities?
– Is mixed-use zoning a viable long-term solution, or do cities need stronger strategies to safeguard, reinstate, and upgrade industrial and commercial land in the face of rising land values and housing pressures?
– How can urban policies be designed to actively support sustainable urban manufacturing, rather than merely managing decline or conflict?

Papers may engage with questions of land-use conflict, mixed-use development, and the limits of functional integration between production, housing, and other urban uses. This includes land-use planning, industrial land protection, zoning instruments, fiscal tools such as local business taxation, and broader policy mixes affecting production in cities.
Effects on the social structure:
– Which effects on the urban social structure does contemporary urban manufacturing bring or has it brought about in the past?
– Has urban manufacturing reinforced existing inequalities, has it generated new ones? Or does it act as a buffer against social inequalities?
– Has it represented a tool able to reconnect the working and middle classes with the urban society?

This focus invites reflections on the social integration of the urban manufacturing into social morphology and social structure, exploring the links between the economic structure, labour market and urban society. The session explicitly encourages contributions that move beyond a predominantly Global North-centred discourse. While urban manufacturing transitions have been widely studied in European, North American and Australian contexts, empirical research on cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America remains limited (with notable exceptions such as Park, 2023). We therefore welcome studies that examine how urban manufacturing can be supported and transformed in the Global South, taking into account different institutional settings, labour markets, and development trajectories.

We invite conceptual and empirical papers using qualitative and quantitative methods, that address one or more of the themes outlined above. The special session aims to foster critical debate, comparative insights, and dialogue across urban studies, economic geography, planning, and policy research.

#productivecity #urbanmanufacturing #urbanproduction

Session Organiser(s):
Maria Tsouri, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences – SkillResilience4EU, Norway
Henrik Brynthe, Lund Norwegian University of Science and Technology – GSW, Norway
Nikos Kapitsinis, University of Copenhagen – ISABEL, Denmark
Samson Afewerki, NORCE – RENOVATE, Norway

Session Description:

The geographically varied and evolving nature of green and digital transitions are profoundly reshaping labour markets, occupational structures, and skill requirements across regions (Dawley et al., 2025; Moilanen & Alasoini, 2023). While these transformations, driven by green policies and the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), generate new employment opportunities, they also lead to job displacement, skills mismatches, and uneven regional outcomes. Understanding how jobs and skills evolve across places, and how regions can build labour-market resilience under conditions of rapid technological, environmental, and policy change, has become a central challenge for regional studies (Bianchi et al., 2024; Dawley et al., 2025). Important opportunities arise for harnessing social sciences and AI to examine the regional labour market transformation.

This special session invites papers that explore the regional dimensions of jobs and skills’ transformation in the context of the twin transitions. We particularly welcome contributions that examine how structural change unfolds unevenly across regions, sectors, and socio-economic groups, and how institutional arrangements, education and training systems, and local capabilities mediate these dynamics. The session aims to bring together conceptual, empirical, and policy-oriented research that advances our understanding of labour-market transformation from a place-based perspective.

Key themes include (but are not limited to):
• Regional patterns of job creation and destruction linked to either, or both, green and digital transitions and underlying factors
• Regional differences in exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to green and digital transitions induced labour market vulnerabilities
• Skills demand, skills supply, and mismatches across regions and sectors
• Opportunities for harnessing AI and social sciences for evidence-based regional labour market analyses and policies
• The role of education, vocational training, and lifelong learning in supporting regional resilience
• Institutional and governance arrangements shaping regional skill ecosystems
• Inclusive regional labour market transitions, with attention to vulnerable groups and “left-behind” places
• Comparative and multi-scalar analyses of labour-market transformation
• Novel data, methods, and indicators for analysing jobs, skills, and regional change

The session aims to promote dialogue between different strands of regional research, including economic geography, innovation studies, labour economics, and transition studies. Methodologically, we welcome both quantitative and qualitative approaches, including comparative case studies, spatial analyses, policy evaluations, mixed-method designs, as well as more theoretically-led papers.

References
Bianchi, P., De Propris, L., & Labory, S. (2024). People-centred policies for a just transition (digital, green and skills). Contemporary Social Science, 19(1-3), 262-282. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2024.2351479
Dawley, S., Karlsen, A., & MacKinnon, D. (2025). Agency, skills and workforce adaptation. In J. Karlsen & J. O. Rypestøl (Eds.), Sustainable Regional Restructuring: Insights from Economic Geography and Regional Innovation Studies (pp. 59-73). Edward Elgar.
Moilanen, F., & Alasoini, T. (2023). Workers as actors at the micro-level of sustainability transitions: A systematic literature review. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 46, 100685. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2022.100685

Session Organiser(s):
Trisanki Saikia, Trier University, Germany
Simona Popova, Department of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Julia Affolderbach, Trier University, Germany

Session Description:

Quickly growing volumes of waste and associated environmental, health and social problems are posing a big challenge for municipalities and regions around the world. One way of tackling the waste crisis has been to reframe waste as resource as illustrated by institutions such as the United Nations (UNEP 2024; O’Neill 2019). Unlike other natural resources, this ‘new’ resource is increasing (Kaza et al., 2018). The reimaging of waste as a resource is highlighted by circular economy thinking, which frames waste challenges as opportunities through closing loops, for example, through material recovery such as reuse, reprocessing and recycling (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017). Circular practices are widely advertised as opportunity to generate profits from the international to the local scale (e.g. EU Circular Economy Action Plan). While circular logic contributes to a more efficient management of resources, it can also be highly problematic if its limits are not critically examined. For example, critics have argued that an economy that treats waste as a primary resource in production and consumption risks reinforcing the very systems and dynamics that generate it in the first place (Savini, 2019). Another critical aspect in such systems is that when waste is valorized its value is often reduced to purely monetary terms, failing to grasp broader socio-ecological values (Savini, 2023).

Building on the critical debates around waste valorization and circular economy, waste is increasingly central to debates on sustainability and regional development. Beyond being an environmental challenge, waste plays an active role in reshaping regional economies, governance arrangements, and social relations. This session brings together contributions that examine waste as a driver of but also as barrier for regional transformation, focusing on how value, responsibility, and risk are produced and distributed through waste systems in different contexts.

We encourage contributions that critically engage with waste and its valuation practices and processes, aiming to expand the understanding of value beyond the monetary. In addition, we also invite papers that explore how waste is governed, managed, and valued across regions, and how these processes are shaped by regulatory frameworks, infrastructures, labour relations, and political and economic interests. Contributions may address diverse waste streams (e.g. construction and demolition waste, plastics, e-waste, organics), forms of organisation (e.g. formal and informal), and scales of analysis (local, regional, transregional). Rather than reproducing Global North–South binaries, the session foregrounds regionally specific configurations of power, regulation, and material flows. The session aims to foster dialogue across critical regional studies, political economy, urban studies, and economic geography and related literature strands. Collectively, the papers will contribute to understanding how waste practices shape and are shaped by processes of regional change.

References

• Geissdoerfer, M., Savaget, P., Bocken, N. M. P., & Hultink, E. J. (2017). The Circular Economy – A new sustainability paradigm? Journal of Cleaner Production, 143, 757–768.
• Kamble, C. B., Raju, R., Vishnu, R., Rajkanth, R., & Pariatamby, A. (2021). A circular economy model for waste management in India. Waste Management & Research: The Journal for a Sustainable Circular Economy, 39(11), 1427–1436. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734242X211029159
• Kaza, S., Yao, L., Bhada-Tata, P., & Van Woerden, F. (2018). What a Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050 (Urban Development). World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30317
• O’Neill, K. (2019). Waste. Polity Press.
• Savini, F. (2023). Futures of the social metabolism: Degrowth, circular economy and the value of waste. Futures, 153, 103180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2023.103180
• Savini, F. (2019). The economy that runs on waste: Accumulation in the circular city. Critical Sociology, 45(5), 675–691. https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2019.1670048
• UNEP (Ed.). (2024). Global Waste Management Outlook 2024: Beyond an age of waste – Turning rubbish into a resource. UNEP.

Session Organiser(s):
Han Chu, Kiel University, Germany
Robert Hassink, Kiel University, Germany
Fabien Nadou, EM Normandie Business School, France
Mathilde Aubry, EM Normandie Business School, France

Session Description:

In human geography, the concept of place has long been distinguished from abstract space through its experiential, emotional, and symbolic dimensions (Arefi, 1999; Cresswell, 2014; Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977). As the digitalisation process becomes increasingly widespread and profound, digital platforms are progressively emerging as the core medium and tool connecting individuals with their external environments and spaces. However, their impact on local dynamics—whether in terms of spatial inequalities, urban governance, or tourism experiences—remain insufficiently integrated. Place is no longer perceived and understood solely through “being-in-place”, everyday interactions, and embodied experiences, but is increasingly experienced, imagined, and reproduced through platform-based connectivity, online participation, and digital mediation. It interacts with and becomes interwoven with “virtual space” or “digiplace” (De Certeau & Mayol, 1998; Gon, 2021; Hatuka, 2024; Heidegger, 1971; Siegel et al., 2025; Wu & Qiao, 2024; Zook & Graham, 2007). Digital platforms are redefining the mechanisms of place-making, place branding, and sense of place, while simultaneously introducing new algorithmic and economic logics. Therefore, we call for exploring the nexus between digital platforms and local engagement through three locally relevant perspectives: place-making, place branding, and sense of place.

First, place-making (PM) has long been recognized as a key set of practices shaping regional development outcomes s (Chu et al., 2023; He et al., 2025). Lew (2019) conceptualises ‘place shaping’ as a continuum ranging from spontaneous, grassroots place-making to planning-led, market-oriented placemaking, based on the origins of agency in the process. This emphasises its fundamental nature as a process where tangible and intangible tools jointly shape a place’s image, experience, and identity under the influence of diverse powers and actors. Secondly, place branding denotes the process whereby a place employs various strategies to differentiate itself and mobilise cultural, historical, and economic resources to enhance its reputation, sense of identity, and competitiveness (Castaldi & Mendonça, 2024; Kavaratzis & Kalandides, 2015; Shirvani Dastgerdi & De Luca, 2019). Thirdly, in recent years, economic geography and regional studies have increasingly shifted focus towards the emotional, cognitive, perceptual, and experiential dimensions of human-place relationships, while simultaneously emphasising place-based policies. Researchers now place greater emphasis on the role of agency relative to structure, particularly examining how individuals understand a place’s future through narratives, imagined possibilities, and perceived risks, thereby influencing regional development outcomes (Chu & Hassink, 2023; Gong, 2024; Lowe & Vinodrai, 2020; Rodríguez-Pose et al., 2024).

The role of digital platforms is increasingly prominent in the formation of place-making, place branding, and sense of place. These platforms not only alter how people interact with places but also profoundly intervene in the construction of sense of place and place identity (Halegoua, 2020; Li & Alencar, 2023).Virtual places generated by digital technologies, such as the metaverse and online communities, challenge traditional geographical concepts of space and place (Halegoua, 2020; Oleksy & Wnuk, 2017). Firstly, residents forge novel connections with their residential areas or neighbourhoods through social media, lifestyle service platforms, and digital communities (e.g., neighborhood Facebook groups, Wechat groups, collaborative platforms). This alters the mechanisms of place sense generation, making online spaces and digital participation integral components of place experience (e.g., viral “check-in spots,” online reviews) (Birnbaum et al., 2021; Hatuka, 2024; Schwartz, 2014). Secondly, platforms also shape perceptions, imaginings, and emotional projections of “other” places, thereby reshaping tourism experiences and the pathways through which visitors develop a sense of place (Baka, 2016; Molin et al., 2025; Van Gorp, 2012; Wang & Zhang, 2025). Thirdly, digital platforms are reshaping governance models and branding logic for places or cities at a macro level (e.g., partnerships with platforms like Tiktok/Douyin, Airbnb or Google Maps). Platform-based algorithmic dissemination mechanisms and the attention economy mean that place-making and brand-building no longer rely solely on policy discourse or physical spatial interventions. Instead, they are increasingly organised and amplified through platforms. Local governments must therefore integrate digital platforms to implement novel urban governance and branding strategies (Cao, 2024; Nadou et al., 2025; Pun et al., 2025; Shen & Cheng, 2025).

Against this backdrop, this special session aims to bring together research from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to systematically explore how digital platforms reconfigure the sense of place, place-making, and place branding, thereby influencing local identity, local economies, and regional development. Our core questions include (but are not limited to): How do digital platforms alter the mechanisms shaping the sense of place? How do platform practices reshape the agents, processes, and power relations within place-making? How is place branding reproduced under the influence of platform logic and algorithmic visibility? To what extent do digital platforms amplify or diminish local differences, inequalities, and spatial fractures?

We encourage in-depth theoretical and empirical discussions from perspectives including human geography, economic geography, tourism studies and urban studies. This special session focuses on (but is not limited to) the following three research perspectives:
1) Resident Perspective: How Digital Platforms Transform Local Life and residents’ sense of place
Exploring how digital platforms influence residents’ daily practices, community interactions, and place identity. Analysing how platform-based communities and online spaces supplement or reconfigure traditional local experiences, alongside examining experiential disparities and social impacts across different groups.
2) Tourist Perspective: How digital platforms reshape tourism economies and visitors’ sense of place
Examining how digital platforms influence destination branding, visitor expectations, and emotional connections. Analysing the commodification of local landscapes driven by phenomena like ‘viral check-in spots,’ alongside the platform economy’s impact on local culture and resident livelihoods.
3) Urban Perspective: How Digital Platforms Participate in City Branding and Urbanisation

Examining the role of digital platforms in city branding, image competition, and local economies at the urban scale. Analyses how platforms influence urban renewal, industrial organisation, and the divergent pathways of different cities in platform-driven development.
We welcome empirical, theoretical, and policy-oriented papers, as well as comparative studies. Rather than assuming predetermined outcomes, we particularly encourage contributions that critically examine the uneven and contested ways in which platform-mediated dynamics unfold, asking how digital platforms may simultaneously generate new opportunities for local actors and produce differentiated territorial effects across urbanisation, regional development, and local governance contexts.. We seek to advance theoretical discourse on place, platforms, and regional development, while offering fresh analytical perspectives for understanding contemporary urbanisation, regional transformation, and local governance.
Please submit your abstract online via the conference website https://www.regionalstudies.org/events/rsa26/ by 12 February 2026. For any inquiries, feel free to contact Han Chu at chu@geographie.uni-kiel.de .

References
Arefi, M. (1999). Non‐place and placelessness as narratives of loss: Rethinking the notion of place. Journal of Urban Design, 4(2), 179–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809908724445
Baka, V. (2016). The becoming of user-generated reviews: Looking at the past to understand the future of managing reputation in the travel sector. Tourism Management, 53, 148–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2015.09.004
Birnbaum, L., Wilhelm, C., Chilla, T., & Kröner, S. (2021). Place attachment and digitalisation in rural regions. Journal of Rural Studies, 87, 189–198.
Cao, L. (2024). From online to onsite: Wanghong economy as the new engine driving China’s urban development. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 0308518X231224142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231224142
Castaldi, C., & Mendonça, S. (2024). Places as brands: Charting the value of place-based intangibles. Regional Studies, 58(10), 1781–1791. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2024.2355280
Chu, H., & Hassink, R. (2023). Advancing spatial ontology in evolutionary economic geography. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, rsad020. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsad020
Chu, H., Hassink, R., Xie, D., & Hu, X. (2023). Placing the platform economy: The emerging, developing and upgrading of Taobao villages as a platform-based place making phenomenon in China. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 16(2), 319–334. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsad004
Cresswell, T. (2014). Place: An introduction. John Wiley & Sons. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=6OJvBAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=Cresswell,+T.+(2014).+Place:+An+Introduction.+Chichester:+John+Wiley+%26+Sons.&ots=eAJlEVStD5&sig=AoamgoSdQAJpTYsl3aVMnL0BGno
De Certeau, M., & Mayol, P. (1998). The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking. Volume 2 (Vol. 2). U of Minnesota Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eCQRgBgpgIUC&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=The+Practice+of+Everyday+Life+(1980)&ots=a5ArOMNQWd&sig=awrFF1csBguuJxhVr1L2vgPxqKI
Gon, M. (2021). Local experiences on Instagram: Social media data as source of evidence for experience design. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 19, 100435. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2020.100435
Gong, H. (2024). Futures should matter (more): Toward a forward-looking perspective in economic geography. Progress in Human Geography, 48(3), 292–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325231224434
Halegoua, G. R. (2020). The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479839216.001.0001
Hatuka, T. (2024). A conceptual framework for understanding neighbourhoods in the digital age. Urban Studies, 61(16), 3232–3246. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241257392
He, J., Li, W., & Peng, J. (2025). Unfolding the role of digital platforms in cultural production through Shanghai’s freelance photographers. Regional Studies, 59(1), 2517286. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2025.2517286
Heidegger, M. (1971). Building Dwelling Thinking. Poetry, Language, Thought/Harper and Row. https://apartmentstories2016.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/heidegger-ocr.pdf
Kavaratzis, M., & Kalandides, A. (2015). Rethinking the place brand: The interactive formation of place brands and the role of participatory place branding. Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space, 47(6), 1368–1382. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X15594918
Lew, A. A. (2019). Tourism planning and place making: Place-making or placemaking? In Tourism planning and development (pp. 142–160). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315083742-9/tourism-planning-place-making-place-making-placemaking-alan-lew
Li, Y., & Alencar, A. (2023). A tale of two cities: Digital place-making and elderly Houniao migration in China. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 49(4), 1032–1049. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2115630
Lowe, N., & Vinodrai, T. (2020). The Maker-Manufacturing Nexus as a Place-Connecting Strategy: Implications for Regions “Left Behind.” Economic Geography, 96(4), 315–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2020.1812381
Molin, L. U., Selvaag, S. K., & Aas, Ø. (2025). How Instagram shapes visitors’ relation to wild places. Tourism Geographies, 27(8), 1664–1679. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2582644
Nadou, F., Aubry, M., & Burlaud, A. (2025). Digital platforms versus local authorities: Challenges of new forms of ‘territorial’intermediation. Regional Studies, 59(1), 2513471.
Oleksy, T., & Wnuk, A. (2017). Catch them all and increase your place attachment! The role of location-based augmented reality games in changing people-place relations. Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 3–8.
Pun, B. L. F., Guo, F., & Fung, A. Y. H. (2025). Vulgar livestreaming spectacle? Wanghong urbanism, digital platform and precarity in Laojie, Shenzhen. International Journal of Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779251399672
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Rodríguez-Pose, A., Bartalucci, F., Lozano-Gracia, N., & Dávalos, M. (2024). Overcoming left-behindedness. Moving beyond the efficiency versus equity debate in territorial development. Regional Science Policy & Practice, 16(12), 100144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rspp.2024.100144
Schwartz, R. (2014). Online place attachment: Exploring technological ties to physical places. In Mobility and locative media (pp. 85–100). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315772226-17/online-place-attachment-exploring-technological-ties-physical-places-raz-schwartz
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Shirvani Dastgerdi, A., & De Luca, G. (2019). Strengthening the city’s reputation in the age of cities: An insight in the city branding theory. City, Territory and Architecture, 6(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40410-019-0101-4
Siegel, L. A., Tussyadiah, I., & Scarles, C. (2025). Commodification of photogenic sites and rise of ‘selfie parks’ as tourist enclaves. Tourism Geographies, 27(6), 1184–1209. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2532582
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Wu, D., & Qiao, Y. (2024). Interwoven spaces: How interactions in physical space facilitate knowledge exchange and market transactions in virtual space. Geoforum, 151, 104010. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104010
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Session Organiser(s):
Mariangela Lavanga, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Younghyun Kim, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Emma Samsioe, Lund University, Sweden
Annelise De Jong, Swedish Environmental Research Institute (ivl), Sweden
Marianne Ping, Huang Aarhus University, Denmark
Monika Murzyn-Kupisz, Jagiellonian University, Poland

Session Description:

Fashion and textile industries have long been deeply embedded in urban economies. Historically, cities have functioned as key sites of garment production, labour organisation, and industrial clustering, while also hosting fashion shows, trade fairs, retail districts, and creative scenes that shape consumption, branding, and symbolic value (Lavanga, 2020; Wubs et al., 2020). From manufacturing districts to luxury quarters and fast-fashion logistics hubs, the relationship between fashion and cities has been both economically significant and spatially distinctive (Casadei et al., 2020).

At the same time, the fashion sector is undergoing rapid and profound transformations. Digital technologies, platform-based retailing, and influencer economies have reconfigured production networks, cultural intermediation, and consumption practices, exemplified by the rise of ultra-fast fashion firms (Brydges et al., 2018; Kim et al., 2024). In parallel, mounting sustainability pressures, regulatory interventions, and social movements are challenging established business models and prompting experimentation with circularity, and a variety of alternative forms of production, distribution, and consumption (Buchel et al., 2022; Kim, 2024; Lavanga, 2019; Murzyn-Kupisz, 2025; Pugh et al., 2024). For example, circular consumption practices characterized by personalization, such as swap shops or repair and reuse spaces, are now being revalorized through infrastructures that supports initiatives once considered marginalized (Crewe and Beaverstock,1998; Henninger et al., 2019; Bahers and Rutherford, 2025).

Despite the strong interconnections between fashion and urban development, the spatial and urban dimensions of these sectoral transitions remain underexplored. How do fashion-related activities re-organise within cities under conditions of digitalisation and sustainability transitions? In what ways do urban contexts enable, constrain, or shape experimentation and transformation in the fashion and textile industries? Conversely, how do changing fashion economies reshape urban spaces, labour markets, and socio-spatial inequalities?

This session invites contributions that examine fashion and textile industries through an explicitly urban and place-based lens. We welcome theoretical, conceptual, and empirical papers that explore how urban settlements of different size and character host, support, and are transformed by ongoing transitions in the fashion and textile sectors, across different geographical contexts and scales. We especially encourage insights from secondary or peripheral fashion cities beyond the major global fashion capitals.

Relevant themes for contributions include (but are not limited to):
• Urban production systems and the changing geographies of garment and textile manufacturing
• Fashion entrepreneurship, creative industries, and their supportive ecosystems
• Digitalisation and platformisation in urban fashion economies
• Influencer economies and cultural intermediation in fashion
• Place-based sustainability transitions and circular economy in fashion
• Urban governance and policies in fashion and textiles
• Collaborative consumption practices and their infrastructures
• Changing fashion consumption practices in cities
• Labour, migration, and inequality in urban textile and fashion sectors
• Branding, place-making, and the symbolic economies of fashion cities
• Comparative perspectives on fashion and textile industries across regions

This session acknowledges the support of three Horizon Europe-funded projects which share a focus on the fashion transition:
• FABRIX – Fostering local, beautiful, and sustainably designed regenerative textile and clothing ecosystems (grant agreement No. 101135638),
• CARE – Circular consumption Activities to tRansform households toward material Efficiency (grant agreement no.101135141), and
• CRAFT-IT4SD – Craft Revitalisation Action for Future-proofing the Transition to Innovative Technologies for Sustainable Development (grant agreement no. 101132596)

We are happy to answer any questions and looking forward to seeing you in Gothenburg! Assoc.Prof.dr. Mariangela Lavanga, email: Lavanga@eshcc.eur.nl

#FABRIX #CareCircularHouseholds #craft-it4sd #fashiontransition #RSA26

References:
• Bahers, J.-B., & Rutherford, J. (2025). Urban infrastructures, metabolic resource flows and the contradictions of circular economy ‘solutions’ in Nantes and Gothenburg. Urban Studies, 62(9), 1897–1918. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241286750
• Brydges, T., Hracs, B. J., & Lavanga, M. (2018). Evolution versus entrenchment: Debating the impact of digitization, democratization and diffusion in the global fashion industry. International Journal of Fashion Studies, 5(2), 365–372. https://doi.org/10.1386/infs.5.2.365_7
• Buchel, S., Hebinck, A., Lavanga, M., & Loorbach, D. (2022). Disrupting the status quo: A sustainability transitions analysis of the fashion system. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 18(1), 231–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2022.2040231
• Crewe, L. & Beaverstock, J. (1998). Fashioning the city: Cultures of consumption in contemporary urban spaces. Geoforum, 29(3), 287–308. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-7185(98)00015-3
• Casadei, P., Gilbert, D., & Lazzeretti, L. (2020). Urban Fashion Formations in the Twenty‐First Century: Weberian Ideal Types as a Heuristic Device to Unravel the Fashion City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1468-2427.12961. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12961
• Henninger, C. E., Bürklin, N., & Niinimäki, K. (2019). The clothes swapping phenomenon- when consumers become suppliers. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, 23(3), 327–344. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-04-2018-0057
• Kim, Y. (2024). Proximity dimensions in making fashion circular: A systematic literature review and implications for cities and regions. Cities, 148, 104870. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2024.104870
• Kim, Y, Lavanga, M., Brandellero, A., and Hill, A. (2025). Orchestrating Circular Fashion in the Productive City: A Digital Platform Ecosystem Framework. Urban Planning, 10: 1-21 (special issue “Planning for Locally Embedded Economies in the Productive City”), https://doi.org/10.17645/up.10098
• Lavanga, M. (2019). A Spotlight on: Sustainable Fashion in The Netherlands. In A. Gwilt, A. Payne, & E. A. Rüthschilling (Eds.), Global Perspectives on Sustainable Fashion. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350058170
• Lavanga, M. (2020). Cultural districts. In R. Towse and T. Navarrete (Eds.) Handbook of Cultural Economics (Third Edition). Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788975803.00025
• Murzyn-Kupisz, M. (Ed.). Changing geographies of fashion in the European semi-periphery. Transition towards sustainability?. Springer, Cham.
• Pugh, R., Brydges, T., Sharpe, S., Lavanga, M., & Retamal, M. (2024). The ‘Wellbeing Wardrobe’ as a tool to promote just transitions in the fashion and textile industry. Contemporary Social Science, 19(1–3), 223–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2024.2341143
• Wubs, B., Lavanga, M., & Janssens, A. (2020). Letter from the Editors: The Past and Present of Fashion Cities. Fashion Theory, 24(3), 319–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1732012

Session Organiser(s):
Paula Hild, Trier University, Germany & Tallinn University, Estonia
Julia Affolderbach, Trier University, Germany

Session Description:

Sustainability transitions are frequently framed through policy targets, technological innovation, and structural transformations. The implementation of strategies and initiatives that constitute transitions is dominantly seen as the responsibility of actors at the regional and local scale. Regions, however, are not only arenas of implementation but also shape how sustainability is interpreted and enacted in regionally specific ways (Benner et al., 2026). At the same time, a growing body of scholarship highlights that transitions are equally shaped by everyday practices through which sustainability is lived, negotiated, and imagined in specific places. This session brings together contributions that foreground lived sustainabilities, understood as the entanglement of daily practices, meanings, and materialities that inform how sustainability is enacted on the ground. Building on practice-oriented and relational perspectives (Shove & Walker, 2010; Schlosberg & Coles, 2016), the session invites papers that examine sustainability not only as an abstract goal or governance framework, but as something experienced, contested, and performed in everyday life. Lived sustainabilities draw attention to how sustainability transitions unfold through routinised activities such as housing, mobility, consumption, care, work, and leisure, often beyond or alongside explicit sustainability agendas (Affolderbach & O’Neill, 2023). This also includes how sustainability problems and solutions are perceived, thought about, and discussed.

We particularly welcome contributions that:
• Explore everyday sustainability practices and their sociomaterial, spatial, and institutional embedding.
• Analyse narratives, imaginaries, and meanings of sustainability at local and regional scales.
• Examine tensions between policy-driven sustainability agendas and lived experiences.
• Address questions of justice, power, and inclusion in lived sustainabilities.
• Investigate how imagination and future-making emerge from everyday practices.
• Offer empirical, conceptual, or methodological perspectives on lived sustainabilities.

The session aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between geography, regional studies, sustainability transitions, planning, and related fields. By focusing on lived sustainabilities, it seeks to advance a more grounded and plural understanding of regional sustainability transitions that acknowledges both structural change and the everyday worlds through which regions are continuously made and remade.

References
Affolderbach, J., & O’Neill, K. (2023). Everyday sustainability transitions through using green buildings: Spatial perspectives on materialities, discourses, and lived sustainabilities. European Urban and Regional Studies, 30(4), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764231216407
Benner, M., Grünenwald, V., & Kastrup, J. (2026). The geography of just transitions: a place-based framework. Regional Studies, 60(1), Article 2606364. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2025.2606364
Moore, M.-L., & Milkoreit, M. (2020). Imagination and transformations to sustainable and just futures. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 8(1), Article 081. https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2020.081
Schlosberg, D., & Coles, R. (2016). The new environmentalism of everyday life: Sustainability, material flows and movements. Contemporary Political Theory, 15(2), 160–181. https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.34
Shove, E., & Walker, G. (2010). Governing transitions in the sustainability of everyday life. Research Policy, 39(4), 471–476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2010.01.019

Session Organiser(s):
Elena Besussi, University College London, UK
Ben Hughes, University College London, UK

Session Description:

This session stream wants to explore co-governance as a missing dimension of neighbourhood-level development within wider debates on the co-production and co-delivery of place-based policies and welfare services in the context of regional development, state restructuring and socio-spatial inequality.

In the British context, practices of place-based co-governance have emerged out of and in response to a combined context of austerity, pandemic, and new forms of experimental municipalism (Thompson and Lorne, 2023). These tensions have transformed the landscape of governance and resources, including financial resources, within which the community and voluntary sectors and the non-governmental sector operate to supplement fragile state-provided welfare services and to empower place-based economic development.

Drawing on Jessop’s (2016) shifting governance modes between hierarchy, market and solidarity, and DeVerteuil’s (2020) typologies of VCSE–state relations, we see community and voluntary organisations increasingly positioned as intermediaries without clear authority, accountability or resourcing.

Rather than considering co-governance as a fixed model, the stream invites theoretical, methodological, or empirical contributions that explore its possible roles, risks and limits within local and regional development systems. Key questions include how neighbourhood-scale co-governance might support more inclusive regional economic development, how it relates to representative democracy, and how sustainable governance arrangements can be built without becoming technocratic or exclusionary.

The stream aims to encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue on how the “missing middle” of neighbourhood governance shapes, and constrains, contemporary regional development trajectories.

References

• DeVerteuil, G., Power, A. and Trudeau, D. (2020) ‘The Relational Geographies of the Voluntary Sector: Disentangling the Ballast of Strangers’. Progress in Human Geography, 44(5)
• Jessop, B. (2020) Putting civil society in its place: Governance, metagovernance and subjectivity. The British Journal of Sociology, 71(1)
• Thompson, M. and Lorne, C. (2023) Designing a New Civic Economy? On the Emergence and Contradictions of Participatory Experimental Urbanism. Antipode 55.6, 1919–42.

Session Organiser(s):
Marcin Dąbrowski, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Martin Ferry, University of Strathclyde, UK
Stefan Kah, University of Strathclyde, UK
Odilia van der Valk, European Policies Research Centre – Delft, The Netherlands

Session Description:

Building on policy debates on the place-based approach and functional lens on regional development policy spatial planning, this special session will explore the performance of territorial instruments as part of EU Cohesion Policy and national regional policies, as well as the synergies and tensions between the two. The place-based approach was heralded as a response to the need to deliver policies that tap better into the specific assets and development challenges of different territories in order to reduce territorial disparities. It has been the subject of a lively scholarly debate and experimentation in policy practice. The approach entails three interconnected elements: (1) targeting local needs and challenges through place-tailored interventions; (2) supporting integrated functional, territorial strategies across administrative boundaries as opposed to administratively and sectorally fragmented strategies; and (3) fostering multi-level governance and engagement of territorial stakeholders in the shaping and implementation of policy.

Since 2013, EU Cohesion Policy has sought to promote a place-based approach chiefly through the requirement to spend a minimum of European Structural and Investment Fund resources on Sustainable Urban Development. Initially 5%, later increased to 8%, of European Regional Development Fund allocations were required to invest in encouraging a more urban focus, and through a spectrum of territorial instruments that explicitly targeted specific territories. For example, the Integrated Territorial Investment instrument entails providing funding to support strategies developed for functional urban areas or polycentric areas sharing specific geographic or economic features, while the Community-led Local Development tool seeks to support local partnerships within rural areas or cities, bringing together diverse local stakeholders around a shared development strategy. Current debates on Cohesion Policy reform are critical moments for deciding whether such place-based instruments will continue to empower territories or are recentralised in ways that weaken local ownership and the territorial dimension. Proposals linked to the next EU Multiannual Financial Framework after 2027 envisage the possible consolidation of support into a single, national framework delivered through national and regional partnership plans. The extent to which diverse territorial challenges will continue to be recognised is unclear and the continuation and influence of territorial instruments would likely depend on the extent to which Member States choose to maintain a strong focus on place-based, geographically targeted transition measures.

In parallel, and sometimes in connection to these EU level trends, within national regional development policies and spatial planning one could also observe a shift towards a more integrated approach seeking to coordinate the impacts of sectoral policies in space and a focus on functional linkages within territories.

Examples of those include (1) NOVEX policy in the Netherlands, designating a plethora of functionally delimited regions for which spatial visions and strategies are developed in partnership between regional stakeholders; (2) the Areas of Strategic Intervention (OSI) in Poland in which both the national government and regional authorities designate functional territories with the aim to steer funding and develop a more territorial approach to channelling EU funding; or (3) the National Strategy for Inner Areas in Italy, where intermunicipal partnerships were set up within peripheral areas to address specific development traps.

The session will provide a platform to discuss insights from research on territorial instruments, their achievements and future applications. While we expect most contributions to cover European contexts, we very much welcome submissions exploring territorial instruments from countries from across the world to spur a debate on comparisons and possible lesson drawing.

The presentations are expected to cover:
– Quantitative and qualitative research on the performance of territorial instruments as vehicles for place based approach;
– Comparative studies;
– Studies exploring the interface between territorial instruments within national or regional policy with those promoted through EU Cohesion Policy;
– Crossfertilisation between territorial instruments and spatial planning;
– Conceptual reflections and position papers on the future of the place based approach.

A number of contributions will be already offered by the co-organisers of the session, providing a core for the session; however, we also remain open to additional submissions.

Keywords: Place-based approach, Territorial instruments, EU Cohesion Policy, Functional areas, Multi-level governance

Session Organiser(s):
Will Eadson, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Maximilian Benner, University of Vienna, Austria
Giuseppe Calignano, University of Bologna, Italy
Michaela Trippl, University of Vienna, Austria

Session Description:

Decarbonising industry is an imperative for meeting climate action goals. As increasing attention has been paid to this need and resulting actions, regional dimensions of green industrial change have come to the fore (Trippl et al, 2020). This has led to growing interest in ‘just transitions’ for industrial regions (e.g., Weller et al., 2024; Hearne et al., 2025; Lai et al., 2025). For instance, research combining a just transition perspective with insights from regional industrial path development has focused, inter alia, on managing industrial decline in regions (Trippl et al., 2026) and on the politics involved at the regional scale (Eadson & De Leeuw, 2025). This emerging work speaks to mounting voices in economic geography and regional science calling for more attention to the role of power, politics, contestation, and capabilities in shaping regional transition processes (Eadson & Van Veelen, 2023; Calignano & Nilsen, 2024; Jolly et al., 2025). Here politics is understood as taking a variety of forms, entangled with material and cultural processes, not limited to institutional domains.

At the same time, regions coping with decarbonisation pressures are embedded in unequal power relations (Benner et al., 2026), for example, towards the national state (Weller & Beer, 2023) or multinational corporations (Snell, 2018; Beer et al., 2024) which severely constrain the scope for regional actions in shaping the course of just transitions and leave pre-existing injustices in place or create new ones in transition processes. Within regions, unequal power between actor groups (re)produce further injustices, not least through tensions between different forms of agency, including change agency aimed at transforming regional paths (Grillitsch & Sotarauta, 2020), reproductive agency seeking to stabilise existing arrangements (Bækkelund, 2021), and forms of denied agency that systematically marginalise certain actors and futures (Eadson & Van Veelen, 2023; Jolly et al., 2025).

For these reasons, paying attention to unequal power relations at the regional scale and in a multiscalar perspective can sharpen the focus on both old “legacy injustices” and new “transformation injustices” (Hermwille et al., 2025).Crucially, these issues raise overarching questions about who gains and who loses when regional transitions become even less manageable and predictable, how distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice can be safeguarded, and how regions can manage just regional industrial transitions.

For this session we invite contributions from a range of geographic and industrial contexts to deepen our collective understanding of these dynamics, in order to charter ways forward for green industrial transitions that foreground justice, inclusion and equity.

References:
Bækkelund, N.G. (2021). Change agency and reproductive agency in the course of industrial path evolution. Regional Studies, 55, 757-768.
Beer, A., Weller, S., Dinmore, H., Ratcliffe, J., Onur, I., Bailey, D., Barnes, T., Irving, J., Horne, S., Atienza, J., Sotarauta, M. (2024). Just transitions in the Australian automotive sector? Contemporary Social Science, 19, 178-198.
Benner, M., Grünenwald, V., Kastrup, J. (2026). The geography of just transitions: a place-based framework. Regional Studies, 60, 2606364.
Calignano, G., Nilsen, T. (2024). Regional development is not a dinner party: a research agenda on power relations and the use of language in regional development studies. GeoJournal, 89, 74.
Eadson, W., De Leeuw, G. (2025). Path development politics: contesting regional hydrogen economies in Northern Europe. Geoforum, 167, 104470.
Eadson, W., Van Veelen, B. (2023). Green and just regional path development. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 10, 218-233.
Grillitsch, M., Sotarauta, M. (2020). Trinity of change agency, regional development paths and opportunity spaces. Progress in Human Geography, 44, 704-723.
Hearne, D., Bailey, D., De Ruyter, A. (2025): Regions and just transitions: worker perspectives on electrification in two automotive regions. Regional Studies, 59, 2488205.
Hermwille, L., Brisbois, M.C., Hiteva, R., Yazar, M., Nacke, L., Jewell, J., Sovacool, B.K., Cantoni, R., Oei, R.Y., Walk, P., Haarstad, H., Schulze-Steinen, M., Vrontisi, Z., Fragkos, P., Charalampidis, I., Kesküla, E., Anger-Kraavi, A. (2025). Compounding injustices can impede a just energy transition. Nature Energy, 10, 915-918.
Jolly, S., Asheim, B., Benner, M., Calignano, G., Eadson, W., Gong, H., Nilsen, T. (2025). Future-oriented green and just regional industrial path development: towards a critical examination. Progress in Economic Geography, 3, 100049.
Lai, H.L., Devine-Wright, P., Hamilton, J., Mander, S., Clery, D., Rattle, I., Martin, A., Ryder, S., Taylor, P. (2025). A place-based, just transition framework can guide industrial decarbonisation with a social licence. Energy Research & Social Science, 121, 103967.
Snell, D. (2018). ‘Just transition’? Conceptual challenges meet stark reality in a ‘transitioning’ coal region in Australia. Globalizations, 15, 550-564.
Trippl, M., Baumgartinger-Seiringer, S., Frangenheim, A., Isaksen, A., Rypestøl, J.O. (2020). Unravelling green regional industrial path development: regional preconditions, asset modification and agency. Geoforum, 111, 189-197.
Trippl. M., Benner, M., Kastrup, J. (2026). Breaking out of old paths? Towards a research agenda on path decline. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, doi:10.1093/cjres/rsaf045.
Weller, S., Beer, A. (2023). State structures and the limits of agency: governing the transformation from coal in Australia, Regional Studies, 57, 1415-1427.
Weller, S., Beer, A., Porter, J. (2024). Place-based just transition: domains, components and costs. Contemporary Social Science, 19, 355-374.

Session Organiser(s):
Oliver Harman, London School of Economics, UK
Riccardo Crescenzi, London School of Economics, UK
Carolin Hulke, London School of Economics, UK

Session Description:

The green transition is fundamentally redrawing the economic geography of global production. As decarbonisation pressures intensify and industrial policies proliferate, the spatial organisation of global value chains are being renegotiated. Both historic natural capital and emerging green capital are reviving the importance of location factors often considered secondary in the knowledge economy. Regions find themselves at the centre of these shifts: as sites of resource extraction, nodes of green manufacturing, and laboratories for sustainable innovation. Yet how these dynamics play out across different territorial contexts and with what implications for upgrading, governance, and equity remains insufficiently understood.

This special session, convened by the RSA Green Global Value Chains for Sustainable Regional Development Research Network, invites contributions examining the regional dimensions of green value chain restructuring. By interrogating the interplay between global value chain dynamics and regional development trajectories, the session contributes to emerging debates on whether—and for whom—the green transition offers pathways to sustainable prosperity. It positions regions not merely as passive recipients of global forces, but as arenas where the contested politics of sustainability, industrial strategy, and territorial development are actively negotiated.

Themes and Questions of Interest:
• How do green industrial policies reshape the geography of global value chains, and with what consequences for regional economies?
• What role does regional knowledge bases play in enabling circular economy transitions?
• How do lead firm governance structures in green industries shape spatial organisation?
• What upgrading opportunities and constraints do resource-rich regions face within green value chains, and how sustainable are these pathways?
• How can GVC frameworks be adapted to better capture the multi-scalar governance of green transitions?

Session Organiser(s):
Sumit Kumar, Manipal University, Jaipur, India
Siddharth Shukla, Manipal University, Jaipur, India
Kashmira Khanam, Central University of Haryana, India
Diganta Roy, Presidency University, Bangalore, India

Session Description:

In an era marked by geopolitical volatility, shifting global power balances, and intersecting crises of climate, economics, and security, regions have emerged as pivotal arenas for both policy innovation and contestation. The South Asian subcontinent—comprising diverse economies, overlapping security complexes, and deep socio-spatial inequalities—epitomizes the multiple challenges and opportunities facing regional development in the Global South. Traditional notions of regional growth, rooted in economic integration and infrastructure connectivity, are being reconfigured by geopolitical uncertainty, strategic rivalries, and adaptive governance mechanisms. This panel seeks to interrogate how spatial development paradigms in South Asia are influenced by geopolitical dynamics—from great-power competition to intra-regional cooperation—and how these forces shape divergent development trajectories.

Anchored in comparative regional studies and informed by critical geopolitical analysis, the session will foreground empirical and theoretical insights into issues such as policy responses to external shocks, resilience strategies in cross-border economic zones, and the interplay of national security imperatives with sub-national development priorities. By centring South Asia within broader debates on the Global South, this panel contributes to rethinking regional development frameworks that account for uncertainty, agency, and complex interdependence in contested spatial contexts.

Session Organiser(s):
Estelle Evrard, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Lucy Natarajan University College London, UK

Session Description:

In recent years, post-industrial regions in Europe and the US have faced distinct challenges exacerbated by social disenfranchisement and the pressures of the ongoing green transition. Their communities, though marked by a sense of dislocation and vulnerability also possess a rich industrial culture characterised by values, tacit knowledges, skills, and stories. They also often express a strong attachment to place, producing local solidarities and a duty to contribute to sustain their place.

While research currently explores how regional decision makers can support a green transition for post-industrial regions, research on the contribution made by grassroots, civil society organisation and residents remains in its infancy, especially when it comes to considering the situation of these so-called left-behind places.

We know however that social acceptance of green energy cannot be reduced to technical performance or environmental benefits alone. Issues of trust, justice, participation, governance, territorial identity, and power relations are central to understanding success and failure of renewal energy projects on the ground. Communities should play an active role in shaping trajectories of the energy transition, thus effectively appropriating energy projects.

Importantly, a contemporary line of research has demonstrated that social connections and cultural participation is paramount in promoting individual well-being and community resilience. Those who engage in cultural activities exhibit enhanced civic behavior, empathy, and social cohesion, and conversely the absence of such connections can lead to feelings of isolation and disconnection.

In light of this critical challenge for regional studies, the aim of this session is to discuss: To what extent can creative practice, participatory approaches, and initiatives fostering belonging and community engagement contribute to the green transition in post-industrial regions?

We seek to explore how cultural practices, particularly those with a social and green orientation, might act as catalysts for social cohesion and civic engagement in left behind places, including those post-industrial neighbourhoods across Europe and others, struggling to navigate the impacts of economic shifts and environmental imperatives.

Such localities are more impacted by the green transition than others, we seek to unpack how the historical narratives familiar to their communities are being reshaped in light of material impacts of change, especially relationships between places and climate. Further, we call attention to the new social histories emerging, which reflect the lived experiences of often-overlooked groups, particularly women and minorities. The role of the built environment plays a critical part in this re-narration, offering a canvas for diverse everyday activities that can reconstruct places and reshape social connections. These creative practices not only help in crafting new green narratives but also empower communities to reconnect with democratic governance structures.

We welcome papers that address the following themes:

• Cultural Participation and belonging: Examinations of the conditions that enable cultural participation and contribute to the social fabric in post-industrial contexts
• Epistemological framings of participation and creative practice in “left-behind” places
 research on the knowledges and methodological approaches aligned to the socio-cultural work of remaking places
• Experience of community creative practice contributing to green transition
 studies of the embodied and lived dimensions of localities, in the era of climate emergency and industrial re-orientation
• Community Benefits and Marginalized Groups: Investigations of the benefits and limits of cultural participation, particularly for individuals and groups who feel marginalized or “left behind” in post-industrial regions
• Variables Influencing Participation: work related to contextual variables, encompassing socio-demographic characteristics, local infrastructure, digital literacy, community innovation capacity, and overall social dynamics that may influence cultural engagement and its outcomes
• Policies Sustaining Social Fabric: Evidence of methods or strategies fostering the social fabric of communities while supporting their green transition.

We are happy to answer any questions and looking forward to seeing you in Gothenburg! Estelle Evrard estelle.evrard@uni.lu | Lucy Natarajan lucy.natarajan@ucl.ac.uk

Indicative list of references

• Bole, D. (2021). ‘What is industrial culture anyway?’ Theoretical framing of the concept in economic geography. Geography Compass, e12595. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12595
• Bourdin et al (2026): 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗥𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘀 (eds), Edward Elgar Publishing
• European Commission (2022): Blueprint for the Development of Transition Pathways for Industrial Ecosystems. Brussels: European Commission
• European Commission (2023): Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture and ECORYS, Culture and democracy, the evidence – How citizens’ participation in cultural activities enhances civic engagement, democracy and social cohesion – Lessons from international research, Publications Office of the European Union, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2766/39199
• Grillitsch, M., & Hansen, T. (2019). Green industry development in different types of regions. European Planning Studies, 27(11), 2163–2183. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1648385
• Rodríguez-Pose, A.; Bartalucci, F. (2024): The green transition and its potential territorial discontents, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Volume 17, Issue 2, July 2024, Pages 339–358, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsad039
• Tomaney, J., Blackman, M.; Natarajan, L.; Panayotopoulos-Tsiros, D.; Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, F.; Taylor, M. (2024): Social Infrastructure and ‘Left-behind Places.’ Regional Studies 58 (6): 1237–50. doi:10.1080/00343404.2023.2224828

Session Organiser(s):
Duygu Buyukyazici, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Carlo Corradini, University of Reading, UK
David Morris, Nottingham University, UK

Session Description:

Skills are increasingly recognised as a core regional capability shaping innovation, productivity, labour market dynamics and regional transitions. Yet, despite strong policy interest in skills for green, digital and inclusive growth, regional research has long relied on narrow proxies—such as educational attainment or occupational structure—limiting our understanding of how skills are formed, deployed and transformed across places. Recent advances in data, methods and theory now allow scholars to conceptualise skills as multidimensional, place-specific capabilities embedded in regional labour markets, production systems and institutional settings.

This Special Session invites contributions that advance conceptual, empirical and policy-oriented perspectives on skills as regional capabilities. We particularly welcome papers that move beyond education-based measures to examine skills using occupational, task-based or skill-level data, and that link these insights to regional development, industrial change and policy design. The session aims to bridge analytical work on regional skills with pressing policy debates on skills formation, mismatch, mobility and transitions, highlighting how skills policies can be designed and governed in a place-sensitive manner.
Contributions may address, but are not limited to: skills and regional diversification; skills relatedness and industrial transitions; green and digital skills; skill mismatch and shortages across regions; vocational education and training systems; skills and labour mobility; remote work and new labour spaces; low-skill traps and inclusive growth; and regional, national or supranational skills policies. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are welcome, as are comparative and Global South perspectives.

The session is intended to contribute to ongoing debates in Regional Studies, and to provide a platform for papers suitable for a future special issue on Regional Studies.

Session Organiser(s):
Abigail Taylor, City-REDI, University of Birmingham, UK

Session Description:

Universities are increasingly expected to demonstrate their value to society by engaging with local partners, supporting inclusive growth, and ensuring research informs real-world decision-making. As higher education globally faces increasing financial pressures, political scrutiny, and shifting public expectations, understanding how to build effective, sustainable collaboration structures to support regional development has become a strategic priority.

Although a substantial body of literature explores universities’ civic roles, knowledge exchange processes, and contributions to regional development, important gaps remain around the organisational structures and institutional conditions that enable the development and continuation of effective, long-term collaboration with local partners.

The aim of this Special Session is to bring together learning from different countries and contexts, to better explore the organisational, theoretical, and practical dimensions of university–policy engagement supporting regional growth, with a particular focus on university-based policy institutes and their role in shaping place-based strategies. Contributions may draw on empirical research, conceptual work, or practitioner experience.

To that end, we welcome submissions that can cover a number of themes as they relate to how research institutes collaborate with local partners for the benefits of their regions. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
• Organisational development, governance, and leadership in university-based policy institutes promoting regions
• Funding models, staffing structures, and talent development for long-term stability
• Typologies and maturity models for university-based policy institutes
• Universities’ convening power and their role in place strategy development and delivery
• Comparative perspectives on creating /mobilising knowledge to benefit universities and their regions.

Session Organiser(s):
Kai-Ti Wu, European Citizen Science Association, Germany
Simona Epasto, University of Macerata, Italy
Franziska Stressmann, European Citizen Science Association, Germany
Carolina Doran, European Citizen Science Association, Germany
Alberto Anticoli, European Citizen Science Association, Germany

Session Description:

Across Europe and beyond, citizen science and participatory research are increasingly recognised as critical components of knowledge production, democratic innovation, and evidence-based policymaking. At the same time, regions and territories are confronted with complex governance challenges that cut across administrative scales, policy domains, and institutional boundaries. These dynamics raise pressing questions about how participatory research infrastructures can be coordinated, sustained, and meaningfully embedded within regional, national, and European research and policy ecosystems.

While numerous citizen science initiatives have emerged in recent years, many remain dependent on short-term project funding and fragmented governance arrangements. Ensuring their long-term institutional sustainability requires new models of coordination that align regional policy frameworks, public institutions, and research infrastructure ecosystems. Moreover, as digital platforms, artificial intelligence, and data-driven approaches become increasingly central to participatory research, questions of data ethics, AI governance, and open science practices gain renewed urgency.

This session positions citizen science at the intersection of regional studies, governance research, and research infrastructure design. It seeks to explore how participatory and collaborative approaches can integrate territorial knowledge with digital data systems, while strengthening policy interfaces and impact pathways. By bringing together theoretical perspectives and practical experiences, the session aims to advance a more nuanced understanding of how participation, trust, and inclusion are shaped by diverse territorial contexts.

We invite theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Governance models for coordinating citizen science and participatory research infrastructures across local, regional, national, and European levels.
• Institutional sustainability beyond short-term project funding, including the role of regional policy frameworks, public institutions, and research infrastructure ecosystems.
• Collaborative and participatory approaches that integrate territorial knowledge with digital data systems, including questions of AI governance, data ethics, and open science.
• Policy interfaces and impact pathways, examining how citizen-generated data and participatory research outputs inform regional policymaking and public decision-making.
• Cross-disciplinary and cross-regional learning, highlighting how different territorial contexts shape participation, trust, and inclusion in research infrastructures.Overall, the session aims to foster dialogue between theory and practice, and between regional studies and citizen science communities, with a particular focus on governance, sustainability, and impact.Target Audience
  The session is relevant to scholars of regional governance and development, political and economic geographers, policy researchers, and social scientists working on participation and innovation. It will also be of interest to research infrastructure designers, citizen science practitioners, and representatives from policymaking, funding bodies, and public institutions concerned with participatory research, data governance, and regional innovation.

Session Organiser(s):
Sergio Palomeque, University of the Republic, Uruguay
Andrea Belmartino, University of Sassari, Italy
Pablo Galaso, University of the Republic, Uruguay

Session Description:

This special session aims to promote discussion on regional development in South America, focused on knowledge flows and innovation capabilities. Knowledge capabilities are unevenly distributed within national and subnational territories in South America, a region characterized by a peripheral but significant role in the global production of  knowledge. These countries have a rich background of research in this field, associated with urban development, production agglomerations, emigration fluxes, and the role of universities, among others. It is highly relevant to articulate research activities aiming to advance our understanding of the regional development processes which promote knowledge creation and improve access to global knowledge flows.

Session Organiser(s):
Ida Musiałkowska, Poznan University of Economics and Business, Poland
Sonia De Gregorio Hurtado, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
#CPnet members
RSA Europe

Session Description:

This special session by the Research Network on Cohesion Policy and RSA Europe examines the evolving landscape of EU Cohesion Policy as it transitions between financial perspectives, with particular focus on evaluating the 2021-2027 programming period and anticipating the strategic directions for the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) 2028-2034. As the European Union faces unprecedented economic, social, and environmental challenges, Cohesion Policy finds itself at a critical juncture where its fundamental principles, implementation mechanisms, and strategic alignment with broader EU objectives require careful reassessment.

The session brings together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to critically analyse how Cohesion Policy is addressing contemporary regional disparities while simultaneously contributing to the EU’s twin transition agenda and enhanced competitiveness goals. With the next financial framework on the horizon, this session provides a timely platform for evidence-based discussion on policy effectiveness, coordination mechanisms, and future reform pathways.

Key Themes Proposed:

– Evaluation of the 2021-2027 Programming Period
As the current programming period reaches its midpoint, initial assessments reveal both achievements and persistent challenges in Cohesion Policy implementation. This theme invites contributions examining the effectiveness of policy instruments, absorption rates across member states and regions, the impact of simplified cost options and reduced administrative burden, and the real outcomes of interventions in addressing territorial disparities. Papers may explore how the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent recovery measures (including REACT-EU and the Recovery and Resilience Facility) have influenced Cohesion Policy delivery and whether temporary flexibilities should become permanent features.

– Policy Coherence and Integration with Other EU Policies
Cohesion Policy does not operate in isolation but intersects with numerous EU policy domains including the Common Agricultural Policy, industrial policy, research and innovation frameworks (Horizon Europe), environmental regulations, and social policy instruments. This theme explores the synergies and tensions arising from these interactions, examining how different funding streams can be better coordinated to avoid duplication and maximize territorial impact. Contributions may address the governance challenges of multi-level, multi-fund programming, the role of partnership principles in ensuring policy coherence, and experiences with integrated territorial investments and other place-based approaches.

– Cohesion Policy and European Competitiveness
The relationship between regional development and overall European competitiveness has gained renewed prominence amid concerns about the EU’s position in global markets and technological innovation races. This theme examines how Cohesion Policy contributes to strengthening the EU’s competitive position while maintaining its redistributive and convergence objectives. Papers may analyse the balance between excellence-based and equity-based funding allocation, the role of smart specialisation strategies in building regional competitive advantages, and the potential trade-offs between concentration of resources in innovation hubs versus broader territorial dispersion. The theme also welcomes contributions on how Cohesion Policy can support the Draghi Report recommendations on competitiveness while preserving its core mission of reducing disparities.

– The Twin Transition: Green and Digital Transformation
The twin transition toward climate neutrality and digital transformation represents both a framework for Cohesion Policy interventions and a source of new regional challenges. This theme explores how Cohesion Policy supports regions in navigating these transformations, with particular attention to just transition mechanisms for carbon-intensive regions, digital infrastructure development in peripheral areas, and the capacity building needed for regions to implement green and digital projects effectively. Contributions may examine the territorial dimensions of the European Green Deal, the distribution of twin transition opportunities and risks across different regional typologies, and the long-term structural changes these transitions may trigger in regional economies.

– Looking Ahead: The MFF 2028-2034 and Future Directions
As discussions about the next Multiannual Financial Framework intensify, this theme invites forward-looking contributions on the future architecture of Cohesion Policy. Topics may include the appropriate level and distribution of Cohesion Policy funding, potential reforms to allocation criteria and eligibility rules, the balance between thematic concentration and territorial flexibility, and innovative delivery mechanisms that could enhance policy effectiveness. Papers may also address how Cohesion Policy should respond to emerging challenges, such as demographic change, migration patterns, geopolitical instability, and evolving territorial inequality. Comparative perspectives on regional development approaches from outside the EU are particularly welcome.