Italian Regional Science Association (AISRe)
28th Annual Scientific Conference
Bolzano, 27-28 September 2007
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Regional Development
in the European Union
Objectives, strategies, policies
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The regional question is being profoundly transformed by various factors in Europe. Firstly, the enlargement process has changed the geography – and hierarchy – of regional disparities in the European Union’s space, while also significantly increasing the importance of trans-national macro-regions. Secondly, new ways of conceptualising the European territory are being proposed in order to capture macro-regional patterns of development and local trajectories of economic growth and decline. Thirdly, the internationalisation (or globalisation) of the European economy is having – and will continue to have – profoundly different regional impacts.
The social preference function of the European Union is also changing. The aims of environmental sustainability and territorial cohesion have become of paramount importance in Europe, in particular against the background of climate change and growing regional disparities due to the concentration of populations in large cities and in their metropolitan areas. A shift to a new policy framework is warranted and requires a change of the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the EU’s regional policy.
The past decade has seen a widespread endeavour to understand the changing nature of the regional question in Europe. A number of projects in the INTERREG III Programme and in the ESPON Programme have addressed this question, which is of crucial importance for the future of the European Project. The scientific community too has devoted much attention to the changing regional landscape of Europe.
Against this background, the 28th Annual Scientific Conference of the Italian Regional Science Association (Bolzano, 27-28 September) intends to contribute to on-going research on Europe’s regional dynamics and, also, to identification of new framework for the EU’s regional policy.
Plenary Sessions:
1° Plenary Session: “Trajectories of Regional Development in Europe”
2° Plenary Session: “Macro-regions as Governance Level in the European Union”
(or: “The ESPON Programme and its Contribution to Understanding of the EU Regional Organisation”)
Parallel Sessions
More than 50 parallel sessions will be organised to offer the scientific community opportunities to present research results in the broad field of regional sciences.
Some parallel sessions will be devoted to the main theme of the Conference. Most parallel sessions will be held in Italian, some of them in English and, possibly, one or two in German.
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