Beyond land use: what does it take to evaluate the territorial implications of European policies

As pointed out by the OECD regional outlooks - since 2011, the number of socioeconomic trends requiring a better integration of the subnational spatial dimension into broader strategies or policies has been increasing. Moving away from only looking at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and productivity growth, the recent focus is increasingly on the level of development and wellbeing (current and potential) associated with regions and cities. Well‐being is an intrinsically local concept (OECD, 2014) and multi‐faceted in nature: it is determined not only by available income, but also by the quality of the surrounding natural and social environment (measured by, for example, air pollution levels, life expectancy and safety). The function given to land is both influenced by and impacts greatly on a multitude of factors, economic, social, environmental and political alike. Analysing the situation with a territorial approach helps to break down and understand these complex interactions, so capturing both the specific characteristics of a spatial context, and its relations with other contexts of the same geographical level (e.g. regions) or at higher aggregation levels (e.g. countries). In such a way, local policies can be designed which take into account and target the specificities of a territory, whilst keeping in mind the broader context. As support activities to the practices of policy definition and evaluation, “territorial approaches” identify a large family of methods, more or less sophisticated, whose main strength is the ability to analyse a wide range of thematic areas across different spatial scales. These are the basic requirements for a tool to effectively support policies that aim at increasing the well‐being of regions and cities. As such, spatially explicit landuse models proved themselves as useful tools to inform policies (Koomen & Borsboom‐van Beurden 2011). This is confirmed in the continuous effort of the EC‐DG JRC to develop the LUISA territorial modelling platform.

LAVALLE Carlo;  BARANZELLI Claudia;  PINTO NUNES NOGUEIRA DIOGO Vasco;  VANDECASTEELE Ine;  JACOBS Christiaan;  KOMPIL Mert;  BATISTA E SILVA Filipe; 

2018-06-22

ERSA Congress Proceedings - RePEc database

JRC107130