TREnD Project – Open Panel Discussion New Metropolitan Perspective Symposium 2020
Reggio Calabria, IT – 26 May 2020
TREnD International Open Panel Discussion – New Metropolitan Perspectives 2020 – Opening Event
Equity in Diversity – inclusion in complexity: Knowledge complexity, inclusiveness and sustainability: Towards a transition agenda for Cohesion Policy
How to combine Smart, Inclusive and Green Growth. Towards a Transition Agenda for Cohesion Policy
Ron Boschma, Utrecht University
Rethinking Europe: challenges and transformations
Sergio Fabbrini, LUISS University, Harvard University – Kennedy School of Government
The debate: Technological resilience and inequalities dynamics, Can knowledge complexity generate inequalities? New trends for peripheral areas
Since the 1980s, the European Union has pursued the overall objective to strengthen the economic and social cohesion to reduce disparities among more and less developed regions through the Cohesion Policy. The introduction of Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) in the Cohesion Policy agenda for the programming period 2014-2020 was aimed at the reduction of disparities by exploiting local assets and potentials through a strongly-oriented research and innovation agenda in line with Europe Strategy 2020. However, inequalities have become a growing phenomenon affecting advanced and lagging regions. According to a recent study on regional inequalities in Europe, delivered by European Parliamentary Research Service, “while aggregate disparities between the Member States are decreasing, there seems to be a growing spatial disconnect, with some regions growing dynamically and others stagnating or falling behind”. Moreover, the presence of the so-called “inner peripheries” in almost all European countries claims for a more inclusive and sustainable approach in the “transitional” phase towards the 2021-2027 Cohesion Policy. There is a common agreement that the rising of inequalities is urged mainly by technological change, disruption of organized labor and globalization, with the decline of the middle class and lower taxes on capital. The inequalities generated by knowledge and innovation dynamics, following the global market powers, are bringing both advanced and less developed areas to revise their development strategies improving their ability to respond to the shocks they are more frequently facing. Such a resilience-based process rests on the identification of the key vulnerability factors, to manage the transition phase claimed for more inclusive and sustainable development of EU regions.
The TREnD project proposes an integrated approach based on an evolutionary perspective in recognizing that the dynamic process, thanks to innovation and knowledge, defines different equilibrium paths that may be rather explained by the territorial response. The TREnD Project main objective is to stimulate the regional diversification to be seen more as a co-creation of solutions and concepts on development problems through. enhancing the resilient capacity of regions; applying a transitional approach to tailored placed-based innovation policies. The approach moves from the general question of how strengthening the regional capabilities in triggering, implementing and managing Transition strategies towards driving “resilience-building” processes.
Keynotes Bio
Ron Boschma – Utrecht University
Ron Boschma is Full Professor in Regional Economics at the Department of Human Geography and Planning at the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. He is also Professor 2 at UiS Business School of Stavanger University, Norway since 2017. In the period 2013-2015, Boschma has been director of the Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE) at Lund University. Boschma has published in international journals on Evolutionary Economic Geography, the spatial evolution of industries, geography of innovation, regional resilience, the structure and evolution of spatial networks, agglomeration externalities, and regional diversification. He has been one of the founders of Evolutionary Economic Geography, a new and expanding stream in Economic Geography. Boschma is member of Scientific Advisory group for European Commission DG Urban and Regional Policy, 2018-2020, member of the Board of the International Regional Studies Association since 2015, and he has been member of the Research, Innovation and Science Experts (RISE) High-Level Advisory Body to European Commissioner Carlos Moedas in the period 2015-2016. Boschma was ranked by Thomson Reuters among the top 1% of cited researchers worldwide in all scientific fields in 2014-2019.
Sergio Fabbrini – LUISS University, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government
Sergio Fabbrini is currently Professor of Political Science and International Relations and Dean of the Political Science Department at the Luiss Guido Carli in Rome. He is currently the Pirre Keller Visiting Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He founded and directed the Luiss School of Government from 2009 to 2018. He served as Director of the Trento School of International Studies in the period 2006-2009 and Editor of the “Italian Journal of Political Science” in the period 2004-2009, the first Editor after Giovanni Sartori who founded it. He was Recurrent Visiting Professor of Comparative and International Politics at the Department of Political Science and Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California at Berkeley; Jemolo Fellow at the Nuffield College, Oxford University; Jean Monnet Chair Professor at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, European University Institute in Florence and Visiting Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute in Florence; Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Government, Harvard University. He lectured, among others, in Canada (Carlton University), in Mexico (El Colegio de México, Mexico City), in Argentina (Universitad de Buenos Aires and Universitad Abierta Interamericana), in Ecuador (Quito Simon Bolivar University), in China (Nanjing University), in Japan (Osaka University, Tokyo Imperial University and Sapporo University), in Thailand (Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok), in the Philippines (University of Philippines-Diliman, Manila) and in several European universities. He won the 2011 “Capalbio Prize for Europe”, the 2009 “Filippo Burzio Prize for the Political Sciences” and the 2006 “Amalfi European Prize for the Social Sciences”. He was member of the Steering Committee of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on European Union. He published ninenteen books, two co-authored books and twenty edited or co-edited books or journals’ special issues, and several hundred scientific articles and essays in seven languages in the most important peer-reviewed international journals. His publications in English include: Europe’s Future: Decoupling and Reforming, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019; Which European Union? Europe After the Euro Crisis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015;Compound Democracies: Why the United States and Europe Are Becoming Similar, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010 (second and revised edition); America and Its Critics: Vices and Virtues of the Democratic Hyperpower, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2008; Italy in the European Union. Redefining National Interest in a Compound Polity (with Simona Piattoni, eds.), Lanham, Md, Rowman and Littlefield, 2007; The United States Contested. American Unilateralism and European Dissent (ed.), London, Routledge, 2006; Federalism and Democracy in the European Union and the United States. Exploring Post-National Governance (ed.), London, Routledge, 2005; Italy Between Europeanization and Domestic Politics (with V. Della Sala, eds), New York, N.Y. Oxford, Berghahn, 2004. He is political editor for the Italian financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore. He received the 2017 Spinelli Prize for his editorials.
TREnD Project – New Metropolitan Perspective Symposium 2020
The Symposium will take place in Reggio Calabria (Italy) from 26 to 28 May, 2020.
The 4th edition of the International Symposium “New Metropolitan Perspectives” faces the challenge of local development’s innovation dynamics and its complexity putting humankind at the centre of the scientific debate, towards reclaiming that “man is the measure of all things”.
In partnership with Rhegion United Nations 2020-2030. Territories and cities, material and immaterial heritage, resilience and transformations in the perspective of the 17 Sustainable Development UN Goals.
The symposium is jointly promoted by the LaborEst and the CLUDsLab Laboratories of the PAU Department, Università Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Italy, in partnership with a qualified international network of academic institutions and scientific societies.
It is part of the TREnD (Transition with Resilience for Evolutionary Economic Development) Research Project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions – RISE 2018.
Accepted papers will be published in Smart Innovation, System and Technologies (2190-3018) by SPRINGER. The books of this series are submitted to SCOPUS, EI-Compendex and Springerlink.
Organizing Committee
CLUDsLab – Research and Territory: PAU Department Seminar on Laboratories’ Research Activities
Reggio Calabria, IT -27 November 2019
Research and Territory: PAU Department Seminar on Laboratories’ Research Activities
Professor Carmelina Bevilacqua, Director of the CLUDsLab, presented the activities of the Laboratory together with Pasquale Pizzimenti, Marie Curie Research Fellow.
https://www.unirc.it/comunicazione/articoli/21944/27-novembre-ricerca-e-territorio-seminario-sullattivita-di-ricerca-dei-laboratori-del-dipartimento-pau
TREnD Project – First Assessment Meeting
October, 2019 – Boston (MA)
The TREnd First Assessment Meeting took place in Boston the 8th and 9th of October as scheduled after the Kick-Off meeting of the Project in Reggio Calabria. According with the Agenda the meeting was articulated in a two days session. The first day session centered on the research activities to carry on during the 1st WP in Boston and the second day session centered on the projects’ activities operative implementation and management aspects.
The first day session focused on the need to define an operative framework in order to facilitate the research activities to conduct in Boston by all the partners during the 1st WP of the TREnD Project.
The session was welcomed by Professor Robert Triest, Chair of the Northeastern Department of Economics. Based on his previous experience at the Federal Reserve of Boston on the topic of regional inequalities, his introduction focused on the historical “resilience” ability of Boston – and of Massachussets in general – to adapt to several shocks across time. In particular, the city of Boston, has shown in the last decades a high level degree of adaptability during the different socio-economic transition phases caused by national or local shocks. Each transition phase was characterized by the re-organization and re-design of development strategies. One of the clearest example reported concerned the Boston area education system. The current innovation ecosystem is the result of a long lasting process started with the need to have a highly skilled labour force for the industrial sector. It was the chance for the educational system to re-organize and offer technical-based programs attracting students from the entire state.
The discussion on the Boston and Massachussets resilience-centered ability to adapt to the different shocks resulted inspiring for the TREnD research activities framework definition, both for the study of last decades shocks’ identification and for the definition of a preliminary list of case studies to investigate starting from January. A preliminary desk research confirmed how the State of Massachussets has developed a Resilience State-wide Program with specific actions and specific tools to adopt. The cities above-mentioned have adopted resilience-based strategies with different aims and actions to undertake accordingly with their specific context situation. This material could result helpful for the definition of the cases’ selection criteria and the selection of case studies to analyze during the first WP in Boston according with each units’ research topics to investigate.
The Second day of the First Assessment meeting was dedicated to definition of the research activities framework to develop in Boston during the WP1 and to the management of the related secondments including the financial aspects.
Geography of Innovation and Complexity – TREnD Project
September 5th, 2019 – Utrecht (Netherlands)
The TREnD First International Workshop is the second milestone (MS2) of the TREnD project. It took place during the Conference on the Geography of Innovation & Complexity (GIC), hosted by Utrecht University (UU, partner of the TREnD project) between the 2nd and 5th of September 2019, as scheduled during TREnD Kick-Off meeting in Reggio Calabria.
The aim of the meeting was defining the operative framework for the research activities to conduct in Boston during the 1st WP of the TREnD Project. The framework rests on the overall objective to reduce the gap between EU excellences and EU disparities by empowering the linkage between R&I and Cohesion Policies, namely Smart Specialisation Strategies, Horizon 2020 and Cohesion Policy.
Today, the challenge for the EU is how to sustain the prosperity of the core city/regions driving the EU economy and at the same reduce the gap between them and the less developed areas.
This challenge implies two considerations that match the research objective and the activities envisaged by the TREnD project. The first, relates to the Resilience/Transition Management/Evolutionary Economy perspective. Regions and cities’ ability to adapt and respond to external shocks and their ability to manage the transition are crucial for a more inclusive development trajectory. The second, relates with the need to promote and empower a different regional – and sub-regional – development based on the place-sensitive approach that merges the people-based and place-based approaches into a new vision aimed at empower Distributed Development Strategies where economic development strategies need to be adaptive and to maximise the diversity of people, firms and places involved.
Complexity workshop: https://complexity.world
Complexity workshop key lessons: https://medium.com/@tabea.sonnenschein/key-lessons-from-the-gic-2019-8ae3da45e0ef
TREnD Project Kickoff Meeting
June 24th/25th, 2019 – Reggio Calabria (Italy)
The Kick off meeting of TREnD PROJECT took place on June 24th and 25th, hosted by the Università Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Italy.
The Kick-off Meeting of TREnD allowed the knowledge transfer among partners, to facilitate the collaboration and knowledge sharing, information transfer, and ongoing results for a future uptake and to support building a better integrated approach in case studies selection.
The meeting aimed at facilitating the collaboration and knowledge sharing among project partners, both beneficiaries and Third Country (TC) academic organisation, and at creating synergies for effective project implementation. All project partners worked to identify common ground for collaboration, according with a multidisciplinary approach.
MAPS-LED Project Symposium 2018
The 3rd edition of the International Symposium “New Metropolitan Perspectives” aims at facing the challenges of Local Knowledge and Innovation dynamics towards territorial attractiveness through the implementation of the Horizon/EU2020 Agenda. The symposium is jointly promoted by CLUDsLab and LaborEst Laboratories of PAU Department, Università Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria (IT), in partnership with a qualified international network of prestigious academic institutions and scientific associations. It represents the conclusive event of the MAPS-LED Research Project (Multidisciplinary Approach to Plan Smart Specialisation Strategies for Local Economic Development) funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions – RISE 2014/2019. The main aim of RISE Actions is to favor the mobility of Experienced and Early Stage Researchers between Europe, Associated and Third Countries.
The project empowers the strong international research network built up with the CLUDs Project (7FP) through the exchange of researchers, ideas and practices between EU and US. To date, about 40 experienced and early stage researchers benefited of from the Project mobility towards US, at the Northeastern University of Boston, and the San Diego State University and vice-versa. The researchers, coming from the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) belonging to the MAPS-LED network, had the opportunity to increase their research, training and networking skills thanks to the high exposure to the international scientific community.
The MAPS-LED Symposium represents a fundamental event to disseminate research findings and for stimulating a fruitful debate among scientific and policy-makers’ community. The core of the research activities has earmarked for exploring how Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) can be implemented by incorporating the place-based approach towards regenerating local economies.
The results coming from the MAPS-LED project research activities stimulated the scientific ground around key elements triggering the change through S3; as well as, the understanding of its (current and potential) limits. The participation of international experts involved in the S3 design and the RIS3 implementation, in addition to the academic contributions coming from different disciplines, highlighted the potentials of the projects’ proposed ‘multidisciplinary approach’, allowing to boost up knowledge convergence in an a-sectorial rationale.
The Symposium represents the opportunity to the development of innovation-oriented models for the exploitation and valorization of local assets involving different disciplines and in on a multilevel governance perspective. The contribution offered through the symposium, by either enriching the academic debate and providing evidence-based solutions for the implementation of economic development strategies, is attributed by wide scope and marked cross-cutting dimension.
The structure of the symposium is reflected on a multidisciplinary scale, each session presents topics and arguments which are, to some extent, ingrained within overall framework of the MAPS-LED project, while they are expected to open up windows of opportunity for further studies and research.
Consistently, the Symposium focuses on analyzing, at different scales and under numerous perspectives, the strategies, objectives, and impacts of local economic development and innovation processes, to achieve a smart sustainable and inclusive growth.
Summing-up, the Symposium, and the contributions to its sessions, manifest the effort to re-proposing the multidisciplinary approach implemented within the MAPS-LED research project in a conference-based-dimension.
The participation to the Symposium of international experts as well as academics from different disciplines provides interesting insights for the RIS3 evaluation and monitoring processes for the post 2020 programming period. The multidisciplinary approach to plan smart specialisation strategies proposed with the MAPS-LED project emerged as crucial to properly pursue the local economic development in the S3 perspective. Hence, the MAPS-LED project appears at forefront into this research domain.
WEB
http://www.isth2020.unirc.it
MAPS-LED Project – Second Midterm Meeting
San Diego, CA, USA June 2017
S3: CLUSTER POLICY & SPATIAL PLANNING
The midterm meeting presents the findings of research conducted on the spatial/territorial dimension of Smart Specialisation Strategies. In particular, the discussion will integrate the preliminary findings of research activities accomplished during the first year of the MAPS-LED Project to search, across the whole domain of innovation policy and its practical expression, a methodological framework in which the “place” acquired a specific connotation in designing “tailored policy” for innovation and knowledge spillovers. A new approach, for the urban dimension issue within cohesion policy, is presented combining trough knowledge based urban development principles with urban regeneration mechanism in designing innovation policy from urban to regional level.
MAPS-LED Project – Second International Workshop
Manchester, UK, September 2017
The MAPS-LED Second International Workshop is a milestone of the wider MAPS-LED project. It took place during the International Research Week hosted by the University of Salford (SOBE partner of the MAPS-LED project) between the 11th and 15th of September 2017. The aim of the workshop was to disseminate the results of the research activities – conducted in Boston and San Diego- and enhance the potential impact of the research by involving external experts and potential local users in the mid-term assessment stages of the research process. The research activities focused on the urban dimension of innovation and how public policies support local innovation ecosystems and entrepreneurial knowledge within the (local) clusters. These elements play a central role in US socio-economic and physical transformation, favoring knowledge-based urban regeneration processes. This new approach was outlined by the MAPS-LED experienced and early stage researchers’ contributions and presentations during the Workshop, which saw the participation of the MAPS-LED project partners, the international academic community and local and national stakeholders from the United Kingdom and other EU countries.
MAPSLED Project – First International Workshop
Rome, 3-4 December 2016
The Workshop is specifically oriented in delivering critical reflections and significant contributions for the development of the main goals of MAPS-LED research project. In particular, crucial, in depth contributions and dialectic positions are expected to be presented and discussed – within sessions and round tables – by distinguished invited experts and numerous stakeholders, in order to build significant connections between the Greater Boston case findings and the virtuous interpretation of Smart Specialization Strategies and Cluster policies in the European territorial context.
Critical contributions, discussions, comments and remarks emerging from presentations and debates will be finalized to the construction of WP2 deliverables, and in particular to the 2nd MidTerm Scientific Report ‘Book of lessons learnt on successful clusters from the Boston cases’
