Accessibility and proximity have played and still play an important role in the development process. They enable economic development and sustain it at the same time. Together they also generate the peripherality effect. That what is outside of the “accessible and close” area is peripheral and presents less interest. My argument here is that in
Unemployment. The major concern and at the same time the result of the economic crisis, as well as one of the main points to be addressed through policies targeting the reduction of regional disparities across the EU. In short: unemployment is a big issue! It defines and modifies economic processes with direct impacts on spatial
As expected social media powered discussions give the opportunity to develop new ideas in unconventional ways. Unconventional brainstorming on Twitter and blogs has its benefits, as it combines ideas from a plethora of people and places. After such a discussion/brainstorm which lasted for some time, Horatiu Ferchiu from Federal Europe – a planner’s view put
I live in Romania, a country which until 22 years ago was under a communist regime, and which had to drastically modify its social, institutional and administrative constructs in order to adapt the market economy and the ‘western’ style of life. I observed the reform (partial – my opinion might be biased in this respect) of
Recent weeks brought forward debates concerning governments and the quality and efficiency of their interventions and decision-making processes. While this discussion can be nuanced in many ways, my personal interest lays mainly with the basic understanding of the relation between the quality of the governmental act, the level of trust in international, national and sub-national
The creative class. Could be said that the term is Richard Florida‘s brain child. He put forward the theory that there is a new class in the wide pool of the workforce: the creatives. In this case, the creative class points to the multitude of professionals that are involved in: the creative industries (obviously), science,
Spatial planning research is somewhat a murky field of research, and data available online is sometimes hard to obtain, as you have to navigate around search engines and complicated sites. For some time now I meant to put together a list of spatial data sources and tools I use when doing research, which I gathered along the
This is a guest post from Horațiu Ferchiu. He is a planning professional and independent researcher with interests spanning from strategic planning, governance, and policy to politics, and federal Europe. He is currently brainstorming his future PhD subject around federalism and development. This article sums up some of his preliminary findings and thoughts, and is
Politics – one of the reasons the world goes round, or is it just a result of the world going round? Not really an easy question. One thing that anyone agrees upon though, is that politics (good or bad, doesn’t really matter) can make or brake economies (whatever the level: global, European, national, local, personal),
Cultural values and language define two of the most important characteristics of territorially defined nations or ethnically defined groups. The recent buzz around the EU blogosphere revealed certain cultural and language issues that limit the way in which people react and interact (1, 2, 3). By similarity, this is not different in the spatial planning