The emergence of collaborative approaches in innovation policy and regional governance has increased expectations for universities to engage in strategy making and assume broader roles and responsibilities. Nonetheless, complexities inherent to the policy process, regional context and universities’ own institutional and organisational capacity are often ignored or under-explained when framing universities’

Since the early 2000s, the Europeanization of metropolitan regions from below takes place in a political process with variable geometry and differential intensity. While ‘the metropolitan’ as a political label and research topic has witnessed an impressive upswing in Europe, a concrete understanding of the Europeanization of metropolitan regions is still missing. This article highlights and explains

This paper analyses the economic and geographic characteristics of the world’s principal non-sovereign territories in the context of the growth challenges facing small economies. These territories enjoy high degrees of policy autonomy within a complex array of relationships with their metropolitan countries. Seven of the ten metropolitan powers are European and account for 38 of the 49 inhabited non-sovereign

Policymakers in the UK, having long supported centralised and marketised models of governance and delivery in the field of labour market activation, have recently begun to acknowledge the benefits of more localised, collaborative approaches to organising public services. Evidence from other European welfare states suggests that the case in favour of localised innovation may be particularly compelling

Writings on urban development and planning in Europe have been dominated by a combination of technical studies of the real estate sector and more structural political economy approaches on land expropriation and financialisation. In this paper we draw on the example of the London Landed Estates, to critically assess how land-owning real estate companies, that we call city-owners, perform their roles

The entire aviation industry was severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving airplanes stranded and airports empty of the usual hustle. While the full consequences of this crisis are yet unknown, it only adds fuel to the ongoing debates about the future of the aviation sector, including airport capacity and environmental challenges facing many hub airports around Europe. While conventional aviation

Market and institutional shocks and upheaval, brought about by political, economic and social changes, have the potential to generate significant corporate restructuring. Foreign subsidiaries are particularly vulnerable to such impacts given the embeddedness of parent companies in their home countries, with the potential for disinvestment and regional decoupling. This paper examines the impact of the

It was over 25 years ago that European Urban and Regional Studies was launched at a time of epochal change in the composition of the political, economic and social map of Europe. Brexit has been described as an epochal moment – and at such a moment, European Urban and Regional Studies felt it should offer the space for short commentaries on Brexit and its impact on the relationships of place, space

The United Kingdom’s (UK) withdrawal from the European Union (EU) will reshape the geography of European finance. From January 2021, the UK will no longer be able to sell financial services cross-border into the EU’s Single Market as it has done as a Member State. Through what are called passporting rights, these financial services exports from London to the EU have been central to London’s competitiveness

In the light of impending Brexit, what factors shape European Union migrants’ plans to remain in or leave the UK? Based on an online survey of 360 Bulgarians, an under-researched migrant group in the UK, this study finds that the ones who plan to remain have lived longer in the UK, are skilled professionals and are well integrated into the labour market. Contrastingly, respondents who feel that they

City-regions have become a core unit of analysis for spatial economy, providing an explicit link between bounded administrative units and more networked spaces of production. Too often, however, such analysis is focused on the core of the city-region, applying presumptions of gravity-based agglomeration. This paper examines these networked spaces of production from the city-region periphery, using

Almost 30 years since the Maastricht Treaty and 20 years since the introduction of the euro, it is clear that the European Union (EU) has lost its appeal to wider constituencies and citizen groups that realize that the promises for convergence and prosperity have not been delivered. Rising dissatisfaction and Euroscepticism (expressed both in the ballot box and in Eurobarometer reports) is evident

Cultural and creative sectors (CCS) are increasingly recognized as a driving economic force. In addition to their undisputed soft power, creative jobs are expected to prove more resilient to automation, and may therefore play an important role in the future growth cycles of advanced global economies. But how is Brexit going to affect the UK’s flourishing creative economy at an urban level? Pre-Brexit

The literature on the relationship between regions and the European Union (EU) has generated important insights. Firstly, existing scholarship has found that the EU has empowered, as well as disempowered, regions and sub-national governments. Secondly, researchers have convincingly demonstrated how regions have adapted to the EU opportunity structure. Finally, studies exist that have investigated the

Nowadays, the foundation pillars of European unification, namely solidarity and democracy, are under serious threat, perhaps more serious than that from the 2008 economic crisis, Brexit, the migration crisis and COVID-19 combined. As happened in the past, space and geography are again at the forefront asking for interpretations. A once progressive academic field such as urban and regional research

This paper investigates how the Brexit announcement affects Japanese direct investment into Europe at the regional NUTS-2 level. Political and economic uncertainty is an important factor affecting the economic performance of a country and its regions. In this study, Japanese annual firm-level data between the years 2000 and 2018 for 31 European countries is used. Negative binomial estimations indicate

One of the most concerned groups potentially impacted by the approval of Brexit in 2016 is that of the so-called “Brexpats”. This group of people is composed by at least 784,900 British citizens who are living in the European Union (EU), among which those settling in Spain are the most prominent. Spanish Brexpats are the largest British population outside the borders of the UK, except for in the Commonwealth

The UK has been a recipient of European Union (EU) Cohesion Policy funding since its inception, and it has played a key role ever since in local and regional economic development across the UK. However, in the run up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, discussions about the significance of EU Cohesion Policy funding to the UK’s cities and regions, which have benefitted from this support for decades,

Following the confirmation by the UK Parliament that the UK would leave the European Union on 1 January 2021, this article analyses the likely impact of BREXIT on socio-spatial inequalities in the UK. It argues that inequalities will be further amplified, in contrast to Prime Minister Johnson’s claims that inequalities will be ‘levelled up’, drawing on the historical trajectory of capitalist development

The global or planetary reach of gentrification has become a mainstream in critical urban studies. Yet, the ‘travels’ of a concept originated in specific places and times have often brought about a loss of explanatory and strategic power. In this article, we argue that another concept, that of articulation developed by Laclau and Mouffe, is particularly adequate to help gentrification, touristification

The rapidly expanding stream of path development studies recognises that translating observations from past paths to conscious path creation requires conceptually linking agency to path development frameworks. Actors frame issues about and for the future, coordinate their actions in the present and make sense of what may have transpired in the past. The main objective of the paper is to explore the

This commentary documents the spatiotemporal distribution of financial and business services (FABS) production in Poland, by using location quotients for employment and gross value added. Considering the growing prominence of Warsaw in the central European and international network of financial centres, one could expect increasing spatial concentration of FABS in the country. Our findings confirm the

This paper presents a study about studentification in the medium-sized university town of Goettingen, Germany. While many studentification studies focus on the transformation of owner-occupied houses into houses of multiple occupation, this study is about displacement in the rental housing market. I argue that within this context, the displacement of marginalised social groups takes place through rental

In a context of growing socio-spatial polarization and of restructuring state–market relations in urban governance, a new phenomenon is emerging in Swedish cities, that is, partnerships for urban regeneration inspired by the Business Improvement District (BID) model. Through an empirical case study research on one of the most long-standing BID partnerships in Sweden – that is, BID Gamlestaden in Gothenburg

In this paper, we analyse long-term changes in the regional distribution and migration flows of university graduates in Finland and Sweden. This study is based on detailed longitudinal population register data, including information on high school grades and parental background. We find a distinct pattern of skill divergence across regions in both countries over the last 3 decades. The uneven distribution

The current phase of intensive globalisation, digitisation, the expansion of fintech companies and the overall impacts of the recent crisis seem to spur further concentration in the banking sector in terms of both the number of banks in operation and the number of banking centres. This research is motivated by the fact that, in contrast to leading financial and banking centres that attract considerable

The recent significant inflow of international migrants into rural areas in Europe has raised questions about the integration of migrants into the rural host localities. Amidst the growing literature, there are, however, few comprehensive analyses of processes of migrants’ social integration. Drawing on the lived experience of Polish migrants in a rural area in Norway and applying the theoretical framework

Globally, cities have been experiencing neoliberal urbanization processes since the 1970s, while also contributing to the production of the neoliberal condition per se. The neoliberal state plays a core role in such processes, which have deepened the commodification of urban space via various mechanisms such as the privatization of public land and key urban infrastructure. This article critically investigates

There is a growing academic and policy interest in the notion of using cities as ‘living laboratories’ to develop and test responses to the social, environmental and economic challenges present in contemporary urbanism. These living laboratories are often assumed to function through ‘quadruple helix’ relations between varied actors from the public, private, university and community sectors. However

This paper analyses and critically discusses the role of regions in implementing renewable energy (RE) policies, examining the relationship between state policy and RE deployment. Using evidence from four case study regions, Apulia and Tuscany in Italy and Wales and Scotland in the UK, the paper teases out some differences in terms of regional competencies to implement RE policies across the two countries

This paper explores the dynamics of urban policy transfer in the European Union (EU), critically examining the process of Europeanization in relation to urban issues. The paper takes a comparative approach, analysing the evolution of urban policy and Europeanization in four member states: France, Italy, Spain and the UK from the 1990s up to the current Cohesion Policy period (2014–2020). Using an analytical

Recently proliferating ‘smart city’ building efforts have lent themselves well to interpretations through the lens of the policy mobilities literature. Applying this perspective, studies have insightfully shown how policymaking centred around smart cities is at once a messy, networked process stretching across scales, while also manifesting itself in concrete practices shaped by territorial–regulatory

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing revitalisation of the counterurbanisation research within population geography by nuancing counterurban migration beyond the rural–urban dichotomy, including all moves downwards in the urban hierarchy. The focus is to explore counterurban migration patterns among families with children leaving Swedish metropolitan areas, and whether some groups of skilled

This article brings geographical insights to understanding the Europeanization of agri-food politics in new European Union member states. Most literature on agri-food policy and law in the European Union has conceptualized policy making and implementation as an institutional process involving multiple levels of governance. In this perspective, Europeanization is understood as a process through which

This article analyses the production of urban space in the globalizing city of Milan, Italy. The authors present the evolution of a 30-year development process in a semi-central area of the city known as Garibaldi Porta Nuova, contrasting present and past conditions. Initial attempts to develop the area began in the early 1980s but came to nothing; a previous study of the same area attributed that

In recent academic and urban policy writings the term urban diversity is usually understood, or discussed within the context of, increasing ‘socio-cultural’ diversity in cities or is explicitly connected to debates over immigration and demographic change. Although policy agendas follow certain common trends ‘to deal with’ the consequences of diversity, there is a lack of evidence-based research on

The article analyses the discourses, strategies and daily practices about diversity in Milan, Italy, framing them at different scales: (a) the national model of integration; (b) the city-level debate and policy framework about diversity; (c) the neighbourhood-level initiatives addressing (directly or indirectly) diversity; (d) representations and narratives about diversity among the residents of two

This article deals with the question of how and why urban governments have implemented diversity policies in the context of a broader backlash against multiculturalism. The starting point of our analysis is the conceptualization of multiculturalism as a set of institutional arrangements for ethnic minority group representation and recognition. While scholars have largely focused on normative critiques

This paper examines the discourses and practices of central and local governments, as related to the issues of urban governance and diversity, and the emergence of new governance arrangements in different fields of Istanbul’s diversity. The paper claims that current diversity discourses and policies in Turkey are being increasingly used as a rhetorical device to promote the economic development of

This article uses Statistics Sweden’s full-population geo-coded register data for Swedish workers and their labour market moves, between 2010 and 2014, to analyse regional flow patterns of employees between manufacturing, general business services and knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). The findings generally show that labour flows between manufacturing and services have important bi-directional

While slum clearance projects in the Global South have displaced a large number of urban poor from the inner city to peripheral areas, peripheral mass housing estates have been developed as a spatial fix to improve the livelihood of the urban poor through slum development projects. Shifting the focus of displacement and poverty studies on changing assets and social experiences of displacement, this

The rapid internationalisation of the Spanish property market has triggered debates about the main characteristics of emerging post-crisis urban dynamics. Financial and urban policy reforms have shaped a model depicted by incessant rent increases and displacements. Echoing these concerns, this article addresses two interconnected objectives about the way policy restructuring encouraged transnational

The local regulation of prostitution in Germany is a contested area of urban politics. In this issue area, morality claims intersect with the material interests of home- and landowners and the security demands of ‘ordinary’ citizens. The Prostitution Law of 2001 has liberalized the legal framework: the legislation ‘normalized’ sex work, triggering the re-definition of urban strategies to regulate prostitution

Despite the vigorous debate on the extent, modalities and impacts of public space privatization, there have been few analyses of the processes of its emergence in specific places. Based on 36 stakeholder interviews and desk research, this paper does so through an analysis of how the Martim Moniz square, in Lisbon, became the city’s first square under private management in 2012. To do so, the paper

Land ownership determines fundamental interests, prescribing a framework of alliances and oppositions around its development and use. The public sector constitutes one of the main categories of large landowners, although this type of ownership takes more than one form, due to the wide variety of public sector bodies holding property. Public land management became one of the focuses of austerity policies

Real estate development is an intensely social process dependent on rich networks of relations between public and private sector actors. Previous work has explored how far such relations are formalised in large cities through shared coalitions of interest intended to promote urban growth. Relatively little attention has been given to networks in smaller cities, which is the concern of this paper. Drawing

Drawing on a framework that integrates discursive practices and relationalism, we explore the relevance of relational ties for the cross-state mobility of naturalised third-country nationals (NTCNs) within the European Union, examining how relational ties facilitate their mobility to the UK. Our data derive from in-depth interviews with NTCNs of West African origin living and working in the UK. Emphasising

This paper aims to unravel the impacts of the global economic crisis upon European banking centres on the basis of the evolution of key economic indicators, such as total assets, profitability and the level of risk to the banking sector over the 2004–2015 period. Counterintuitively, the European leading banking centres (London, Paris and Frankfurt), despite their extensive exposure to capital markets

In the Anglophone literature on local and regional development policy there are tendencies to overextension of claims from one side of the Atlantic to the other, or there is no comparative framing at all. As a result the specificity of the West European case tends to be lost. In contrast with the USA, the West European instance is very different indeed. Although there have been changes since the postwar

Has the post-war managerial approach to urban governance in the Netherlands and Flanders been replaced by more entrepreneurial and financialized forms? In this paper, we study the transformation of urban governance in the Low Countries through city case studies of Apeldoorn (Netherlands) and Antwerp (Belgium). We show how Dutch urban governance is financialized by connecting local public finance with

This paper draws attention to the burgeoning phenomenon of Metrophilia, the fashionable yet uncritical embrace of city-centric narratives of development in place-based policymaking. Within this narrative, City Deals have emerged as mechanisms that pit places in competition with each other through the promotion of local economic growth compacts. Despite being launched with great fanfare as localised

This special issue of European Urban and Regional Studies maps out a move from a strictly geopolitical to more socio-political and socio-cultural interpretations of the European Union’s (EU’s) ‘Mediterranean neighbourhood’. In doing this, the authors propose a dialogic understanding of neighbourhood as a set of ideas and imaginaries that reflect not only top-down geopolitical imaginaries but also everyday

This article analyses the productive strategy adopted by Renault for its Dacia plant in Romania. It proposes a detailed analysis of the conditions for the success of the Logan project – Renault’s radical approach to the concept of the low-cost automobile. We look into both market- and production-related aspects that have made the Logan work and highlight the tensions sparked by Renault’s drive to capitalize

European cities are experiencing a mushrooming of a new urban imagery amid multiple types of crisis. In fact, the ‘smart city’ has become a widely spread vision used by a variety of powerful key actors as well as a top-down urban political strategy that is applied in order to promote new arrangements, models and technologies for almost all policy areas. By using the Italian case as a point of reference

The recent upsurge of interest in the experimental city as an arena within and through which urban sustainability is governed marks not only the emergence of the proliferation of forms of experimentation – from novel governance arrangements to demonstration projects, transition management processes to grassroots innovations – but also an increasing sensibility amongst the research community that urban

The objective of this paper is to understand temporary spatial proximity beyond temporary clusters, and to analyse rationales for the use of various spatial settings for temporary spatial proximity in the work processes of knowledge-intensive services. To contrast different types of temporary spatial proximity two basic types, ‘Meet and Mingle’ and ‘Move and Manage’, are identified. On the basis of

The “smart city” has risen to global prominence over the past two decades as an urban planning and development strategy. As a broad but contested toolkit of technological services and policy interventions aimed at improving the efficacy and efficiency of urban systems, the “smart city” is subject to several pressing critiques. This paper acknowledges these concerns, but recognizes the potential of

The growing concentration of production and population in capital cities in Europe is accompanied by metropolitan governance reform with two policy objectives in mind. Firstly, capital cities are promoted as ‘national champions’ in the context of global territorial competition. Secondly, metropolitan regions are characterised by recurrent crises of ‘governability’ as economic, social, environmental

While there is a relatively extensive literature concerning the nature of smart cities in general, the roles of corporate actors in their production and the development and deployment of specific smart city technologies, to date there have been relatively few studies that have examined the situated practices by which the smart city unfolds in specific places. In this paper, we draw on three sets of

Research on innovation has often concentrated on a narrow set of sectors and activities, and on the experiences of the most advanced regions in the world. However, innovation, when defined in a broad sense, incorporates a variety of processes and outputs that cut across organisational, sectoral, territorial and knowledge boundaries. This paper seeks to make a contribution to this literature by focusing