ABSTRACT
Remote rural areas are often rich in natural and landscape assets, which are in turn used as the main focus of tourism development strategies aiming at reverting their decline. However, mono-functional strategies hardly manage to achieve this goal, as in order to restore those structural conditions that are essential to liveability and local development it is necessary to engage in a more comprehensive approach. Acknowledging this challenge, the paper reflects on the possibility to include tourism within multi-level development strategies aimed at tackling marginalisation, drawing on the case of the Italian National Strategy for Inner Areas. More in detail, the authors analyse how the latter enables the integration of tourism-related actions into more comprehensive, place-based development strategies that act upon the peculiarities of the territories they focus on through a mix of top-down and bottom-up logics.
ABSTRACT
Metropolitan areas progressively joined cities as catalysts of European development, putting traditional governance models into crisis and triggering episodes of institutional experimentation. Also the European Union has progressively adapted its cohesion policy to cater to the needs of metropolitan areas, and arguments in this direction have multiplied as a consequence of the role that the latter could play in tackling the pandemic. Aiming at shedding some light on this issue, the contribution draws on the results of the ESPON METRO project, discussing how selected metropolitan areas in Europe have reacted to the pandemic, and to what extent they have been able to use the EU cohesion policy. Overall, whereas metropolitan areas appear well positioned to react to the pandemic and to contribute to plan its aftermath, the collected evidence shows that the scope and magnitude of their activity has been rather limited: a situation that may contribute to threaten European social, economic and territorial cohesion. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.