A workshop aimed at discussing the future of the Baltic Sea Region took place on 5 March 2020 at Nordregio,  in Stockholm.

A new ESPON project, "Interregional relations in Europe" (IRiE) launched yesterday. The general objective of the project is to analyze inter-regional flows, design actions that reduce barriers and include information on flows within the regional Smart Specialization Strategies. Different types of emergency scenarios, such as the COVID-19 pandemic will be analyzed.

Financial instruments will continue to play a prominent role in EU policy post-2020 under both EU Cohesion policy and the proposed

https://www.poctefa.euThe COVID19 pandemic will have both sanitary and territorial impacts but regions and cities won’t be hit with the same intensity. ESPON is interested in pooling local experiences and territorial policy responses. And supports actively other European Research Associations to collect scientific evidence on the impact of CORVID19.

Differences in population density in the Baltic Sea Region show a clear north-south pattern with the sparsely populated north and the densely populated south. There is also still an east-west divide in terms of economic performance, although the divide has been closing. The BSR has developed from a divided region into a prosperous region with a dense network of cooperation arrangements.

Collecting, processing, validating and publishing statistical data are delicate processes, which require sound guidelines and structures in order to produce reliable, comparable and valid data.

A case study of the ESPON project BIG DATA on transport and mobility partnership networks in the EU based on data acquired from the KEEP database. This data contains about 2,353 projects and 18,318 partners around Europe for the programming period 2014-2020

Do you know the possibilities offered by digital plan data and their actual use in spatial planning?

The Territorial Agenda is a strategic policy document for Europe, its regions and communities.

2020 is a landmark year for Europe. Brexit apart, what are the challenges and EU is facing and how is ESPON supporting European stakeholders to address them?