The ESPON seminar aims at discussing “Quality of Life for territorial and citizen-centric policies” bringing together the latest research on the topic and policy challenges. Improving the Quality of Life is a key objective for policymakers at different scales, and it has become more relevant in the policy agenda along with increasing demands for the participation of citizens in the political process. But how can we measure the quality of life and its impact on policymaking? 

Digital transformation has the potential to profoundly change public institutions. Not only by delivering better, cheaper, more efficient and more empathetic public services that meet user needs, but also because those institutions will provide a new foundation, a new digital infrastructure serving the whole of society. Digital transformation can be the great equalizer as well as divider, and the success lies in the ability of working together through international networks, multilevel governance frameworks, across the different departments, with the people, academia, industry and entrepreneurs to deploy and scale up best practices. This session presented the findings of the ESPON DIGISER project - Digital Innovation in Governance and Public Service Provision - and put them in the wider policy context and investment priorities for the upcoming programming period.

The panelists of the session were:

Grazia Concilo,Politecnico di Milano (IT)

Michelangelo Sechhi, Politecnico di Milano (IT)

Michael Mulquin, Open and Agile Smart Cities (UK)

Mika Kataikko, City of Jyväskylä (FI)

Marcos Nogueira, H2020-AURORAL (BE)

Moderator: Martin Gauk, ESPON EGTC (LU)

Find links to all the sessions of the seminar and the presentations available to download here

You can read an article by Martin Gauk on the same topic in our TerritoriALL magazine