ERMES is focused on the reinforcement of land-sea interactions through policies and soft governance solutions that allow for the promotion of Blue Growth and the maximization of regional benefits of sustainable maritime spatial planning.

The Interreg Central Europe (CE) programme area encompasses the territory of nine EU Member States, i.e. Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, as well as parts of Germany and Italy. It makes up 23% of the EU territory and covers countries from both sides of the former ’Iron Curtain’.

Digitalization in public administration is gaining momentum in many European countries and spatial planning is no exception. The digitalization process is driven by ideas of efficiency, expressed for example in the concept of “smart cities” and “digital governance”, ideas of participation and improved public service, like “open government” and “open data”, and an aspiration for new economic growth and business opportunities based on this data. The topic of this ESPON Targeted Analysis is highly relevant as digitalization plays an increasing role also in spatial planning.

The main objective of this service contract is to provide an empirical foundation for destinations and help local leaders assess their situation and identify vulnerabilities in relation to sustainable tourism in the respective territories.

Urban economies change ever more rapidly. Businesses and products, and the technologies used to develop them, come and go. They grow, shrink, reinvent themselves or change their location altogether, on a global scale. Besides the strong service economy in most cities, there is also a substantial need for producing and handling material goods, even in urban economies that are not export-oriented. In our case we loosely refer to this as “metropolitan industry”.

This project focuses upon European rural regions experiencing or threatened by demographic decline. The central objectives are to understand the process(es) driving shrinkage, map the heterogeneity within this group of regions, and devise intervention logic(s) for more appropriate integrated policy approaches, which pro-actively push forward strategies based upon territorial assets and emerging opportunities, whilst recognising the need to ameliorate the effects of some continued decline, and bearing in mind the “intervention tools” available within the EU Cohesion and ESIF policy

Over the past years, discussions have taken place on how assessing and measuring quality of life and on how more qualitative indicators (such as surveys) can complement existing economic and social indicators to measure territorial development and well-being. Quality of life is being impacted by economic transitions, social changes and environmental challenges. Moreover, enhancing quality of life is a key objective for policy makers.

Scope

Port cities have historically been an essential element of European society and economy. Despite overall growth in maritime transport, many European port cities are experiencing the relocation of port-related activities from central areas to other locations. The loss of this economic activity is leaving deteriorating inner city areas. Today brownfield waterfront sites are strategically valuable but their development can be hugely constrained by costs of decontamination treatment, plot fragmentation and complex landownership.

The Baltic Sea Region (BSR) includes Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark as well as North-West Russia and Northern Germany. The BSR is the first European macro-region having a vision for spatial development (adopted in 1994, renewed in 2009).

The region is a highly heterogeneous area in economic, environmental and cultural terms. Spatial integration is hindered by the existing divides. Some of the countries are EU member states, whereas the others are not foreseeing EU accession.