A guide for practitioners, policy and decision makers based on contributions from the ESPON TANGO Project

Territorial development has been an issue in the Baltic Sea Region for the past 20 years. Experience shows that territorial cooperation and policy approaches to transnational development potentials and challenges require a sound base of comparable transnational evidence.

Centuries of human activity has shaped current European landscapes. Not only by the geographical context and availability of resources, but also demographic evolution, economic development, urbanisation and infrastructure roll-out have played an important role in driving land use changes and shaping Europe’s current landscapes.

Drawing on the results of a wide range of ESPON applied research projects, this report highlights the territorial development themes, challenges and opportunities that need to be addressed jointly by the Partner States and the EU Member States while, in addition, identifying the complementarities between each of these four states and the EU.

Today, development policies for regions, cities and larger territories require the understanding of an area’s development potentials and challenges in a wider territorial context. This is why ESPON provides territorial evidence with relevant information on trends, perspectives and policy impacts seen from a European perspective. This can be used during various stages in the cycle of European Structural and Investment Funds Programmes (ESIF) – ranging from the development of the programme, via the selection of actions to monitoring and evaluation.

Europe’s second tier cities are important growth poles and have in many cases great development potentials. They play a vital role within the national urban system and often even perform better than their capital cities. In fact, secondary cities contribute substantially to the economic development in Europe and are decisive for achieving the Europe 2020 objectives on smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

One of the objectives of the ESPON Programme is to support the European wide research community in the field of European territorial science and to involve a wide European network of scientists and practitioners in the field of territorial research and its related fields. A large involvement is indispensable to get high qualified research capacity in ESPON projects and at the same time to increase interest and competences in research on European territorial structures, trends, perspectives and impacts of EU sector policy.