
RELOCAL - Resituating the Local in Cohesion and Territorial Development
Research group
See the project website at: https://relocal.eu/
The EU Horizon 2020 research project ‘Resituating the local in cohesion and territorial development’ – RELOCAL has received funding from European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement Nº 727097.
This project, led by researchers at the Karelian Institute, UEF, aims to identify factors that condition local accessibility of European policies, local abilities to articulate needs and equality claims and local capacities for exploiting European opportunity structures.
However, the persistence and exacerbation of territorial disparities in the European Union, coupled with the insecurity that economic crisis and austerity have generated and even threaten this vision of cohesion. The aim of fairness with regard to access to opportunities, the availability of services of general interest and basic infrastructure, independently of location, has become increasingly difficult and expensive to achieve. One important consequence of this situation is a greater need to connect European Cohesion, both as policy framework and principle, more directly to local needs and local scale. Place-based and endogenous regional development as well as the more effective use of territorial capital and assets are some of the approaches that have been invoked to facilitate a greater local orientation of cohesion, territorial development and other EU policies.
The RELOCAL project departs from the basic premise that localities and their functional spaces represent the contextual nexus where the relationship between individuals and spatial justice unfolds. Therefore, the principal rationale of the RELOCAL project is to contribute to conceptually and empirically enhancing the knowledge base on spatial justice and territorial inequalities and it also contributes to identifying policies promoting spatial justice and socio-economic well-being at various levels of governance.
Group description
RELOCAL is based on 33 case studies of local contexts (cities and their regions) that exemplify development challenges in terms of spatial justice. (See at https://relocal.eu/all-cases/)
Keywords
Time period
Group members - UEF
-
Petri Kahila Research Director , Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, Karelian Institute
-
Sarolta Németh Senior Researcher , Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, Karelian Institute
-
Matti Fritsch Senior Researcher , Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, Karelian Institute
-
James Scott Professor , Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, Karelian Institute