SPECIAL SESSIONS
The geography of resilience in Europe
Session organisers
Gabriela Carmen Pascariu
Peter Nijkamp
Karima Kourtit
Bogdan-Constantin Ibanescu
Description
During the last decades, the notion of resilience has gained much popularity in geography and geography-related sciences, such as urban planning, regional science, geopolitics, or economic geography. The main idea behind this concept is that a territory, or in general any dynamic system, may be subject to various shocks and/or pressures that produce quantitative or qualitative transformations upon the system. However, not all territories manage to entirely recover following a shock, therefore, the challenging task for spatial sciences is to identify the factors contributing to appropriate territorial responses. The resilience concept has been applied in geography mainly in studies on the consequences of natural disasters for the affected regions and on the impact of economy-related shocks on regional development, although the potential of geography for analysing, identifying, and providing solutions in the field is much greater. Given the complexity of such phenomena, new analysis techniques are required in order to properly tackle the issue of spatial resilience and to enhance the added value of geography, thus connecting more consistently academic views to policy-making. This special session aims to bring together new theoretical approaches and empirical research results on spatial resilience, focusing on the relevance of the resilience concept for regional growth and the connection between the territorial dimension of resilience and economic, social or ecological issues. We welcome contributions on, but not limited to: the relation between spatial planning and the capacity of territories to face internal and external shocks, the role of natural, social, economic, institutional, and policy-based factors on resilience capacity, the drivers of resilience and how the resilience can capture regional dynamics, core-periphery structural differentiations of the resilience capacity, empirical studies on regional policies and measures for boosting the overall and sectorial resilience capacity of regions, the role of networks and accessibility in resilience estimation models, cross-scale perspectives and the integration of multi-scalar approaches in resilience models, climate change adaptation, rural-urban structural differentiations and resilience, or smart regions. Accepted papers for this session could be submitted for publication in a special issue of Eastern Journal of European Studies (http://ejes.uaic.ro/), journal indexed in Clarivate Analytics, Scopus, Index Copernicus, ProQuest, DOAJ databases.
