Detecting Territorial Potential and Challenges (DeTeC) will provide practical guidance on how to utilise ESPON knowledge to detect territorial potentials and turning challenges into potentials. The project will be done in close collaboration with practitioners and stakeholders in a selection of regions in Europe and result in a handbook with evaluated analytical approaches and methods for detecting territorial potentials and challenges, but also concrete examples of good practices.
Europe and the European Union are facing several mega trends and territorial challenges, but also potentials. There are great potentials in the ESPON knowledge base for dealing with these challenges and potentials. And there is a demand for new and more knowledge from practitioners and policy makers on these issues. The general objectives for the ESPON project Detecting Territorial Potential and Challenges (DeTeC) are to, in close collaboration with practitioners and stakeholders:
- develop practical guidance of how practitioners and policy makers can utilize ESPON knowledge for detecting territorial potentials and how to turn challenges into potentials
- provide concrete examples of good practices in utilising territorial potentials and/or deal with particular challenges including a European outlook and combining ESPON results with local and regional knowledge
The project will thus meet the increased demand for evidence-based analytical approaches and methods supporting practitioners and policy makers searching for territorial potentials and meeting territorial challenges involving a European perspective. It will contribute with both place-specific and general knowledge on how territorial potentials and challenges can be detected and utilised by using ESPON knowledge.
The research project will produce an inventory of analytical approaches as well as qualitative and quantitative methods supporting the detection of territorial potentials. It will also develop a conceptual framework based on the inventory of analytical approaches and methods from and to construct a preliminary guidance document that will be used and tested through the interactive case studies. The main research activity to engage practitioners and policy makers at regional and municipal level to test in practice the guidance document of analytical approaches and methods developed in case study regions.
During the case studies the regions' or cities' territorial potentials and challenges will be identified and analysed. The cases will provide concrete examples on how a region or a city can detect and utilise their territorial potentials using ESPON knowledge. Results from the case studies will be used to refine and revise the preliminary guidance document and conceptual framework including analytical approaches and methods. The main outcome and result of the DeTeC project will be a usable and guiding handbook on detecting and utilising territorial potentials.