Abstract
The National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) is a public policy designed to tackle depopulation in inner areas, defined according to the distance from centers offering essential services. Such a policy’s success is crucial to address the new challenges for planning brought to light by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this sense, there is a need to adequately support its implementation by providing handy decision support tools, understanding the power balances among municipalities, and defining proper interventions. The Indicator Grid, already used by the SNAI for project areas selection, can answer this need. However, the Grid’s application to support public policy at the municipality level requires reviewing some of its features, such as the indicators’ large number and the impossibility of defining some of them at the municipal scale. Based on these premises, this paper aims at supporting inner areas policies by carrying out a critical analysis of the current SNAI Grid, aimed at improving its effectiveness. It relies on a hybrid methodology that merges qualitative data interpretations and statistical analyses. Thanks to this method, defining a parsimonious Grid by leaving its complexity and information level untouched is possible. The so-defined set of indicators can represent a valuable reference tool in pinpointing priorities for actions or selecting further territorial scopes from the SNAI perspective, even if it still brings some criticalities to be faced.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced an accurate reflection about the leading urbanization model’s crisis [1,2] and the need to place marginal areas at the core of new territorial sustainable development paradigms [3]
Similar to the cohesion policies in other European countries [8,9,10], the SNAI focuses on marginal areas, intended as territories that have been cut off from the leading urbancentered development models over recent decades
This paper aims at supporting inner areas policies by providing them with a comprehensive indicator set, stemming from a critical analysis of the current SNAI Grid towards its handiness and effectiveness
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced an accurate reflection about the leading urbanization model’s crisis [1,2] and the need to place marginal areas at the core of new territorial sustainable development paradigms [3] This reflection has immediately resulted in growing attention towards territorial cohesion policies that, starting from 2007 with the Lisbon. The Grid’s application to support public policy at the municipality level requires reviewing some of its features, such as the indicators’ significant number and the impossibility of defining some of them at the municipal scale Based on these premises, this paper aims at supporting inner areas policies by providing them with a comprehensive indicator set, stemming from a critical analysis of the current SNAI Grid towards its handiness and effectiveness.
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