When the future is captured by participation: Governance, resistance and planning dilemmas on Lisbon’s Violet Line

Sars-CoV2 epidemic was the cause of death of more than 180,000 Italian citizens. The severity of this disease showed to policymakers how easily Italian health services, and particularly hospitals, could be overwhelmed by requests and needs from patients and the general population. As a consequence of the clogging of health services, the government decided to allocate a consistent investment to the community and proximity assistance with a specific section (Mission 6) of the so called "National Recovery and Resilience Plan". The aim of this study is to analyse the economic and social impact of the Mission 6 of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, with particular regard to the most relevant interventions (Community Homes, Community Hospitals, Integrated Home Care), in order to understand its future sustainability. A qualitative research methodology was chosen. Documents containing all the relevant information regarding the sustainability of the plan (called in short "Sustainability Plan") were taken into consideration. In case of missing data regarding the potential costs or expenditure of the aforementioned structures, estimates will be made reviewing literature for similar healthcare services, already implemented and active in Italy. Direct content analysis was chosen as the methodology for data analysis and final reporting of results. The National Recovery and Resilience Plan states that it will create savings of up to €1.18 billion thanks to the re-organization of healthcare facilities, the reduction of hospitalizations, the reduction of inappropriate access to the emergency room, and the containment of pharmaceutical expenditure. This amount will be used to cover the salaries for the healthcare professionals employed in the newly planned healthcare structures. The analysis of this study has taken into account the number of healthcare professionals that will be needed to operationalize the new facilities, as described in the plan and compared them with the reference salaries for each category (doctors, nurses, other healthcare workers). The annual cost for healthcare professionals has been stratified for each structure, with the following results: € 540 million for the personnel of the Community Hospitals ("Ospedali di Comunità"); € 1.1 billion for the personnel of Integrated Home Care Assistance ("Assistenza Domiciliare Integrata"); and € 540 million for the personnel of Community Homes ("Case della Comunità"). The expected € 1.18 billion expenditure is implausible to be sufficient to cover the cost for salaries of all the healthcare professionals needed, which is expected to be around € 2 billion. The National Agency for the Regional Healthcare Services (Agenzia nazionale per i servizi sanitari regionali) calculated that in Emilia-Romagna (the only region in Italy to have already implemented a healthcare structure based on the one described in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan), the activation of Community Hospitals and Community Homes reduced the rate of inappropriate access to emergency rooms by 26% (while in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan expectation is a reduction of at least by 90% for "white codes", the identified code for stable and not urgent patients). Moreover, the hypothesis for the daily cost of stay in the Community Hospital is roughly € 106, while the average current cost in the active Community Hospitals in Italy is € 132 (much higher than the National Recovery and Resilience Plan" National Recovery and Resilience Plan estimate). The underlying principle of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan is highly valuable since it strives to enhance the quality and the quantity of the healthcare services in the country that are too often left out of national investments and programs. Nevertheless, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan has critical issues due to the superficial prevision of cost. The success of the reform appears to be established by decision makers and by their long-term prospective, oriented to overcome the resistance to change.

The Portuguese housing market underwent major transformations between 2010 and 2020. Until then, a delicate but resentful stability had long existed, with distorted rent schemes and low annual price increases proportional to the national economy and the income of the Portuguese population. After the financial crisis, several internal and external variables converged to dramatically change this scenario. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have centred their attention on the difficulties that the Portuguese urban middle-class populations are facing in trying to find homes. This paper analyses these challenges and their impact quantitatively, focusing on the affordability of housing for purchase or rent and considering synthetic indicators for average household incomes in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area between the beginning of 2016 and the end of 2019. The results show that the cost of buying or renting a house in the main Portuguese urban system has become much more detached from local incomes. The article concludes with reflections on the structural reasons for the enduring inequalities in the housing markets and the difficulties recognising territorial cohesion and spatial justice as important elements shaping urban and housing policies in Portugal.

National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRPs) set out the objectives for recovery and building the socio-economic resilience of EU Member States following the crisis caused by COVID-19. In their framework, countries also declare the introduction of structural reforms and investments for their implementation. The author aims to offer a closer look at and characterize the adoption procedure and basic assumptions of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans developed by Visegrád Group Member States, which are among the greatest beneficiaries of the Plans. Thus, it is worth zooming in on the national design and approval procedures for the various recovery plans, their basic assumptions, and procedures for their approval by Union bodies. The reason for researching this issue is the characteristic distribution of accents in existing research. On the one hand, there are many publications on the European Instrument for Reconstruction and Enhancement of Resilience. On the other hand, the analysis of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans of the Visegrad Group countries has not, so far, been the scope of broader legal and comparative research.

This article examines the policy drift of the 1st Right, Portugal’s main housing program, originally designed to guarantee the right to adequate housing for families in situations of severe deprivation. This study aims to analyze how the program’s integration into the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) reconfigured its redistributive objectives. Taking the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA) as a critical case, this study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining systematic documentary and legislative analysis (2018–2025), discourse analysis of official communications, and empirical analysis of 18 municipal Local Housing Strategies, supplemented by financial execution data from RRP monitoring reports. The results reveal three interlinked forms of policy drift: (i) territorial deviation, driven by unequal municipal capacities and resource absorption; (ii) instrumental deviation, resulting from the prioritization of rehabilitation of pre-existent public housing stock over the provision of new housing; and (iii) social deviation, marked by the expansion of eligibility criteria that extend benefits to middle-income groups. Together, these dynamics demonstrate how a social-rights-based housing policy can be reshaped when integrated into a financial recovery framework, such as the RRP. This article contributes to international debates on housing governance by demonstrating how multilevel financing mechanisms can reinforce territorial inequalities, reorient policy instruments, and dilute redistributive objectives—even within ostensibly progressive recovery frameworks. It concludes by advocating for stronger social performance monitoring, differentiated instruments for distinct target groups, and improved temporal alignment between social policy objectives and EU funding cycles.

The European Union has been trying to adjust its tourism policy in response to the challenges posed by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The funding of the EU Cohesion Policy has been one of the primary mechanisms guaranteeing that all regions can be prepared to receive tourists and cope with the sustainability challenges the pandemic has raised. The recovery and resilience plan (PRR) is the most recent instrument created to help economic growth in most European Union countries. The implementation of the PRR in Algarve and Alentejo has been fundamental to understanding the Portuguese tourism sector, as these regions are heavily dependent on tourism sector revenue and were hit hard by the consecutive lockdowns in recent years. Therefore, this policy, in brief, critically assesses the tourism-related projects that received funding from the PRR until November 2023 (ex ante) and their potential to guarantee long-term tourism sustainability in Algarve and Alentejo. Despite not achieving the expected efficiency results due to delays in project execution and low investment, the PRR is still a positive upgrade for tourism-related policy in Algarve and Alentejo.

Urban environmental sustainability is a growing concern within the United Nations and the European Union’s ongoing policy agendas to fight climate change. This paper contributes to this debate by presenting the main impacts of the Operational Programme for Sustainability and Use of Resources (POSEUR 2014–2020) in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (NUTS II). The analysis was completed using the Impact-WEB_GIS platform, specially developed for this study, supported by a territorial impact assessment methodology. In addition to the production of general impact scores, five analytic dimensions were further analysed, supported by state-of-the-art (i) low-emissions economy, (ii) adaptation to climate change, (iii) risk prevention and management, (iv) environmental protection and (v) resource efficiency. At a strategic level, the research created awareness of the need to adjust regional policy to the region’s characteristics on environmental sustainability matters.

This article analyses the legal framework implemented in Portugal for the execution of its Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP). Starting from the analysis of the legal framework offered by the European Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (MRR), it critically analyses the main regulations created on a special or exceptional basis for the implementation of the Portuguese Recovery and Resilience Plan, with emphasis on the governance model, but also on the exceptional measures to facilitate budgetary procedures, expenditure authorisation and staff hiring and also special public procurement measures. As these special and exceptional measures are, as a rule, intended to relax or reduce the mechanisms of prior administrative control of certain procedures, the external control of special public procurement measures by the Portuguese Court of Auditors was strengthened. Lastly, and despite the Portuguese legislator not dedicating special legislation to it, the most appropriate means for resolving any legal disputes arising from the implementation of the Portuguese Recovery and Resilience Plan are addressed. The present article will be divided and published in two parts. The first part will be dedicated to the MRR, Portuguese RRP and special measures for its implementation already with reference to the special procurement measures approved in this context. The second part will be dedicated to the analysis of the special measures for public procurement and the appropriate means for the resolution of possible disputes arising from the execution of the national RRP. In each part we will present the respective conclusions. Keywords: EU Next Generation Funds; Recovery and Resilience Mechanism; Portuguese Recovery and Resilience Plan; special public procurement measures; administrative arbitration

Proposed for the first time by European Commission in May 2020, the “NextGenerationEU” (NGEU) program is the European Union’s most important effort to address key issues relating to public health and healthcare, digital and technological innovation, climate change, sustainable mobility, and key sociocultural aspects. In addition, the NGEU represents a response to the COVID-19 crisis through an extremely powerful financial intervention (over 800 billion euros). Italy is one of the main recipients of the NGEU plan’s resources with almost 200 billion euros received in grants and loans. Implementation of the NGEU in Italy will take place through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). The NRRP not only describes how the NGEU resources will be used, but it singles out crucial public law reforms in national legislation and organization. Unsurprisingly, public health intervention represents a major component of the NRRP. Here we summarize and discuss the rules, regulations and perspective envisaged by the NRRP to foster effective healthcare and to reshape the Italian National Health System through the redesigning of primary care, enhanced communication between hospital and community healthcare, and stronger implementation of digital technologies in public health. (www.actabiomedica.it)

The Recovery and Resilience Facility reflects unprecedented solidarity through common financing paired with an innovative governance framework. Member states can access grants and loans through the formulation of National Recovery and Resilience Plans, under a set of conditions that include minimum allocation targets and addressing country-specific recommendations. The analysis evaluates whether the governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility mitigates one of the longstanding weaknesses of the Economic and Monetary Union architecture: fiscal coordination. Assessing the prevalence of green, digital, and social priorities in the (a) National Recovery and Resilience Plans, (b) the country-specific recommendations, and (c) party manifestos through a quantitative and qualitative text analysis shows some convergence toward supranational preferences, albeit only in the green domain. I provide preliminary evidence at the stage of the formulation of the plans of the effectiveness of the Recovery and Resilience Facility fiscal policy coordination by testing whether recovery agendas in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans reflect EU or national priorities. Deviating from the limited implementation of country-specific recommendations within the European Semester, the analysis indicates the governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility orients the National Recovery and Resilience Plans toward fostering a green recovery. Findings contribute to the assessment of how pandemic recovery instruments innovate EU fiscal governance and longstanding discussions on the ineffectiveness of fiscal coordination within the Economic and Monetary Union, informing the ongoing debate on the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact and a permanent successor to the Recovery and Resilience Facility.

The incorporation of nature-based solutions into urban planning and development policies has become a pressing issue in many large cities worldwide, aiming to improve the urban environment and the well-being of city-dwellers. However, the establishment and management of urban green infrastructure can be expensive and may lead to spatial injustice or be ecologically inefficient due to the planning decisions. This study focuses on the Spatial Justice-Ecological Efficiency Nexus of urban green infrastructure in large Caucasian cities of Russia, where urbanization rates are rapidly increasing. The hypothesis of this study is that green infrastructure in Russian cities predominantly has an ecological aspect, meaning that it provides a large volume of ecosystem services that are still unavailable to a significant portion of the urban population. To explore this topic, we aim to assess the balance between the social and ecological aspects of green infrastructure in six case study cities, including Makhachkala, Grozny, Nalchik, Maykop, Vladikavkaz, and Stavropol. The assessment framework includes 12 indicators, divided into two categories: spatial justice (6 indicators) and ecological efficiency (6 indicators). The spatial justice indicators assess the availability, accessibility, and distribution of green infrastructure, while the ecological efficiency indicators evaluate the performance of regulating and supporting ecosystem services. The results revealed that despite the common prevalence of ecological side in large Russian cities, the spatial justice side in the southern cities generally dominates over the ecological side, with most cities having an unbalanced nexus. Green infrastructure in the studied cities has a low ecological input, with a mean total score of around 300 points (out of 600), with most cities lacking protected areas and green areas beyond the edge effect. Meanwhile, the social side of the nexus is more developed, with an average score of 400. The study highlights the need for a more integrated approach to urban green infrastructure planning, considering both justice and ecological aspects to ensure a more just and sustainable urban environment. Overall, in this research we introduce a multidimensional approach to understanding the functions and qualities of green infrastructure that will allow for a more comprehensive assessment and planning of the rapidly growing southern cities. This study contributes to the understanding of the complex relationships between urban green infrastructure spatial justice and ecological efficiency, providing valuable insights for urban planners, policymakers, and stakeholders seeking to create more sustainable and equitable urban environment.

<p>Climate change is one of the biggest challenges that our planet is currently facing. From seasonal shifts in climate, with droughts, heatwaves, floods and storms<strong>,</strong> the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. Cities are heavily affected by the climate change consequences, with most of Europe’s population living in cities and urban areas and projections for 2050 predicting even larger shares (Nabielek, Hamers, & Evers, 2016). At the same time, cities generate up to 80% of a country’s GDP (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2011), but also consume 75% of the natural resources and account for 60-80% of greenhouse gas emissions. That is, urbanisation and cities’ economic growth are the biggest contributors to climate change.</p><p>Heritage, as a sensitive and valuable element of the living environment, is being affected by the increase in frequency and intensity of climate-related events, posing new challenges and needs to conservators and heritage managers. But improving the resilience of the historic urban districts, adapting to urbanisation, climate change, and other social, economic, and security trends is a challenging endeavour for cities and prone to potential conflicts of interest. It requires managing tasks like accommodating a growing – and in many cases aging – population, providing the required services, fostering social, environmental, and economic sustainability, and keeping the city liveable and attractive. But a liveable, sustainable, and, above all, resilient city is not just a product of organised and well-functioning services; other crucial elements are the places that make up the city, along with their communities. Sites of significant cultural and historical value and significance have an important role to play in fostering location-based identity and social cohesion. With the increased recognition of the threats that heritage faces from climate change, but also the role heritage can play in driving climate actions, all those connected to heritage face both a profound opportunity and a challenging responsibility. (ICOMOS Climate Change and Cultural Heritage Working Group, 2019)</p><p>As a response to these threats, a bridge is needed to fill the gap between urban development, resilience planning, and heritage management to boost collaboration among all involved stakeholders and make our cities more climate neutral and resilient. This should be based on a vision to stimulate and promote development for wider adoption of solutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation in historic urban districts. This process will promote constructive dialogue, development, and exchange of best practices for achieving better integration between resilient urban planning and heritage management. Moreover, it will aim to increase awareness of the role of historic areas – with their unique value and importance – play in stimulating the general public to actively contribute to coordinated efforts on climate resilience in accordance with protection and preservation of heritage both within local environments as well as nationally and internationally.</p><p>In the long-term, the goal is to make historic urban districts and their communities climate neutral and resilient, but also branch out to issues of contemporary urban districts to build and nurture more synergies.</p>

People’s daily mobility and commuting patterns are differentiated by sociodemographic features. It relates to place as structure (spatial organization) and to public policy (spatial planning). Between urban structure and people’s traveling behaviours, spatial public policy should be called to reduce social inequality and to promote more just territories. This concerns the process of planning as well as its outcomes. Accessibility and conflict are important questions to be approached in both. The paper examines the importance of social issues in the design of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area’s (LMA) policies on mobility and spatial planning. It continues to be a peripheral matter, despite some change at the discursive level. We begin by discussing how spatial justice and social inequalities can be central to mobility and spatial planning. Secondly, the general European and national policy background is presented. Finally, some fundamental trends of LMA mobility statistics are outlined followed by a critical reading of municipal and supramunicipal mobility related policies.

Urban mobility plays an important role in addressing urban livability. The complexification and dispersion of travel due to the improvement of transport and the multiplication of our daily living places underline the relevance of multilevel territorial planning, recognizing that the knowledge of local differences is essential for more effective urban policies. This paper aims (1) to comprehend conceptually how urban mobility contributes to the urban livability from the local to metropolitan level and (2) to assess the previous relation toward a livable metropolis based on the readily available statistics for the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Hence, a triangulation between conceptual, political/operative, and quantitative/monitoring approaches is required. The methodology follows four steps: (1) literature review focusing on the quantification of urban mobility within the urban livability approach; (2) data collection from the Portuguese statistics system; (3) data analysis and results, using principal component analysis (PCA) followed by cluster analysis (CA); (4) discussion and conclusions. In Portugal, although it is implicit, consistency is evident between the premises of recent urban mobility policies and respective planning instruments, such as the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP), and the premises of urban livability as an urban movement. Focusing on the national statistics system, the available indicators that meet our quality criteria are scarce and represent a reduced number of domains. Even so, they allow identifying intra-metropolitan differences in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA) that could support multilevel planning instruments. The results identified five principal components related to commuting at the local and intermunicipal level, including car use as well as social and environmental externalities, and they reorganized the 18 LMA municipalities into eight groups, clearly isolating Lisbon, the capital, from the others. The identification of sensitive territories and respective problems based on urban livability principles is fundamental for an effective urban planning from livable communities to livable metropolis.

Purpose: This study conceptualizes spatial justice as a competitive intelligence framework for rural territories, examining how justice-oriented governance of rural public landscapes generates strategic knowledge that supports decision-making and enhances regional competitiveness. It addresses a key gap between spatial planning and competitive intelligence by reframing rural public landscapes as intelligence-generating territorial assets rather than merely environmental or policy instruments. Methodology/approach: The study adopts a systematic conceptual review and analytical synthesis approach. A structured literature review was conducted using Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, covering the period 2000–2024 and focusing on spatial justice, rural landscape governance, competitive intelligence, and regional competitiveness. The selected studies were analyzed using a thematic analytical matrix integrating justice dimensions, governance mechanisms, intelligence processes, and competitiveness outcomes. Originality/Relevance: The originality of the study lies in extending competitive intelligence analysis to the territorial scale, moving beyond firm-centric perspectives. By positioning spatial justice as a strategic capability and rural public landscapes as intelligence platforms, the article aligns directly with the analytical scope of the Journal of Sustainable Competitive Intelligence and contributes to debates on strategic territorial governance. Key findings: The findings indicate that spatial justice-oriented governance functions as an intelligence-processing system that enables the collection, interpretation, and mobilization of territorially embedded information related to access, participation, and recognition. These processes enhance strategic coordination, policy learning, and adaptive capacity, supporting multidimensional regional competitiveness, including economic resilience, social cohesion, environmental sustainability, and territorial attractiveness. Theoretical/methodological contributions: The study advances competitive intelligence theory by integrating spatial justice into territorial governance analysis and demonstrates the value of systematic conceptual review and analytical synthesis for developing intelligence-based frameworks in interdisciplinary regional research.

Resilience evaluation systems have been used to aggregate and calibrate multi-dimensional resilience-related inputs. But these evaluation systems do not offer comprehensive outputs nor sufficient analytical capacity to support the design and implementation of city and community recovery and resilience plans. Urban resilience research covers multiple fields of study like earthquakes, floods, and tsunamis, amongst other types of disaster risks. This study focuses on the strategic needs of resilience and recovery plans for Portuguese cities and communities and proposes a sophisticated mapping system to address this gap. The main output of the proposed approach is a multi-layer heatmaps with scores based on various disasters for all Portuguese cities. The resilience score is obtained through real statistical geo-data analysis.