Barbara Szyda (p), Paweł Churski, Czesław Adamiak, Anna Dubownik, Maciej Pietrzykowski

Luigi Benfratello

COVID-19 pandemic has brought far-reaching consequences for the economic and social situation in the world. Although the end of the pandemic is increasingly being reported, the consequences of the economic crisis will be appreciable for years to come. To sort out with these effects is the most important and, at the same time, the most difficult economic challenge, both internationally and regionally. In this regard, it is particularly important to reply to the question about the socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis for the development of the least resilient areas, primarily the inner peripheries, representing lower level of economic development.

The results of ESPON research provide that inner peripheries are common throughout Europe, regardless of the level of development of the country. Inner peripheries are areas affected by a combination of undesirable processes, conditions and evolutionary dynamics resulting in limitations to their developmental potential.

The aim of the paper is to delimit and classify inner peripheries based on a wide range of indicators of quality of life, economic performance and communication accessibility. Functional urban areas (FUA) delimited based on migration, commuting and transport accessibility served as spatial units of analysis. The purposeful choice of indicators was followed by multivariate exploratory statistical analysis. The results point at a wide diversity of the characters of peripherality in various geographic settings. It points to the utility of case study approaches and place-sensitive politics in challenging development issues during the current pandemic crisis. The results presented constitute the first stage of the implementation of the research project TIPERICO (www.tiperico.web.amu.edu.pl) financed by the National Science Centre in Poland (UMO-2020/37/B/HS4/01034): Trajectories and challenges of the development of internal periphery in the new conditions of post SARS-CoV-2 cohesion, whose task is to identify the socio-economic development challenges in selected areas of internal peripheries and their resistance to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. This will enable to design recommendations for the changes in development policy interventions.