Christina Kakderi (p)

Simona Ciappei

We are currently experiencing a period of significant transitions. The shift toward sustainable production and consumption, alongside the digital transformation, holds the potential to generate lasting environmental benefits while opening new avenues for economic growth. Europe’s green and digital transition must be just and affordable, prioritising the development of new skilled jobs, extensive retraining, smooth labour market transformations and the development of accessible products and services. While these twin transformations present significant opportunities, they also pose challenges to the social fabric, with the risk of increasing (or creating new) inequalities, particularly for people of low socio-economic status and those limited access to infrastructure (European Parliament, 2024; OECD, 2021). The implementation of the two transitions will also vary across territories, as Member States, regions, and cities have different starting points and capacities to respond to both the green and the digital transition, depending on many contextual factors such as their industrial structure, their international connectivity/collaboration and the skills of their populations. Ideally, the two policy streams and societal transitions would complement and reinforce each other. However, their dynamic interdependence makes the twin transition a more complex process with largely unknown (positive and negative) implications to economies and societies. A recent report published by the EC Joint Research Centre (JRC) highlights that these transitions can sometimes clash, creating unintended consequences (Muench et al., 2022). The twin transition is anticipated to generate new layers of cumulative and intertwined inequalities, with conflicting dimensions appearing over different time horizons and geographical areas (Galgóczi, 2023). The paper maps EU policies and initiatives established since 2020, driving the green and digital transition and outlines a typology categorising their different perspective on how they deal with inequalities. The collection of these texts allows for the establishment of a theoretical framework, and a comprehensive understanding of the EU's policy landscape and its approach to ensuring an equitable transition. We reveal tensions, gaps and limitations in how they view transitions-driven inequalities and raise questions about the EU's ability to achieve a just and equitable twin transition.

Roberta Capello, Simona Ciappei (p), Camilla Lenzi

Simonetta Armondi

Rapid technological advancements, primarily in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics, opening to digitalization and platformisation opportunities, have relaunched the debate regarding their impact on employment, highlighting vast heterogeneity across occupational groups, with the least skilled and least educated workers proved to be the most vulnerable to substitution effects. This paper re-examines this statement by claiming that labour market outcomes vary depending on the digital transformation considered. By distinguishing conceptually and empirically two main ongoing digital transformations, i.e., digitalisation and platformisation, the paper shows their positive, though highly selective, effects for specific occupational groups. Based on an empirical analysis on Italian NUTS3 regions in the period 2018-2023, the paper highlights the role of platforms for the creation of gig jobs, as much as the importance of advanced digitalisation for the creation of creative jobs. Results warn about a wage inequality anxiety, calling for mitigating policies accompanying the diffusion of digitalization and platformization in the upcoming years.

Simonetta Armondi (p)

Alberto Marzucchi

This paper explores the spatial materiality of digitalisation in Italy’s extended urbanisation (Schmid, Topalovic, 2023),
where unprecedented investments are underway after saturation in other European regions. The taken-for-granted
purity of the 'digital turn' in global, national, and local urbanisation initiatives (Armondi, Di Vita, Galimberti, 2024; www.operationalgeographies.polimi.it; https://www.dastu.polimi.it/prin-italian-geographies/) hides wicked spatial problems. Places such as productive areas, technical hinterlands, operational landscapes, logistics hubs, and extractive zones are at the heart of the dynamics of environmental violence and techno-extractivism driven by state infrastructures and operations of capital (Mezzadra, Neilson, 2013). Key manifestations include, in particular, data centres (with technologies demanding soil, high water and energy inputs).
These emerging digital territories involve uneven processes, harming and exploiting communities, workers, and places they traverse, reconfiguring space and powers. Adopting a critical geography and political ecology framework to look at the Italian case in the context of wider global dynamics, the paper outlines three sections:
• Introducing the materiality of urbanisation-as digitalisation (Datta, 2023);
• Exploring ongoing digitalisation-driven territorial reconfigurations and patterns (of logistics warehouses and data centers) with preliminary reflections on the state’s
role, the operations of capital, and the bargaining capacity of regional and local authorities.

Stefano Basilico, Alberto Marzucchi (p), Sandro Montresor

Francisco Enrique Santarremigia

This paper focuses on the combination of green and digital technologies at the regional level. Using patent data, we put forward an original measurement of the regional speed of green-digital (ie twin) combination: the temporal distance between the time at which a combination is realised for the first time in the frontier region and the time at which this same combination is accomplished in the focal region. We proceed by investigating the drivers and the technological impact related to this speed. We find that the speed of combination is enhanced by dealing with broad and diverse twin technologies. The speed at which the gap is closed, also crucially depends on the interdependencies between green and digital domains, captured by the overlap in their knowledge bases. Counterintuitively, the longer the combination paths, the faster the region combines green and digital technologies. This finding is then rationalised further looking at the policy and network characteristics. Finally, we find that the earlier the combination happens, the greater is likely to be the impact on subsequent inventions, but only for granted patents. Overall, these results are discussed in terms of policy recommendations, given the high attention placed by policymakers on the twin transition.

Aditya Kapoor, Gemma Dolores Molero (p), Francisco Enrique Santarremigia (p), Mehdi Zarehparast Malekzadeh, Ashwani Kumar Malviya, Tom Flynn, Maria Chiara Leva

Christina Kakderi

The FITTER-EU project addresses the critical challenge to help ensure that a fair and inclusive twin transition encompassing both green and digital transformation, in Europe is delivered. The project takes a process-oriented approach with the aim to replicate and extend it to multiple contexts/sectors throughout the EU. For benchmarking, the project implements this approach in six use cases - Germany, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, covering four contexts/sectors - Energy, transport, building, and agri-food/agriculture. This extended abstract introduces an innovative evolutionary tree framework to map the project’s developmental stages from data collection to the final policy-relevant outputs, similar to the evolution of a tree through the seasons —Winter (Research inputs and foundation), Spring (Progression and fine-tuning of research towards actionability), and Summer (policy-level decision-making - Influence, Impact, and Guidelines)—each illustrated by distinct figures (Figures 1–3). The fruit-bearing “Summer” season in the FITTER-EU project becomes possible through the development of a Fitter Digital Platform powered by an intelligent decision-support system for policymakers. Thus, the digital platform is the fruit or the manifestation of all the research-heavy work carried out across the preceding seasons, including data gathering, scenario building, vulnerability mapping, along complex operation insights. It is symbolic of the strength of the roots that support the FITTER-EU evolutionary tree and that ultimately help produce the fruit. The digital platform will be used to identify and mitigate risks of social exclusion among vulnerable groups during the twin transition. Preliminary outcomes include the development of quantifiable composite indicators for four sectors (Energy, transport, buildings, and agriculture) that form the basis of scenario building and the corresponding vulnerability mapping process. Further, these findings inform targeted policy interventions and underpin the development of best practice guides. The innovation of this work lies in its potential to drive anticipatory governance and ensure that transition policies do not inadvertently exacerbate existing inequalities.