Aydan Ege Güven (p), Giulio Breglia, Marco Modica

Alexandra Sandu

Regions are increasingly interconnected through population mobility, economic exchanges, and infrastructure networks that create complex interdependencies, shaping regional resilience. As these connections deepen, the ability of regions to withstand disruptions becomes increasingly vital. In this context, critical infrastructures, such as electricity grids, water supply, and transportation, play a crucial role in ensuring the continued delivery of essential services, economic and social wellbeing. However, their interconnected nature can also lead to cascading failures, affecting entire regions.
As regions expand and face greater uncertainties, their ability to withstand shocks has become crucial. Resilience, broadly defined as a socio-economic system’s adaptive capacity to shocks, is strongly influenced by the sufficiency of critical infrastructures and the interdependencies within these networks. Insufficient backups and infrastructure, or hub overdependence can escalate natural events into disasters.
Critical infrastructures (CI) are the infrastructures providing continued delivery of essential services, ensuring their accessibility for sustaining economic and social life. While there is no universal definition of critical infrastructure, energy, ICT, and transportation are widely recognized, whereas housing, elderly care, and legal systems receive less attention. What makes these infrastructures truly "critical," however, is their potential to turn a disruptive event into a disaster if they are susceptible to failure and lack redundant capacity. Effectively addressing this criticality requires examining critical infrastructures not only through the lens of engineering resilience but also in terms of their geographical distribution, sufficiency, and interconnections. Yet, research in this area remains limited, and the link between critical infrastructures and regional resilience is still under-explored.
To better understand these dynamics, it is crucial to examine how CI contributes to regional resilience. Recognizing their role in shaping a region’s ability to withstand and recover from disruptions provides a foundation for more effective risk mitigation. In regions where critical infrastructure is diverse and sufficient, service continuity is more likely to be maintained, enhancing the region's adaptability. Therefore, the aim of this study is to map CI and regional resilience across EU NUTS 2 regions and provide a picture of the potential criticalities. In this study, CI indices based on numerosity and sufficiency will be mapped. The relationship with regional resilience -assessed with a multi-layer approach- and CI will be analysed with a regression analysis. By mapping critical infrastructures, this study bridges single-infrastructure resilience research with complex adaptive systems theory, paving the way for planning regional resilience and disaster mitigation in the face of uncertainties.

Alexandra Sandu (p), Alexandru Bănică , Ionel Muntele

Johannes Lohwasser

This study presents a comparative analysis of how cities and regions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) responded to two distinct global crises: the 2007-08 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a methodological approach that measures economic resilience using GDP trajectory slopes rather than absolute values, we analyse the performance of 54 major cities and their corresponding NUTS2 regions across ten post-socialist countries. Our findings reveal complex resilience patterns, particularly in Polish regions, which demonstrated remarkable recovery despite initial vulnerability. By examining urban primacy metrics alongside resilience indicators, we demonstrate that regions with balanced urban networks generally outperformed those dominated by single large cities in both crises. Notably, the research identifies disparities between financial crisis and pandemic shock responses, with some territories showing high adaptability to one type of disturbance but vulnerability to the other. These findings contribute to theoretical debates on urban and regional resilience while offering practical insights for policymakers seeking to enhance regional/urban resilience against diverse types of economic shocks. Finally, the research highlights that in CEE, urban/regional resilience depends not only on the strength of individual urban centres but on the broader configuration of urban networks and their resources for coordinated adaptation.

Johannes Lohwasser (p)

Fernando Rubiera Morollón

Land take represents the increase of artificial surfaces and soil sealing (i.e. the covering of soils by buildings and layers of (partly) impermeable artificial material) and is an important indicator for human influence on the local environment. It has direct negative impacts on multiple ecological functions of soil (e.g., resource, filter or habitat functions) as well as enhances the danger of flooding in exposed regions and heat islands in urban areas. Thus, land use can be considered a crucial element of climate policies.
A common way to analyze the relationship between anthropogenic factors and environmental degradation is the application of the STIRPAT (Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology) model. While most STIRPAT studies investigate anthropogenic impacts on emissions at national level, the presented paper uses increases of the settlement and transport area (as proxy for land take) as an indicator for local environmental degradation. The local perspective is taken, as it is mostly the municipal authorities that decide on land use in Germany. Overall, the derived regression model employs local administrative data of more than 2000 Bavarian municipalities from 2014-2023.
The paper contributes to the literature in the following aspects. First, and in contrast to most STIRPAT applications, the thematically adapted model focuses on local impacts at the level of municipalities. Second, the model controls for spatial effects (it is reasonable to assume spatial dependencies of the dependent and independent variables due to communal networks or higher-level offices), communal policies (e.g., building permits or local taxes) as well as structural factors (e.g., population density or demographic factors). Additionally, the paper considers non-linear dynamics of variables (e.g., EKC hypothesis). Finally, the so derived results are compared with results based on district (NUTS 3) and federal states (NUTS 2) level data to investigate the potential value-added of data at a true local scale in this context.

Fernando Rubiera Morollón (p), Guillermo Rodríguez Lopez

Aydan Ege Güven

One of the key aspects of regional science has been understanding the decisions regarding the location of economic activities. Such decisions determine the specialisation of territories and therefore their economic prosperity and resilience. Distilling the essence of all the classic and most current theories on the location of economic activities, it is concluded that two basic variables are behind all the processes of concentration/dispersion of economic activities: the 'size' -in terms of the generation of large urban agglomerations capable of unleashing external economies associated with the agglomeration- and the 'distance' -fundamentally with respect to large concentrations of population, that is, with respect to the 'size'-. The development of the digital economy has brought back to light the debate on the importance of 'distance'. New technologies reduce the costs associated with distance and should supposedly facilitate the processes of relocation. We have built a database at a local level for Spain from 1950 to 2010 with which we can study the location decisions of the different activities. Spain is an ideal case, as in these 60 years it has experienced profound economic and social change. The quality of infrastructure has also changed completely. Looking back over these decades we can see to what extent ‘distance’ and ‘size’ have changed their roles and to what extent classic approaches to location are still relevant or not.