RT @ChristophidouEU: In turbulent times, 🇪🇺 needs both its firm roots & strategic agility. #CohesionPolicy has proved to offer both. We cou….

#ERSA2025 starts tomorrow in #Athens. This is where regional science meets reality: 1,100+ papers, 930 minds, and a shared intent to turn turbulence into prosperity. 930 participants, 1,100 papers & the will to turn chance encounters into new research.

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#EU integration leads to economic #growth, but not evenly. As Petrakos, @alexsamoth & Alexiou argue in @RegionalStudies, trade in goods hollows out peripheral regions, while services uplift. The two single market economies: one thrives, the other stalls.

Ask if a #Trump-style war on #science could cross the #Atlantic and you miss the point: it already has. As my new paper with @ZhuoyingYou & Teirlinck shows, in #Europe there are no bonfires, just the slow unpicking of its #research & #innovation capacity.

Honoured to receive the Sir Peter Hall Award from the RSA (@regstud). To be named alongside scholars who shaped my field is humbling. More lasting still are the life-long friendships and debates that make research a community, not a solitude.

Political extremism is not just a political risk. It is a brake on #Europe’s capacity to invent its future. My new Research Policy paper with @ZhuoyingYou & Peter Teirlinck shows that #research and #innovation falter precisely where the extremes thrive.

Public R&D is meant to bridge Europe’s divides; instead, it shores up the winners. @fitjar, in a thought-provoking article just out in Research Policy, finds that funding flows towards #regions rich in talent and infrastructure, exacerbating #inequality.

#Devolution without local capacity is like a gift that cannot be used. Where local #institutions require improvements, targeted #investment, not mere #autonomy, is the main driver of #resilience. Check my new paper with @RajKharel8 in @WorldDevJournal:

County websites are more than noticeboards; they are mirrors of place. In their new @RSPP_RSAI paper, @Mrtz_Schuetz, @LukasKriesch & @S_Losacker mine 360,000 paragraphs to map the tone and themes of German local governance.

Rural identity and welfare anxieties are not mere subplots but central to the changing Dutch politics. As Veenhof, Halleck Vega & @Eefchjen show the deepening fractures in the #Netherlands represent an acute diagnosis of neglected places and fading #trust.

Resilience in #Nepal is not the child of #decentralisation alone; it flourishes where #devolution takes the form of targeted, well-designed investment. Raj Kharel & I on the limits of local autonomy in an emerging country in our new @WorldDevJournal paper.

From the blue coasts to neglected interiors, #banking deserts carve invisible wealth divides across #Europe. As @_AlexandraSandu & I show in @economyandspace a geography of exclusion persists; a simple bank account divides the fortunate from the forgotten.

Europe’s green & digital ambitions map unequally across the continent, shaped less by policy than by inherited economic and institutional strengths. Check the new @jbarberoeco, Collado, @ernestorodcresp & @anabelamsantos paper in European Planning Studies:

The digital age grants us endless methods, but the real prize is synthesis. Sánchez-Hernández, writing in @geogjournal, reminds us that in a data-rich era, economic #geography flourishes through plurality & the messy dialogue of evidence, theory & context.

Brexit’s drama starved #UK #SMEs of #credit, especially in the periphery. @cem__soner, Alsakka & Mantovan reveal in the Journal of Rural Studies how uncertainty choked SME lending, leaving #rural #Britain especially exposed and deepening regional divides.

#Banking deserts persist in #CEE. There, #geography dictates financial fate. My new research with @_AlexandraSandu in @economyandspace shows that financial #inclusion remains hostage to place and, without trust, #DigitalBanking cannot bridge the gap.

Radicalism stems less from #poverty or #inequality than from the ache of being stuck in a place that doesn't matter. According to Tubadji, Burger & Webber in Social Indicators Research, it grows in towns drained of people and public culture.

Where the world’s discontented fight, rural Japan picks the same party. As @jannohentzsch & @kovsiann show in @journalEPOP, #populism thrives on absence. In Japan’s declining towns, the state never left, with subsidies & social ties guaranteeing stability.

Beneath the glamorous surface of “Made in Italy” lies a disquieting truth. @dariadenti & @IammarinoSimona find that forced #labour is far more prevalent that imagined. #Italy has a geography of exploitation where race is not the sole or even primary axis.

Where others see periphery, many see potential. According to Korsgaard, @wbgartner, @DomenicoDenton2, Tillmar & @JohanGaddefors in @ERD_IntJournal, #rural areas can use local entrepreneurship and cooperative ingenuity to turn ‘nothing’ into novel markets.