Professor Rob Atkinson presented his long-lasting research on small towns at the “Small Town Talk”, organised by HCKF.
The long-time experience and research of professor Rob Atkinson has been at the core of the Small Towns Talk, organised by the Institute for Urban Planning of the University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenbergthe in the context of Hochschul Campus Kleistadt Forschung (HCKF) research project on 30th June 2022. In particular, he presented three main research projects focusing on European small towns in which he worked: ESPON project on “Attractiveness of European Regions and Cities for Residents and Visitors” (2010-2012), ESPON Applied Research Project “Small and Medium Sized Towns in their functional context” (TOWN – 2013-2015), and Horizon 2020 project “Inequality, Urbanization and Territorial Cohesion: Developing the European Social Model of economic growth and democratic capacity” (2017-2021).
Starting from these works, the seminar addressed a question that is also crucial for the PISTE project: how can small and medium-sized towns be defined? Population, size and density are all relevant elements to identify them, but they are not enough to understand their complexity and this is the reason why criteria deriving from functionalist approaches and supralocal characteristics have also been used in the above-mentioned projects. The result is a complex set of frameworks with no simple answers. According to Atkinson, the place-based approach, which has become conventional since the Barca report, is often seen as the answer, but it is not a cure-all, because it requires “capacity to act”. In this sense, when designing policies in small and medium-sized towns, a lot of features need to be considered, such as the types of governance or leadership and the territorial capital. These issues are also crucial for the PISTE project and they are among the reasons why our Working Package 2 started with the analysis of the regulatory framework and the local networks of policy actors.
