Territorial Capital and Transition processes: Smart Network in Calabria for dynamic scenarios reacting to shocks

The recent global pandemic is rapidly disrupting established systems of work, education, mobility and welfare, highlighting the need of sharp, place-sensitive and people-centered public policy measures. For the most vulnerable economies and population groups, the ongoing pressures and the associated socio-economic cost are twofold. On the one hand, the post-pandemic scenario indicates larger long-term detrimental effects (and slow-paced recovery) across territorial settings with weak institutional capacity, insufficient public healthcare, low social cohesion along with poor digital and technological development. On the other hand, the cross-domain decarbonization/climate neutrality objective poses additional transition-related risks, which will be felt very differently across different regions (EC 2019). In May 2020, the European Commission has proposed a powerful, modern and revamped long-term EU budget boosted by Next Generation EU, an emergency temporary recovery instrument, to help repair the immediate economic and social damage brought by the coronavirus pandemic, kick start the recovery and prepare for a better future for the next generation. To exit the crisis and embark on the path to becoming a smarter, environmentally responsible and cohesive EU economy, ensuring that change is being equally well received across locations is therefore critical. Sub-national regions – and so sub-regional economies - are differently endowed with a combination of ‘tangible and intangible assets and conditions’ including capital accumulation, natural resources, human and social capital, as well as established production factors and consumption modes, practices and routines among others’, notably territorial capital. This paper is, hence, aimed at providing a novel approach to investigate the role played by specific characteristics and conditions of territorial capital in mitigating the social and economic cost of transitioning towards a climate-neutral economy based on dynamic analysis of equilibrium and disequilibrium in response to a shock. The territorial capital is turned in a grid pattern, composed by nodes and flows that change configurations according to the significance of data concerning an event. The paper is part of research activities conducting within the SOUND project, which aims to introduce this dynamic approach to building a smart platform to support transition-oriented planning activities. Concurrently, it is proposed a first application in the Calabria region in defining a configuration based on labour market areas, as spatial and statistical units of reference, to highlight the local performance for the technological progress related to climate change policy action. The dynamic aspect is investigated concerning the different patterns that clusters, according to the EU portal for emerging and changing industrial system for smart specialization, can activate with the dynamic observation of territorial capital components.