25 Jun Comparative Research Project (2012-2015): ‘Benchmarking Future City-Regions: The Basque Country, Catalonia, Scotland, Iceland, Liverpool/Manchester, Oresund, Dublin & Portland’ [www.cityregions.org]

The research project’s website that I have been carrying out since 2012 as a PostDoctoral Research Fellow in the Future of Cities field, with the support of Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science and the Basque Government Scientific Policy Direction (in collaboration with academic/scientific agents and institutions) and the University of Oxford (UK), Future of Cities Programme, COMPAS and InSIS, has been renowned after different previous versions:

• In 2012, I started a beta version of the project, based on the Scientific Direction of the Euskal Hiria / Basque City-Region 2012 Congress in collaboration with the Basque Regional Government, by setting up two platforms: on the one hand, http://www.basquecity.org in English and, on the other hand, http://www.euskalhiria.org in Basque and Spanish. I called this part the “Future of City-Regions”.
• In 2013, I developed the Conceptual and Analytical Approach of the research project, presenting them in several research papers (Flexible Cities International Symposium, RSA Winter Conference, St Antony College Seminar, among others) by digging into the meaning and the applications of the City-Region for the spatial analysis and the policy making. After ending this part of the project, I continued with the second part called the “Comparative Territorial Benchmarking”.
• In 2014, I am carrying out and gathering the Empirical Approach’s 8 City-Region case studies while transferring in parallel the scientific knowledge directly to the Basque Country Ikerbasque through a Research Centre. Here listed some of the key themes that I considered linked with my whole research when it refers to this project, such as: Reflections on Smart City determinism, Social Innovation Critical conception, Territorial Development strategies, Horizon 2020 EU Strategy, among other reflections and projects I am thinking about at present time.

This is the new version of the website that gathers the whole research work (stored in the old version of the beta version), in order to build on the 8 City-Region case studies of the Empirical Approach and design/experiment in the real case the Policy Approach.

The research project titled “The Future of City-Regions <> Comparative Territorial Benchmarking & Connections” has recently become then “Benchmarking Future City-Regions”.

To be continued >