Territorial Scenarios and Visions for Europe
The ESPON project ET2050 (Territorial Scenarios and Visions for Europe) aims at Supporting policy makers in formulating a long-term integrated and coherent vision for the (smart, sustain-able and inclusive) development of the EU territory. This aim is twofold: content-wise, a prod-uct, namely a vision for the European Territory, has to be developed; and process-wise, those who will elaborate this product, namely policy makers, have to be supported by sound scientific knowledge.
As is often the case in territorial development policy, the process is essential to achieve a suc-cessful result. This process is complex, since it entails involving a wide array of key-players, inviting them to widen their thematic, temporal and territorial horizons, i.e. to imagine a future that deliberately transcends sector-based, short-term and domestic policy considerations to-wards the definition of the European Territorial Vision. The “smart, sustainable and inclusive” policy-aims included in the above mission-statement of the project paraphrase the EU 2020 strategy.
In order to support the process of defining scenarios and the Vision, different tasks are focused on updating and harmonising databases, improving the design and/or geographic coverage of the models according to the needs of the exercise, to establish linkages between the various models to be used, and to specify the kind of policy-relevant indicators most likely to be needed for the Territorial Impact Assessment while clarifying the models’ ability to provide them.
RIKS has applied its land use model Metronamica to support these tasks. Linking Metronamica to various socio-economic models, we provided spatially explict assessments of the various scenarios.