Europe and the EU are facing several mega trends and territorial challenges and regions have different territorial capital and potentials for development. Understanding the position of one’s region or city in a larger territorial context and including a European perspective in strategy building and policy making is of major importance for utilising new and underused territorial potentials. There are great potentials in the ESPON knowledge base for dealing with these challenges and potentials. DeTeC is an ESPON scientific platform project that strives to enhance the accessibility of the ESPON knowledge base and to support local and regional practitioners and policy makers by the following actions:
- Conducting six regional workshops (“Regional Labs”) in Edinburgh (UK), Malmö (SE), Valetta (MT), Graz (AT), Bialystok (PL) and Szeged (HU), discussing the added value of ESPON projects, tools and data for regional and municipal stakeholders in spatial planning and regional development.
- Developing an interactive handbook that provides hands-on guidance to methods, data, tools and good practices developed in ESPON projects which can help detecting territorial potentials and challenges in regions and cities. Combining ESPON results with local and regional knowledge is a focus of DeTeC.
