Description
Description (EN): This Targeted Analysis covers the so-called Northern Growth Zone that stretches from Oslo via Örebro and Turku to St Petersburg. This corridor includes the northern parts of ScanMed TEN-T Corridor and is aimed at boosting the region’s competitiveness in the global arena through the creation of a single, internationally recognized market and commuter belt. Altogether, the political significance of the growth corridors in the Baltic Sea Region has grown due to investments in infrastructure, which create potential for developing the area in relation to international investments and Russian markets. Because of this multi-scalar context, the territorial policy development and comprehensive planning of growth corridors requires a knowledge-base and indicators that fairly capture the functionality and interactions between different countries, diverse urban and rural regions, and more specifically, between their citizens and economic actors and actions. Currently, the spatial data attached to different areas along the corridors that cross several administrative boundaries is often insufficiently catered for and utilized in the planning processes. In particular, data describing the interactions within the corridors are often limited. Therefore, this Targeted Analysis will address an important need for further understanding of the territorial realities of corridors relying on location-based data. The long-term emphasis of corridor development needs to be supported by new means of data utilization as the development dynamics of these territories no longer adapt to the traditional administrative boundaries of data gathering. New data sources, such as big data, offer promising potential for analysing the dynamics and interactions within the growth corridors. Increasingly, data and information from analysing internet activities or social media can be used for observing territorial development trends. Thus, in the context of European growth corridors, this Targeted Analysis will investigate to what degree new ‘big data’ collection approaches can be used to enrich existing territorial policies and provide more up-to-date evidence. The use of big data will offer opportunities, in combination with traditional statistical data, to explore flows between different areas within growth corridors.
Read more Achievements (EN): Some of the most promising data that describe flows and interactions across territorial boundaries, such as social media data, customer data, and price scanner data, raise legitimate privacy concerns among the citizens. This is why legislation both nationally and internationally is necessary to provide clarity and uniformity that are needed across national boundaries regarding how privacy can be protected while utilising such datasets for policy-making in the public interest across administrative boundaries.
According to the findings of our ESPON project, BIG DATA such legislation would support the development of new methodologies that couple new datasets with new processes to analyse the data. Further, it would support the development of big data and analytics ecosystems that would ease the usage of the data for public sector purposes.
Since utilisation of new datasets requires expertise from several fields, EU and national actors should prioritise long-term research on how new data sources can be analysed to support territorial development and cohesion.
Furthermore, data standardization, quality benchmarking and data harmonization across administrative boundaries would further promote transnational corridor development and platform creation to enable wide-spread data utilisation. Currently, the lack of harmonization makes the utilisation of big data challenging, especially when crossing national boundaries. The development of a joint harmonized system that takes into account the special needs of corridor governance should be a common objective.
The case study of Estonia: Mobile positioning data:
An example from Estonia illustrates how mobile positioning data provides more frequent and up-to-date Spatio-temporal information than conventional methods used in transportation planning. The value of data utilisation relates strongly to the possibility of having near real-time insights into a nation or city’s mobility patterns. An objective of the case study was to develop a high-quality database useful for the spatial and transportation planning in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of the Republic of Estonia.
Mobile positioning has proved itself as a very good and promising data source for studying mobility-related aspects of the society and/or smaller groups. The data has high time accuracy which reveals short-term differences, includes movements between the place of residence and the workplace as well as other regular places, and differentiates the movements of different social groups (e.g. by gender, age, nationality) and the types of movers. The ESPON project Big Data developed a methodology for producing an everyday mobility database containing abstracted Origin-Destination matrices (or O-D Matrices) of individual-level movements between territorial communities.
In this case study mobile positioning data has been used only to analyse movements within Estonia, but mobile positioning data also allows to estimate flows for cross-border movements based on mobile network operators roaming data. The possibilities of mobile positioning data for cross-border settings should be studied further, as the data is increasingly available in neighboring nations of Finland, Estonia, and Sweden. This kind of data exists in all European nations and if it became more accessible to researchers and government agencies, it could support cross-cutting analyses of the functionalities of all of Europe’s main corridors (e.g. the TEN-T network).
To achieve such ambitions, legislation and ecosystem development are needed to support and ease the usage of mobile positioning data in both the public sector and academic research supporting territorial development. The utilisation of this data has historically required long value chains requiring expertise from several fields, thus indicating the need for public-private partnerships and ecosystem building to foster public value creation. The analytical approach used in this Estonia case is nearly ready for wider use.
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Website: https://archive.espon.eu/
Expected Results (EN): The objective of this activity is to build new kind of evidence for corridor-based development. In addition, this targeted analysis will provide added value for planners and decision makers in generating new knowledge about the spatial interdependencies of actors and regions at diverse scales along growth corridors. More concretely, the objective of this activity is to satisfy the stakeholders’ knowledge needs as defined below: What are the policy needs, defined by the stakeholders, that could be better addressed with an improved understanding of spatial development trends, dynamics and interactions along growth corridors? What are the different categories of data sources and what related data sets can be collected and used to fill those gaps of knowledge in the stakeholders’ territories and, more generally, in growth corridors areas around Europe? What are the most efficient methodologies – according to different data’s typologies – to collect, process and analyse those new data sets? What are the main conditions and potential blocking factors for accessing and using them? How could governance and territorial coordination be improved between regions or countries that have diverse potentials and legislative restrictions for big and open data? What are the development potentials to answer the stakeholders’ needs in the study areas covered by this Targeted Analysis, and how can these potentials best be exploited? How could the cooperation between public authorities and private providers and platforms be improved to foster “big data” utilisation in spatial planning and territorial development policies? What are the main policy recommendations for improving new big data collection and provision, both in the study areas covered by the activity but also generally along growth corridors throughout the EU? The result of the service will be increased knowledge about available sources of big data and new methodologies on analysing interactions within the growth corridors. Eventually, this will lead to wider utilisation of such data and methods, which will improve the evidence-base for planning and decision making not only in the stakeholder’s areas but also Europe-wide. In this perspective, the main outcomes of the service should be: An overview on main evidence-based gaps to understand spatial dynamics and interactions and to address stakeholders’ policy needs along the Northern Growth Zone corridors. In order to fill those gaps, a European and comparative categorisation of available data sources and methodologies to collect and use those new big data sets. Using these new sets, detailed case studies in the three stakeholders’ territories (in Finland, Sweden and Estonia) to demonstrate the potentials of big data for integrated territorial policy development and improved coordination in the related growth corridors (including a set of maps, practical examples showing the added-value of those new data for policy purposes, policy recommendations to answer stakeholders’ needs…). A practical guide describing how to improve the use of big data sets in territorial development policies (investigating possible cross-analysis with existing data sources) and policy recommendations to leverage territorial cooperation at European growth corridors level.
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Thematic information
Specific Objective:
Upgraded knowledge transfer and use of analytical user support
Thematic Objective:
(11) enhancing institutional capacity of public authorities and stakeholders and efficient public administration through actions to strengthen the institutional capacity and the efficiency of public administrations and public services related to the implementation of the ERDF, and in support of actions under the ESF to strengthen the institutional capacity and the efficiency of public administration.
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Investment Priority:
(11 ETC) ETC specific for transnational cooperation: enhancing institutional capacity of public authorities and stakeholders and efficient public administration by developing and coordinating macro-regional and sea-basin strategies
