Territorial Inequalities and Cohesion Policies in Urban, Suburban and Marginal areas: Open Challenges

Despite the efforts deployed to promote territorial cohesion, at all governance levels, territorial inequalities are growing in contemporary European territories. At the same time, the diffusion at the EU level of a territorial cohesion perspective has been met with growing interest, even in the face of a still fuzzy and ambiguous definition of the concept, which alludes to different dimensions and meanings. The H2020 Cohsmo project aims to understand the relation between socio-economic inequality, urbanisation and territorial cohesion, as well as to investigate how territorial cohesion at different European scales affects economic growth, spatial justice and democratic capacities, looking in particular at the socio economic consequences of spatial and economic strategies on territorial cohesion in different localities.Moving from the theoretical framework and empirical research done in the framework of the Cohsmo H2020 project, the paper will investigate modes in which in recent years in Italy policy approaches aimed at territorial cohesion have problematized and tackled the issue of territorial inequalities, and it proposes to critically discuss some of the tools which have been experimented to this end in three different contexts: a large central city (Milan), a suburban context (Legnano) and a marginal area (Oltrepo’ Pavese).The research question will focus on the possibilities that both mainstream policies (such as traditional welfare policies) and extraordinary or additional policies (such as local development policies or urban regeneration policies) have to tackle territorial inequalities across different local contexts; in order to do so, the paper will look in particular at the role of local coalitions in defining appropriate and effective governance arrangements, also taking into account the path dependency dimension. Moving from this research framework, the paper will identify some key issues in the definition of territorial cohesion policies, looking at the local contexts in which they are defined and implemented.