Territories Attractive: How To Identify Them?
The main objective of the project SPANDAM is to develop a simulation tool that allows to assist in decision making when designing and implementing measures against depopulation. Therefore, it is of vital importance to know what are the attributes that favor the retention and attraction of population and economic activity, as well as those indicators that should be used to evaluate them.r.
Let's talk about territories attractive front to the depopulation.
Have you ever stopped to think why do you live in the place that you do?
According to the Royal Spanish Academy, something is attractive when it attracts or has the power to attract. Thus, when a thing or a person we find attractive, we feel attraction for her, and this leads us to preferirla on other things or people. But, how we can feel attraction for a place?
When we talk about attractive territorial we are referring to the degree to which a territory is able to attract population and economic activity. The reasons for which a territory may or may not be attractive, they are very different: his beauty, his offer recreational, your social environment, your provision of services, their quality of life, your job, or even to its proximity to other nuclei nearby.
The main problem is that, like physical attractiveness, the attractive territorial is a subjective quality, which depends on the individual preferences of each person or company. For example, while an individual decides to move to Madrid or Barcelona attracted by the dynamism of the big cities, the other chooses to migrate from there to get away from the hustle and bustle. Both situations are equally valid, despite that indicate levels of attractiveness very distant. For this reason, it is very difficult to determine the extent to which a territory is or is not attractive to the general level.
In this sense, although the appeal is ultimately a matter which is completely individual, many studies have found patterns in terms of the attributes that are perceived as attractive in function of the characteristics of individuals, such as their level of education, sector of work, or, above all, your age. So, for example, while young people tend to pay more attention to aspects related to leisure and culture, for older people it is more important than territories, having basic health services.
Something similar occurs in the case of companies, since although they all tend to prefer to be located in places that are accessible to a large number of potential customers, their perception of the attractiveness of territorial varies depending on the sector of activity in which they are framed. So, for example, is much more common than the big cities and the territories tourist attract businesses related to the hospitality industry, while the rural environments for its part develops to a greater extent in the agricultural activities.
Until here everything is clear, but...
Why is it relevant to the appeal territorial? what helps us to analyze the attractiveness of a territory to fight against depopulation?
In recent decades, the issue of depopulation and the well-known phenomenon of Spain emptied have begun to awaken a wide concern among politicians, scientists, and residents of the affected areas. Therefore, we have spent countless efforts to reverse the situation, trying to cushion the population losses through incentives of a diverse nature. However, given the magnitude of the phenomenon, the vast majority of these measures have failed to bear fruit, and the number of municipalities that lost population remains very high.
We think that one of the reasons that the measures taken are not proving effective, that have not known how to solve the real causes of the depopulation. In this sense, for example, if a territory lacks basic services and has serious problems of accessibility, as much as reductions in taxes and subsidize the purchase of homes, this will not be sufficient to retain or attract population. For this reason, the analysis in a comprehensive way what attributes are most attractive to different groups of the population, we can promote measures to optimize these attributes, resulting in actions more efficient and effective.
SPANDAM. Designing a dynamic model that allows it to measure the attractiveness of the territories against depopulation.
In this way, given that depopulation is a multi-causal phenomenon, should be considered a multitude of issues at the time of measuring what is the level of attractiveness of the territories. So we are faced with a very large number of variables and indicators related to the attractive territorial, which cater to different dimensions, such as quality of life, resource availability or accessibility. To analyze all these attributes in a holistic way, it is convenient to construct dynamic models that allow to obtain an overview of the situation in each territory.
In line with this, various entities, such as the European Commission, the National Statistical Institute or the Government of Aragon, have designed composite indices that allow to measure the attractiveness of the territories from the aggregation of several indicators. Although it is very common that these indices are oriented to analyze and compare the performance of countries in different dimensions of attractiveness, we also find an interesting proposals that evaluate the appeal to the regional level, city or even neighborhood.
The problem of these indices is that they are closely limited by the availability of data, so that it is very difficult to replicate in other contexts or scales. In this sense, even to know the attractiveness of the territories, it's important to know the perception and the worth of the individuals themselves to their different attributes, this information is generally only be known through the implementation of ad-hoc surveys, which is very expensive if you want to analyze a large number of territories.
In any case, multidimensional indices of attractiveness serve as a reference for the development of one's own model SPANDAM, because they offer different proposals about how to measure and operationalize the various dimensions of the attractiveness of the territory. Therefore, from the work package number 4 of SPANDAM (Deliverable 4.1), relating to the indicators, it has developed a report on the theoretical foundations of the depopulation and the analysis of previous proposals of indices of attractiveness.
This report, which collected many of the ideas presented here, will serve as a starting point for the development of the remaining tasks of the project.
