The Role of Territorial Capital in Urban Renewal in a Non-core Central European City

Abstract

The concept of territorial capital, presented by the authors as an alternative to exogenous, FDI-driven economic restructuring strategies, has fertilised regional development policy thinking in multiple ways. Triggering reflections on the bottom-up reconceptualisation of regional policy, it has a particular salience in peripheral or lagging regions due to its potential to reverse deeply-entrenched core-periphery relations. The paper discusses the concept of territorial capital with a view to its policy embeddedness and academic valorisation. The structure of the paper is as follows. The first section presents the theoretical antecedents and conceptual evolution of the notion of territorial capital. This is followed by a brief discussion of the relevance of territorial capital in non-core or peripheral Central European contexts. The concluding section seeks to identify the main obstacles to collaborative and integrated strategy-making relying on the territorial capital approach in the case study city of Pécs, demonstrating its crucial absence from post-2000 top-down regional development programmes.