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This article seeks to explain why the public provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in Reggio di Calabria – the largest city of the Calabria region in Southern Italy – has remained among the lowest in the country, failing to respond to the growing local demand for such services. Most of the limited formal supply of ECEC services currently available in the city is almost exclusively provided, for a fee, by private – until recently unregulated – day care centres, whereas households who cannot afford them must still rely on family care.

Based on original research findings, the article explains how such a supply configuration is the result of several concurrent factors – structural, institutional and cultural, on both the demand and the supply side of the service relation – and has been conditioned by both national and local specificities.

The complex interplay of these factors accounts not only for the enduring absence of an adequate public provision of ECEC services in the city and its region but also for the reproduction of an “unsupported” familistic model of care, while a loosely regulated private supply answers the growing demand coming from the working women who can afford it.

The lack of public ECEC, which was significantly aggravated by the 2008 financial crisis, represents a major constraint for women's emancipation and social justice in an already difficult socio-economic context.

The article provides in-depth knowledge on the enduring deficit of public ECEC services in a region and city that are little studied, together with a contextualized interpretation of its causes and implications.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

Over the last five years, governments, think‐tanks and public alike have re‐focused their minds on the future development of British cities. Why are such diverse social organizations producing visions of urban futures? What kinds of techniques and tools are they using, and what are their implications? What types of city do they envision? And most significantly, what are the resonances and dissonances between the development paths they propose?

In recent years, Asian countries have experienced rising rates of premarital cohabitation, mirroring a similar trend that could be observed in many European countries several decades ago. As international differences in these trends are often attributed to institutional and societal differences, this study explores how China’s and Germany’s welfare and cultural regimes relate to national differences in the timing and prevalence of premarital cohabitation and direct marriage.

On the basis of two post-hoc harmonized surveys (pairfam for Germany; CFPS for China), descriptive analyses and logistic regressions were conducted. A higher standardization of partnership trajectories during the transition to adulthood was observed in China; this being probably related to China’s collectivist and Germany’s individualistic culture. While urban–rural differences prevail in China, and are attributable to China’s hukou system, East and West Germans differ considerably in this regard, a finding which can be traced back to regional differences in historical legacy. Discrepancies in economic modernization explain why the likelihood of experiencing these events differs for individuals in the Eastern and Western Chinese provinces.

Besides these differences, the two national contexts resemble each other in the prevalence of educational hypergamy, as well as in greater rates of cohabitation prior to first marriage, in contrast to direct marriage, seen among wealthier individuals and those with higher education. For the first time, the effects of cultural and institutional differences on the transition to adulthood were compared between a collectivistic vs. individualistic cultural regime and a productivist vs. corporatist conservative welfare regime, enabling researchers to draw conclusions about the link between cultural and welfare regime types and partnership patterns.

This study aims to investigate the synergies between the economic environment and the smart living dimension embedded in the current smart city initiatives, focusing on the localization of female entrepreneurship in contemporary cities. This interaction is under-investigated and controversial as it includes cities' practices enabling users and citizens to develop their potential and build their own lives, affecting entrepreneurial and economic outcomes. Building upon the perspective of the innovation ecosystems, this study focuses on the impact of smart living dimensions and R&D investments on the localization of female entrepreneurial activities.

The study uses a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and a panel dataset that considers 30 Italian smart city projects for 12 years to demonstrate the relationship between smart living practices in cities and the localization of female entrepreneurship. The complementary effect of public R&D investment is also included as a driver in the “smart” city transition.

The study found that the advancement of smart living practices in cities drives the localization of female entrepreneurship. The study highlights the empirical results, the interaction over the years and a current overview through choropleth maps. The public R&D investment also affects this relationship.

This study advances the theoretical discussion on (1) female entrepreneurial intentions, (2) smart city advancement (as a context) and (3) smart living dimension (as a driver) and offers valuable insight for governance and policymakers.

This study offers empirical contributions to the preliminary academic debate on enterprise development and smart city trajectories at the intersection between human-based practices and female entrepreneurship.

This study offers empirical contributions to the preliminary academic debate on enterprise development and smart city trajectories at the intersection between human-based practices and female entrepreneurship. The findings provide valuable insights into the localization of female entrepreneurship in the context of smart cities.

Creating high quality, liveable urban settings that facilitate a transition to lower carbon living and work environments is central to achieving more sustainable cities and communities. For over two decades, city builders and planners have advocated compact growth to facilitate these transformations. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has heralded a conceptual shift in debates on urban density, mobility and accessibility with the idea of the ‘15-minute city’ (Moreno, 2016) gaining increased prominence and traction among policymakers. Popularised by Mayor Anne Hidalgo of Paris, proximity and accessibility, together with density, underpin an ideal that privileges the relocalisation of work, home and leisure activities. Broadly described, the concept centres on the (re)development of urban neighbourhoods where basic services – access to public transport, grocery, social and healthcare, leisure and amenity – can be provided within a 10-, 15- or 20-minute walk or cycle from home. Since the publication of the National Planning Framework in 2018, more compact urban growth has become a core principle underpinning spatial planning at a range of scales in Ireland and the development of low-carbon and vibrant urban centres is now a key objective of Irish policymakers. The Southern Regional Assembly has been promoting the ‘10-minute town’ ideal through its Regional Spatial and Economic Strategy (RPO 176) and pilot projects in 3 medium sized towns (Carlow, Tralee and Ennis). However, scaling up the concept to accommodate the region's larger cities is relatively unexplored. As the smallest of the three cities in the southern region, and with significant redevelopment potential at the heart of the urban core, Waterford is in a dynamic position to accommodate the 15-minute concept. Furthermore, Waterford's more recent population growth suggests the need to cement the 15-minute city concept as a baseline for the design of the city as it develops and evolves in both new and emerging neighbourhoods. This chapter examines the potential and challenges of embracing the 15-minute city concept in Waterford as a way to meet the objectives set out in the National Planning Framework, Regional Spatial and Economic Strategy and by Waterford City Council, and discusses lessons for the Irish context more broadly. The chapter concludes that while the framework conditions for success appear to be largely in place, whether the governance and political system at the metropolitan and local levels is courageous enough to embrace and harness these opportunities remains to be seen.

This paper aims to evaluate the career patterns and global mobility trajectories of hospitality and tourism graduates that are relevant for global knowledge and local talent management.

This study maps and assesses the public profiles of over 2,000 hospitality and tourism graduates from five institutions each from a different territory using a popular online professional network.

The findings highlight a network of worldwide mobility from hospitality and tourism graduates of the five institutions. The findings also suggest five different types of mobility trajectories (i.e. stateside, intra-regional, continental, inter-regional and global) and career patterns (i.e. rooted, prospector, seeker, two-homes and wanderer).

Geographical mobility of graduates in tourism and hospitality is one of the less studied phenomena; however, it is important to understand due to growing concerns regarding globalization of the workplace and internationalization of education.

This study provides insights into how knowledge transfer and talent management could be impacted by the global graduate movements.

This is one of the first studies to date to combine mobility trajectories with a classification of career patterns to provide implications relevant for global knowledge and local talent management.

Contemporary urban and regional planning practice and scholarship often fails to address the full implications of technological change (technology blindness), lacks a clear or consistent definition of the long term (temporal imprecision) and seldom uses formal foresight methodologies. Discussion in the literature of time horizons beyond 10 years is, therefore, based on profoundly unrealistic assumptions about the future. The paper aims to discuss why conventional reasoning about possible futures is problematic, how consideration of long-term timescales is informal and inconsistent and why accelerating technological change requires that planners rethink basic assumptions about the future from 2030s onward.

The author reviews 1,287 articles published between January 2010 and December 2014 in three emblematic urban and regional planning journals using directed content analysis of key phrases pertaining to long-term planning, futures studies and self-driving cars.

The author finds that there is no evidence of consistent usage of the phrase long term, that timeframes are defined in fewer than 10 per cent of articles and that self-driving cars and related phrases occur nowhere in the text, even though this technology is likely to radically transform urban transportation and form starting in the early 2020s. Despite its importance, discussion of disruptive technological change in the urban and regional planning literature is extremely limited.

To make more realistic projections of the future from the late 2020s onward, planning practitioners and scholars should: attend more closely to the academic and public technology discourses; specify explicit timeframes in any discussion or analysis of the future; and incorporate methods from futures studies such as foresight approaches into long-term planning.

This paper identifies accelerating technological change as a major conceptual gap in the urban and regional planning literature and calls for practitioners and scholars to rethink their foundational assumptions about the long-term and possible, probable and preferable futures accordingly.

The growing number of studies shows that government policies and measures are critical in determining entrepreneurship levels of regions. Any changes in the government policies and measures are, therefore, expected to bring significant changes at the entrepreneurship levels. This paper aims to explore the importance of the government policies and measures, along with supply and demand-side determinants in regional entrepreneurship in Turkey and explains the convergence of entrepreneurship among two distinct periods corresponding to changes in the government policies and measures concerning entrepreneurship.

Looking at a study on 81 NUTS-III regions of Turkey, this paper focusses on regional determinants important in the separation of regions with different entrepreneurship trajectories (based on the initial level and the rate of increase in entrepreneurship). Using discriminant function analysis, this paper tries to show how far government policies are important in distinguishing regions with different entrepreneurship levels.

The outcomes of the analysis show that certain policies and measures recently introduced have become instrumental in triggering higher entrepreneurship levels in regions with already higher levels of entrepreneurship, but not in regions with initially lower levels of entrepreneurship.

This study contributes to the existing regional entrepreneurship literature through introducing the research findings on the importance of government policies and institutions on regional entrepreneurship, besides the role of regional capacities and assets.