Territorial capital, competitiveness and regional development

Territories may be conceived as multidimensional spaces, where each dimension represents the presence of stocks of single types of territorial capital: location, size, quality, internal and external interactions. Relationships of a functional, hierarchical or cooperative nature may take place within the single dimension (economic, social, environmental, cognitive, identitarian) or, more interestingly, among the different dimensions, generating huge and diversified cross-externalities and synergy effects. The conceptual breakthrough allowed by the relatively new concept of territorial capital consists in the almost infinite widening of the structural and functional relationships that are assumed to determine the growth potential of single places/regions, along the scientific trajectory of the last 70 years in the direction of an ideal place-based production function with heterogeneous capital assets. The full spectrum of territorial capital types may be considered and included, provided that good measures or proxies are available. The goal of this chapter is to make an assessment of the utilization of the territorial capital concept in regional development studies, from its development in 2001 to the present day. This includes analysing its definition and role in the interpretation of spatial development, before exploring its theoretical soundness and use in a regional production function. The latest empirical findings that use of the concept are then explored. The questions concerning its nature and intrinsic heterogeneity that remain open are considered, before concluding with the new contents and styles of policies suggested by the utilization of the concept.