Territorial reorganisation issues at NUTS-2 level: reflections on the Friuli Venezia Giulia experience

Ristret

The main purpose of this article is to put forward a few general reflections regarding the problem of territorial reorganisation of a NUTS-2 region in light of the teachings of Prof. Marzio Strassoldo. More specifically, this work follows his belief that the territory, in statistical modelling, should not be considered as a mere spatial constraint to be fulfilled or underlying assumption to be taken for granted. In this sense, in his thinking you can find a kind of territory supremacy that should not only be understood in the sense of a territory’s ability to modify its socioeconomic values, which even “under the same conditions” can change from territory to territory, but also to make, with its full component of relationships, certain models recommended in the literature only partially applicable to the regional case being studied. This trans disciplinary view, already present in his thinking at the end of the Eighties, was extremely uncommon among statisticians, including those working in economics, and can almost certainly be traced back to his first scientific interests that focused more on Economic Geography than Statistics. It is not by chance that he believed that skills in several scientific fields were necessary to fully analyse a territorial phenomenon, itself often covering a range of disciplines. Indeed, he recognised an increasing need for interdisciplinary figures, both in the professional and academic field (“borderline” researchers as he liked to call them, implicitly playing on the geopolitical position of Friuli Venezia Giulia), who would offer a broad view that crossed the boundaries between each disciplinary area. That is why he was a strong supporter of Statistics and Computer Science for Business Management degree courses (Bachelor’s and Master’s degree) at the University of Udine, based, as is easily inferred from their name, on three distinct skills. These courses provided, in turn, very useful professional figures to a territory whose economic structure, similar to the national one, largely comprises small and medium-sized enterprises This work focuses on territorial reorganisation exercises in Friuli Venezia Giulia through the use of Cluster Analysis, a classical multivariate statistical analysis tool. A number of suggestions, based on various empiric experiences gained in over twenty years in the field, will be presented. These cover the main decisions a researcher has to take during his analysis and include those related to metrics, agglomeration strategies and contiguity constraints. In particular, with respect to the last point and its significant methodological criticalities, suggestions will be provided on how to use privileged direction indicators of the phenomenon being studied