Quality of Life in urban settings is intricately tied to active transportation, public health, and physical activity, capturing the growing societal emphasis on sustainable mobility and well-being. This study develops a composite indicator to evaluate regional Quality of Life across Italy, utilizing data from the 2021 ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics) survey “Aspects of Daily Life.” Employing Principal Component Analysis for weighting, the indicator identifies key dimensions of urban well-being, including active transportation, physical activity, and general health. The results reveal pronounced disparities between central-northern and southern Italy, driven by differences in infrastructure, access to health resources, and socio-economic conditions. Northern regions consistently outperform southern counterparts, where structural challenges hinder improvements in Quality of Life. These findings underscore the urgent need for targeted, equity-focused policies to address regional disparities and enhance urban environments, with a particular focus on improving accessibility and public health in underperforming regions. The study provides valuable insights for policymakers aiming to promote sustainable and inclusive urban development.

An increasing number of studies focus on the impact of firm location on firm productivity. Here, location refers to localised resources or externalities available to firms. These studies have become possible due to advancements in firm-level data availability and productivity estimation methods. There is a growing need to better identify the effects of localised externalities -- "the firm-region nexus" -- on firms, which are the primary targets of many regional development policies. However, relying solely on administrative regions risks committing the ecological fallacy: attributing to all firms in a region the effects observed for a region as a whole. This article presents the state of the art as of 2025, highlighting key issues in this area of research. A total of 165 articles were selected, mainly published in the past decade. From a methodological perspective, there is no real consensus on the models utilised, whether to estimate productivity or to investigate the relationships between the "firm-region nexus" and firm productivity. Spatial integration is still not adequately taken into account: (a) Total Factor Productivity estimations do not account for spatial dependence among methodological concerns; (b) 70\% of the articles do not discuss methodological issues linked to the use of firm locations. A deeper grasp of firm location, particularly the "head office bias", emerges as critical to improving the robustness of analyses. Quantifying the "firm-region nexus" remains heterogeneous across national and local contexts (diverging points of interest, data availability, etc.). Comparing the effects of various types of externalities across countries therefore appears ambitious. Some articles focus on the effect of one category of localised externalities, aiming not only to identify a relationship but also its type: spatial or temporal effect, linear or non-linear relationships, and threshold effects.

Bike-friendly cities offer scores of benefits to both individuals and society, but a lack of safety is a major barrier to ridership. Significant research has been devoted to studying demographic drivers of ridership and what makes individuals feel unsafe on a bicycle, but there is lack of research utilizing quantitative approaches on spatial perceptions of safety, particularly with respect to gender. This paper seeks to close that gap using a crowd sourcing approach to spatial data collection, statistical comparisons of cycling behavior by gender, and spatial analyses of mapped points. The authors find parity between women and men in terms of number of trips taken per week but find significant differences in the spatial extent of mapped responses. This paper adds to academic discussions on cycling safety and sheds light on specific locations that could benefit from infrastructure improvements.

When an analysis over a specific geographic area is performed, the way that area is divided into regions can affect the outcome of the analysis. Results obtained based on different geographic units can be conflicting. This issue is known as the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). The objective of this paper is to understand the extent to which the regional setting influences the results of an analysis with spatially aggregated variables, with a focus on agglomeration effects, in the case of Germany. Relying on a sample of manufacturing firms over 7 years we estimate a fixed effects model to explain the firm-specific total factor productivity in dependence of region-based agglomeration variables. We simulate 1000 regional settings of Germany on three scales and overtake thereby some characteristics of the administrative units, which are used as the baseline. We infer that the spatial scale and shape matter in the case of Germany.

The management of the COVID-19 pandemic not only depends on the stringency measures established by governments but also and more importantly on the underlying capacity of territories in economic and health and sanitary infrastructure. This study aims to identify how the underlying conditions of countries influence on their level of COVID-19 lethality rate. To do so, a classification of countries is first conducted by the means of the k-means partitioning method, using COVID-19-related variables such as the lethality rate, the contagion growth rate and the number of days with respect to China. Based on the resulting groups of countries of the first stage, Tobit and Ordinary Least Squares regressions are estimated to determine the effect of the underlying characteristics of countries on their COVID-19 lethality rate. Risks factors which increase the lethality rate in countries are the contagion growth rate, the trade flow with China, the age composition of the population and, to a lesser extent, the population density. Factors that help to reduce the lethality rate are the government effectiveness, the health infrastructure (hospital beds) and, to a lesser extent, the economic growth rate.

Among the German spatial economists August Lösch is arguably the one who has had the biggest lasting influence on international academic literature. After his death in May 1945, a legend was created according to which he was a fierce opponent to national socialism. This was part of the attempts of his former colleagues and of the German economics community at large to disguise the extent of their own involvement and their agency in advising economic and social policies of the Nazi regime. The political context of spatial planning during the Second World War was particularly damning as it in many cases presupposed genocides on nations such as Poles and Russians and on religious groups such as Jews. It was precisely with regards to Eastern Europe that Lösch’s theoretical contributions were deemed to be particularly valuable. However, the legend of his supposed opposition contained a grain of truth as he was indeed appalled by central aspects of Nazi ideology. Yet, the ability of a totalitarian regime such as the “Third Reich” to integrate the contributions of a brilliant mind and somebody who saw himself as an independent and unpolitical scholar into its decentralized and collaborative spatial research apparatus is what makes Lösch’s biography particularly interesting and relevant today.

Italy has been one of the most popular destinations for travellers since the classic Grand Tour. However, the destinations of travellers changed during the nineteenth century: The focus was no longer on the buildings of antiquity and the renaissance, but on vernacular architecture. Around 1800, Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Friedrich Weinbrenner were among the first to see the simplicity of vernacular architecture, which Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, and Adolf Loos about 100 years later understood as a way to modernity. In the 1920s it was Capri's mayor Edwin Cerio, who eloquently pointed out the elementary connection between landscape and architecture, and architects like Virgilio Marchi, Plinio Marconi, Luigi Cosenza, Bernard Rudofsky, and Le Corbusier travelled to Capri to be inspired by the vernacular architecture. All this took place against the backdrop of fascism and the Italian architects’ search for a nationally connoted architecture.

This chapter explores the meanings and motivations behind the ‘French School’ of Comtean Positivist regionalism in Victorian Britain. It focusses specifically on how Auguste Comte, Richard Congreve, Patrick Geddes, and other Positivists considered architecture as central to delivering public education based on a republican political theory of civic duty for regional devolution. Positivist architecture was a means to inaugurate the Republique Occidentale, or a social reorganisation for the ‘Positive Era’. This chapter argues that Positivist architecture was part of an agenda to realise networks of garden city-states with an aim to confine women to the domestic sphere.

The Azores, an archipelago located nearly in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, is an Autonomous Region whose legal establishment occurred in 1976, through the approval of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic. Ranging from this event to a contemporary lens–marked by the current rebounding procedures—this paper suggests the Azorean Region as being an active territorial project, aiming to make the territory calculable. Furthermore, through the regulation and institutionalisation of such ordering processes, the Region's concept is proposed as being juridically, socially, culturally, and territorially produced, reflecting on borders and embodying manifestations on such ordering processes, either material or symbolic.

This editorial describes improvements REGION implemented in the first months of 2022. Although they are not directly visible to authors or readers, they are important for the quality of the journal and for the visibility of the articles published in REGION.