2023 Barcelona Workshop on Regional and Urban Economics: Global Cities
On October 26th and 27th 2023, AQR-IREA hosted the 2023 Barcelona Workshop on “Global Cities” at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona.
As in past editions, the 2023 Barcelona Workshop on Regional and Urban Economics organised by the AQR research group, brought together researchers interested in spatial economics, as well as in other interrelated disciplines such as development and conflict, housing economics, labour markets, or innovation. This year the Workshop focused on the topic of Global Cities, with the aim of bringing together cutting-edge research papers focused on the global challenges that cities face, with special attention on spatial dynamics, urbanisation and development. This connects with a 3-year long research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2020-118800GB-I00) led by researcher at AQR-IREA of the University of Barcelona and the Department of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
The Scientific Committee received close to 40 works linked with the topic of global cities. The final program included six papers and two keynote speakers’ presentations: Lewis Dijkstra (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission) and Elisa Gianone (Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREi), Barcelona School of Economics (BSE) and Penn State. Over 40 scholars and researchers registered and attended the thematic sessions and the keynote speeches, contributing to the dynamic debates during the presentation of the papers and also during the coffee breaks and the Workshop lunch.
On October the 26th, the opening ceremony included speeches of Dr. Ramon Alemany (Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona), and Dr. Vicente Royuela, member of the Organising Committee. This was followed by the keynote lecture by Dr. Lewis Dijkstra on the “Degree of Urbanisation” worlwide.
The first contributed session included three papers. First, Marcos Sanso-Navarro (Universidad de Zaragoza) presented the work titled “Comparing city size distributions: Gridded population vs. nighttime lights”. Second, Nicola Pontarollo (University of Brescia) presented his work on “Good-life cities: Identifying the local conditions driving subjective wellbeing in European cities”. The session ended with the presentation by Alberto Hidalgo (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca), titled “Your room is ready: Tourism and urban revival”.
On October the 27th, we enjoyed the second keynote speech. Dra. Elisa Gianone presented her work on “Unequal global convergence”, showing new results about the role of sectoral concentration on regional convergence in a wide list of countries.
Later, we had the second contributed session, which included three additional presentations. Tasos Kitsos (Aston University) presented the work titled “Creative destruction? Creative firms, workers and residential gentrification”. Riga Qi (CERGE-EI, Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences) talked on “Destroy and build? Economic effects of centres de regroupament in the Algerian war”. Finally, David Gomtsyan (CERDI) presented the paper “Building the city under financial frictions”.
In our view, these works offered a broad view on the subject that should help to identify more clearly some of the key research challenges investigated by key scholars in spatial and urban economics.
The 2023 Barcelona Workshop on Regional and Urban Economics is the thirteenth edition of an annual scientific meeting devoted to the regional and urban economy and developed by the AQR-IREA research group of the University of Barcelona. To know more about other editions of the workshop, you can consult the history in this link. In due time we will announce the 2024 edition, which connect with further topics in the discipline.