Policies for Territorial Rebalancing in the Era of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). New Indicators for the Classification of Inner Areas in Italy

In February 2022, the Department for Planning and Coordination of Economic Policy (CIPESS) published the update of the Italian Inner Areas Map (2020), integrating the classification of 2014. In this update, the analysis tools were revised, returning more precise results, but both indicators and methodology did not change. The definition of Inner Areas by the Agency for Territorial Cohesion identifies those "areas that are significantly distant from the centres offering essential services (education, health and mobility), rich in important environmental and cultural resources; about a quarter of the Italian population lives here, in a portion of territory that exceeds 60% of the total territory and is organised into more than four thousand municipalities". The distance between each municipality to the service provider centre is still calculated on the average of road travel time during weekday peak hours (pre-Covid19). This type of classification, further than minimizing the role of public transport infrastructures, distorts the reading of the territory ignoring other economic-social, cultural, of telematic accessibility and of environmental protection factors. The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) now offers the opportunity to revise the policies for territorial re-balancing in Italy. This paper intends to present the key points of a research that analyses the current methods and criteria for classifying Inner Areas. With the aim of developing a homogeneous territorial mapping tool, better suited to the purposes of territorial cohesion, the objective of the research will be to define a new method of classifying Inner Areas and fragile territories, based on several essential integrated indicators and on experimenting consolidated methods in the framework of: • socio-economic analyses, such as the Local Employment Systems (ISTAT); • identification of urban and rural areas, beyond the thresholds of administrative boundaries, such as Local Action Groups (GALs); • fiscal analysis, such as the reading of per-capita taxable income gap.