GEOSPECS - European perspectives on Specific Types of Territories

Regions with specific territorial features have received increasing attention in recent years, most notably in article 174 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion. These key policy documents identify certain territories – cross-border, island, mountain, Outermost and sparsely populated regions – in two ways: as having particular challenges, and as having particular assets, many of benefit to Europe as a whole. Two other types of such ‘geographic specificities' have also been recognised: coastal areas and inner peripheries. While there have been a number of studies of groups of these areas, or individual types of territories (e.g., coasts, mountains) at the European scale, GEOSPECS is the first comprehensive study of all of these particular types of territories.