Introduction to the Special Issue on “Territorial Resilience: Mitigation and Firms’ Adaptation”

Abstract

The depth of the Great Recession in the developed world had a major impact on the daily life of millions of people. It also brought a new way of seeing the response of economic actors. From a territorial point of view, the concept of Resilience came to a forefront. We can see several examples on this. A simple search in the Scopus database with the words “Regional Resilience” returns more than 170 entries in the Social Sciences area published during the last 10 years. Several academic journals have devoted Special Issues to the topic, being particularly influential the special issue on the “Resilient Region” of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economics and Society published in 2010, disseminating the concept of resilience across regional scientists. Single papers have also had a wide audience: the paper by Simmie and Martin (2010) has received nearly 600 citations according to Scopus and more than 1,200 in Google Scholar, while Christopherson, Michie, and Tyler (2010) or Hassink (2020) have also received considerable attention in terms of citations. Many works have identified territorial Resilience as a challenge for research and policy (van Dijk and Edzes 2016), and the research has expanded exponentially addressing both conceptual and measurement issues and applications in different settings. Different meta-analytic reviews have also been published (see, for instance, Sedita, de Noni, and Pilotti 2017 or Lazzaroni and van Bergeijk 2014). As highlighted by Briston and Healy (2020), “part of the richness of the literature