Programme > By author > Le Bel Pierre-Mathieu

A growing trend among policy-makers is to regard territorial attractiveness as a decisive tool of regional development strategies. Evaluating the attractiveness of a given space has a number of implication in regards to business and households' location, investments' flux, and tourism markets. Alongside this shift in policy, research on place attractiveness has increased throughout the social sciences, reinforced by call from political contributions like the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (2009) or the Barca Report (2009) to give more consideration to local attributes and place-based policies. As such, there is high demand from policy makers for scientific data on attractiveness. This research focuses on scientific papers on territorial attractiveness both in French and English. It provides an in-depth NVivo analysis of the conceptual development of territorial attractiveness research. More specifically, it seeks to answer three questions: Firstly, when attractiveness is the object of study, what are the indicators used by contributors? Secondly, what are the scales privileged by analysis? Thirdly when quality of life intersects with the concept of attractiveness, what are the characteristics in terms of methodology and indicators? The paper concludes by underlining that by studying territorial attractiveness using various conceptions of space, distinctive conceptual contributions to the research field are being made.