The contribuition of retail trade to the integrated regeneration of italian town centres

The identity of a territory is generally perceived on the basis of place awareness in terms of experiential and relational trends created within urban areas connoted by centuries of activities and relationships. Trade in its various forms concurs in delineating the living standards of a territory, seeing as a distributional system structured upon small and medium size enterprises besides producing wealth and employment, safeguards a precious network of social relations, improves standards of living, citizen safety, as well as solidarity, social cohesion and sense of belonging to a community. Urban areas, constituting a resource for the economy of towns and cities have to act in synergy with public and private sectors, envisaging forms of funding to incentivize new businesses and the requalification of existing businesses, in order to create alternative niche markets to those of large scale structures.

Germana Citarella was awarded a PhD in Geopolitics, Geostrategy and Geoeconomics from the University of Trieste in 2005. Since 2007 she has been a tenured Researcher in Geography at the Department of Legal Sciences (School of Law) and since 2009 Adjunct Professor of Organisation and Spatial Planning and Environmental Policy (Department of Business Sciences - Management & Innovation Systems (DISA-MIS) of the University of Salerno). In her role as Supervisor, Germana Citarella has carried out scientific research on relevant issues such as Euro-Mediterranean cooperation, territorial planning, sustainable tourism, public-private partnership in territorial development policies and urban security under the aegis of the Observatory for the Planning of Sustainable Development and Spatial Planning (OPSAT), the Scientific structure of the Department of Information and Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics (DIEM) of the University of Salerno. Furthermore, her latest scientific interests in the context of the study and analysis of forms of territorial organisation, also consist in the dynamics with which local communities connect environments and resources to promote a shared system of values underpinning the process of share capital accumulation.