Decentralization is considered an important component of participatory democracy. However, despite its widespread implementation in the healthcare sector, its impact on health systems’ performance remains unclear. Using a theoretical framework based on the World Health Organization’s five decentralization variables—geography and sociodemographics, organization of political processes, functions and economic weight, steering, and control—we conducted a scoping review to unveil causal mechanisms linking each feature to equity, efficiency, and effectiveness. Following the PRISMA protocol, 1627 articles were screened, and 63 were selected for data analysis, with a focus on middle- and high-income countries. The findings show that the most frequently discussed forms of decentralization are fiscal and administrative, with a primary focus on how governance mechanisms affect equity and efficiency. The effects of decentralized healthcare governance on equity, efficiency, and effectiveness are diverse and contingent on contextual factors and the implementation processes. The spatial context (geography) of decentralization negatively impacts equity, and steering strongly affects effectiveness. Functions and economic weight significantly influence efficiency, albeit with variability. Overall, decentralization falls short of delivering substantial healthcare system benefits, although this depends on contextual factors.

Today, major planning agendas in Europe steer the future of territorial organization towards an urban polycentric perspective. The accessibility to services of general interest (SGI), a significant source of spatial inequality in Europe, is one of the key challenges to address. However, instruments needed to support the implementation and monitoring of territorial policy measures regarding the distribution of, and accessibility to SGI are still under-developed. Studies generally relate to the (intra)regional and not the national scale. When they do so, they lose local specificity as they often consider the existence/availability of services at a given scale and not the actual capacity to reach their (often just estimated) location through the transport network. In the context of the revision of Portugal’s National Plan for Territorial Planning Policies, this paper presents a comprehensive multi-criteria location-based approach for measuring the factual accessibility to a representative range of SGI at the national Portuguese scale. Results are evaluated considering the dichotomy between centrality and periphery, high and low density, and the regional disparities found. High accessibility values do not necessarily mean greater territorial cohesion. Contributions to the development of national planning policies that respond to cohesion challenges are also debated.

La proximidad de los hogares y el empleo a las redes de transporte público es un factor clave en el uso final de las mismas. Una de las estrategias más frecuentes para aumentar la proximidad al transporte público es densificar el entorno de las estaciones. Sin embargo, también se pueden generar proximidad en los nuevos desarrollos mediante el diseño de la trama urbana. En este artículo se analiza el impacto del diseño de la trama urbana en la cobertura de la redes de transporte público y en su demanda potencial mediante la comparación de la situación real de la red de Metro de Madrid con cuatro escenarios hipotéticos, que representan diferentes tipos de red viaria: una red irregular de alta densidad; irregular de baja densidad, ortogonal y un viario orientado a la estación. Para ver el efecto de la trama urbana, se mantienen las distribuciones de la población y el empleo constante, de manera que las diferencias entre el escenario real y cada uno de los hipotéticos se explican únicamente por el papel desempeñado por el diseño de la trama urbano. Para medir la magnitud del impacto del diseño de la trama urbana en la proximidad al transporte público se han calculado una serie de indicadores: la superficie de las áreas de cobertura, la población y el empleo cubiertos de acuerdo a las franjas de distancia, la calidad de acceso y la demanda potencial. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que una trama viaria orientada a la estación daría lugar a un aumento sustancial de la población y el empleo en las primeras franjas de distancia, lo que genera un aumento significativo en la demanda potencial del transporte público.

The socio‐economic dimensions of cohesion have long been considered an integral part of Europeanization. However, recently a third dimension has been added to the Europe 2020 cohesion policy debate: territorial cohesion. Consequently this term is as yet undeveloped, resulting in a lack of consensus on how to define and interpret it. Such ambiguity represents a theoretical and empirical challenge to regional actors needing to respond to European Union (EU) directives while operationalizing the concept within their national and/or regional agendas. This article uses Portugal as a case study to examine how the concept of territorial cohesion is being interpreted and transposed from EU‐based to territorial‐based instruments and policy documents. First, we conducted a qualitative content analysis (QCA) of a selection of European and regional publications to compare their intrinsic discourses. This was followed by around 60 structured qualitative interviews, conducted with leading actors who had been instrumental in writing or implementing regional policy documents. On the basis of this dual analysis we conclude that, as a whole, the writers of the Portuguese strategic documents successfully transposed this concept, although perceptible differences exist between regions, as local actors have selectively redefined it to better suit their strategic priorities. These differences are debated with the aim of contributing to the design of effective public policies that facilitate inclusion, cohesion and Europeanization.

Vacant shops are an important problem affecting urban areas today, particularly in the wake of the economic crisis. Most strategies to analyse and deal with this issue are related to economic and financial variables. However, the amount of research associating store geography and performance with urban morphology has increased over the past decade. Thus, this research tests the hypothesis that specific morphological features characterize vacant retail sites. Using four Portuguese cities as test-beds and Kernel density analysis to plot spatial patterns, vacant shops were for example positively correlated with low segment betweenness and negatively correlated with block area.

The analysis and management of the territory from the perspective of the current administrative boundaries produce interpretative errors and, therefore, operational consequences in the determination of plans and projects. Nowadays, the physical and functional configuration of the urban territory has exceeded the traditional administrative limits and the border with the rural world. In this regard, the emerged forms of organization still need to be analysed. This paper develops a methodology to build a new framework which may be able to go beyond the traditional boundaries pre-established by public administrations in the Iberian Peninsula. This is not simply a question of metropolization, but rather identifying the total of functional urban areas with an approach as broad as possible, to rendering them a full significance and categorization. As a result, 273 functional urban areas of very varied characterization have been delimited in the Iberian Peninsula. All of them still need to be explored within themselves and comparatively.