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Fabio Della Marra holds a MS degree in Computer Science Engineering and a PhD in Economics and Social Sciences from the University of Parma. His doctoral dissertation focused on the macroeconometric forecasting by means of dynamic factor models, under the supervision of professors M. Lippi and S. Sanfelici.

He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Statistics at the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at the European Centre for Living Technology (ECLT).

His research in the MEDIUM framework concerns the application of statistical methodologies to analyze the main socio-economic indicators describing the spatio-temporal evolution of Guangzhou during the last decade.

See Fabio’s profile

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The videos of the MEDIUM conference “Innovative China: Decoding Socio-Economic and Technological Challenges” are now available online (in French only). Watch the videos.

The conference gathered industrials, scientific diplomats, researchers to discuss the PRC national and local policies designed to transform the country towards an innovative society and economy, as well as Chinese firms’ pathways to innovation.

The conference, which was co-organised with the Association for the promotion of international relations for science and technics (AVRIST), took place in Paris on Thursday 31 May.
It was the last event of the project. A report will be made available.

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The members of the consortium had the opportunity to visit Tashan Circular Economy Park of the Datong Coal Mine Group, which has achieved integrated industry chains based on coal with electricity, with construction materials and with chemical industry.

Datong Shanxi University hosted the last academic conference of the project, which was an opportunity for current and former MEDIUM fellows and senior researchers to present their research on environmental management system, the circulation of policy knowledge and know-how, urban transformation etc.

The conference was followed by a workshop on circular economy: Marco Pesce (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; MEDIUM mobility programme) and Andrea Critto (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), gathered local companies of the carbon industry to discuss international environmental standards and their application to foster sustainable production process.

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China is gradually overcoming its inconsistency between economic growth and protection of the environment. However, policies on territorial planning lack awareness and attention towards social sustainability. An interdisciplinary team of researchers identified this gap by examining a classic example: the environmental redevelopment of Lihu Lake, overlooked by Wuxi, a Chinese city with 3.5 million inhabitants, which is considered a model of sustainability.
 
Between 2002 and 2012, the area was restored and the major sources of pollution, primarily agricultural, were strongly reduced, bringing the quality of water to an acceptable state. The waterfront was transformed, through the creation of parks and new residential areas. This contributed to a rapid economic development. At the same time, different communities were relocated, having previously been employed in traditional lines of work such as agriculture and aquaculture.
 
Thanks to the contribution of a group of investors with local interest, including some ordinary citizens, a group of Euro-Chinese researchers analysed the repercussions of these processes on the overall sustainability of the area. Thus allowing them to identify not only the costs and difficulties, but also the progress made.

“Our work shows how environmental management is seen today by the Chinese authorities as a tool for economic growth,” commented Daniele Brombal, synologist at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice who coordinated the study. “Our results clearly indicated how the effects on the environment and economy are positive. However, this logic translates into significant social costs: forced moves, instrumental public participation, lower housing accessibility. In the case that we have studied, those that were paying taxes were the most vulnerable socio-economic communities, made up of peasants, farmers, artisans and small-scale traders. The same communities that preserve and nurture the social and cultural capital. These dynamics risk undermining the path to sustainability. There aren’t many studies such as ours carried out in China to evaluate its contributions to sustainability. The procedures and the model of evaluation that we’ve developed can be replicated in other contexts: we hope they can help other researchers and other communities.”
 
The study, published on the Environmental Science & Policy journal, has been allowed to develop and test a participatory approach in the field, that if adopted by local institutions, could make the development of Chinese urban and peri-urban areas more sustainable. It was conducted within two European projects: GLOCOM (Global Partners for Contaminated Land Management) and MEDIUM (New Pathways for Sustainable Urban Development in China Medium-Sized Cities).

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Juste Raimbault, who spent seven months in Zhuhai as a MEDIUM fellow in 2016 and 2017 successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on Monday 11 June and received his Ph.D degree in Geography from the University Paris VII – Denis Diderot. The title of the Ph.D is “Characterizing and modeling the co-evolution of transportation networks and territories”.

ABSTRACT
The identification of structuring effects of transportation infrastructure on territorial dynamics remains an open research problem. This issue is one of the aspects of approaches on complexity of territorial dynamics, within which territories and networks would be co-evolving. The aim of this thesis is to challenge this view on interactions between networks and territories, both at the conceptual and empirical level, by integrating them in simulation models of territorial systems. The intrinsically multidisciplinary nature of the question requires first to proceed to a quantitative epistemology analysis, that allows us to draw a map of the scientific landscape and to give a description of common features and specificities of models studying the co-evolution between network and territories within each discipline. We propose consequently a definition of co-evolution and an empirical method for its characterization, based on spatio-temporal correlation analysis. Two complementary modeling approaches, that correspond to different scales and ontologies, are then explored. At the macroscopic scale, we build a family of models inheriting from interaction models within system of cities, developed by the Evolutive Urban Theory (Pumain, 1997). Their exploration shows that they effectively capture co-evolutionary dynamics, and their calibration on demographic data for the French system of cities (1830-1999) quantifies the evolution of interaction processes such as the tunnel effect or the role of centrality. At the mesoscopic scale, a morphogenesis model captures the co-evolution of the urban form and of network topology. It is calibrated on corresponding indicators for local form and topology, computed for all Europe. Multiple network evolution processes are shown complementary to reproduce the large variety of observed configurations, at the level of indicators but also interactions between indicators. These results suggest new research directions for urban models integrating co-evolutive dynamics in a multi-scale perspective.