Artificial Land as a Candidate Indicator of Structural Territorial Constraint: A Parsimonious Framework for Regional Sustainability Assessment in Italy

The availability of environmental indicators at the NUTS-2 level remains limited in European statistical sources, often resulting in regional sustainability analyses that reflect short-term policy dynamics rather than long-term conditions. To address this gap, this paper proposes a parsimonious framework based on a spatial stock indicator measuring the share of artificial land within each region (ENV_ARTIFICIAL_LAND), derived from CORINE Land Cover data and aggregated at the NUTS-2 level. Rather than serving as a short-term metric of policy performance, the indicator describes an inherited territorial stock reflecting historical land-use trajectories, consistent with path-dependent development processes. Using the Italian NUTS-2 regions as a case study, the indicator is analysed alongside key socio-economic variables covering economic capacity, social vulnerability, and human capital formation through a non-aggregative, quadrant-based trade-off framework. The results suggest pronounced regional asymmetries and structural mismatches, demonstrating that territorial rigidities and socio-economic outcomes follow differentiated, non-linear alignments. From a policy perspective, the analysis highlights the limits of uniform benchmarking and underscores the necessity of place-based strategies tailored to inherited spatial constraints. Future developments will include integration into territorialised lifecycle frameworks, to account for the cumulative effects of land occupation and environmental debt. While this framework offers a transparent screening tool for regional spatial rigidity, its convergent validity against high-resolution spatial datasets (such as HRL Imperviousness) and disaggregated land-use subclasses remains to be formally tested in future empirical research.