The quality of integrated urban strategies in light of the Europe 2020 strategy: The case of Slovenia

Abstract

European Strategy 2020, a series of priorities and initiatives that will transform the EU into a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy, with high rates of employment, productivity and social cohesion, recognized cities as units crucial for social, cultural and economic progress and sparked the development of new integrated urban strategies (IUSs) across the EU. By the end of 2016, 11 Slovenian cities had developed and ratified their own strategic plans in order to manage their urban development. We analyzed the content of the IUSs and supporting documents of Slovenian cities in order to evaluate the quality of IUSs in terms of empirical groundedness, logical consistency and structure and to assess the conformity of these documents with Europe 2020 strategy and national guidelines. Our results show that the IUSs of Slovenian cities are generally of low quality and that they conform to the Europe 2020 strategy poorly, but rather more to national guidelines defined by the Slovenian government. The implications of these findings for EU policy in the area of urban development are discussed.