The Urban Question and the EU Integration Project: A Continuous Experiment

Abstract

The chapter seeks to illustrate and comment on the role assigned to cities and urban policy in the European integration project in order critically understand the current programming period as a result of an intricate and complex history. It provides a synthetic reconstruction of the process that led to the constitution of spaces and tools for action in the urban field, first within the creation and, later, the consolidation of the European Union. To do so, it will develop the topic around two key perspectives considered essential for illustrating the specificity and importance of the EU integration project along with its limits and contradictions. The first point of view regards politics and problem setting, reconstructing first why and when the urban entered the European agenda implicitly or explicitly; then the definition of the policy issue regarding how the urban question been conceptualized follows. What ideas of the urban supported the definition of the policy problem? The second key perspective has to do with problem solving in terms of policy design and governance. What has EU been able to do for cities? With which policy tools/forms or models of governance? The aim of this paragraph is to provide an account of the experiments and to open to the innovation that the EU integration project has provided both in the urban policy field in terms of theory and practices. The chapter will also provide some final thoughts about the future of urban policy during the next economic programming period, and introduce some remarks regarding the peculiar contribution of the EU experience to the broader international debate on the New Urban Agenda.