As highlighted by several speakers at the workshop, the urban dimension of Cohesion Policy offers a chance to make its impacts more relevant and tangible to wide groups of EU citizens living in cities, while addressing some of the burning social and economic problems (social segregation and tensions, risk of poverty and exclusion, the need to pool resources between municipalities to invest jointly in times of austerity and so forth). That said, while the ‘urban dimension’ has arguably a lot of appeal, it also stirs many tensions linked with sensitivities and rivalries across the layers of government involved. One of the main cleavages, for instance, stems from the fears of some Member States that making the urban question a more prominent aspect of Cohesion Policy would lead to a competence creep; the urban partnerships which are now in pilot phase would create a direct link between the European Commission and cities, bypassing the central governments.
However, there are many more doubts and conflicting visions of the ‘urban dimension’, for example concerning the role of urban-rural linkages (would it mean that urban areas would attract more funding at the expense of rural areas?), the difficulties in operationalising the urban instruments and new partnerships (how to make complex cross-level and cross-sectoral partnerships work?), or the asymmetric interest problems and possible North-Western bias (some Member States keenly adopt the new ‘urban’ instruments while others remain lukewarm about them). Also there are the thorny questions of which actors and which territories will be able to exploit the possibilities offered by Urban Agenda for the EU and which will not; and of how to prevent the capture of the emerging urban collaborative networks (e.g. via Community Led Local Development instrument) by the specific groups (e.g. small but well organised urban activist groups VS wider urban population)?
Finally, should the urban initiatives as part of Cohesion Policy focus on addressing the symptoms of urban poverty and segregation, with more visible physical urban redevelopment projects, or perhaps consider more long-term investment in education and social integration, which may bring better results but hardly be noticed by the public? These are just some of the issues on the increasingly prominent urban dimension of Cohesion Policy that the policy-makers and the research community will tackle in the near in the future.
Marcin Dąbrowski & Dominic Stead
Delft University of Technology