National urban policies in Europe - an introduction

Abstract

Urban problems are back on the political agenda and several policy documents, such as the New Urban Agenda (UN-Habitat 2016; Caprotti et al. 2017) as well as the Pact of Amsterdam (EU Urban Agenda), call for national urban policies as one of the key measures to implement the goals defined in these documents (UN-Habitat 2015). It is not difficult in this respect to figure out why UN-Habitat and other international actors have invested efforts in trying to define national urban policies as a response to the worldwide dynamic of urbanization (UN-Habitat 2015 and 2014; OECD 2017; Turok and Parnell 2009). In fact, without significant help in terms of financing, but also without appropriate policy knowledge and legal instruments, supported by national governments, cities will hardly be able to implement the goals of the internationally signed urban agenda adopted at the Habitat III conference held in Quito in 2016 or take over the role of ‘vectors of change’ (Parnell 2016). The rise of international urban agendas comes along with a notable number of publications on the resurgence of cities and city-regions and the rise of ‘The City as a global political actor’ (Oosterlynck et al. 2019). Various assumptions are made in this debate about the relationship between cities and nation states. These assumptions range from a newly gained autonomy of cities vis-à-vis weakened national governments1 to the selective support of a limited number of cities as national champions (Crouch and Le Galès 2012). In this edited volume we start from the postulate that all this is less clear and evident than many people perceive and claim. Does the growing relevance of international Urban Agendas translate easily into national urban policies? And if yes, in what way do national governments give priority to urban policies over others? Does the European Union make a difference in this regard? For sure, the debate on urban policies differs slightly between Europe and many other places in the world, as the European Commission, unlike UN-Habitat, has regulatory and financial instruments to implement what is called the urban