Urban change and regional development at the margins of Europe: an introduction

Since the beginning of the nineties the urban dimension has taken a growing relevance within the EU’s regional policy. The implementation of community initiatives or other areabased projects under the structural funds has meant for several cities a tangible opportunity to start urban renewal, introduce innovative planning instruments and implement new governance relations. In the so called “less developed” regions, this process has also been accompanied by significant financial resources, giving local governments and municipalities the chance to start large infrastructure projects of metropolitan or even regional relevance. Development processes in regions and urban areas, however, have followed very different trajectories, particularly at the economic and geopolitical margins of Europe. While some cities and regions seems to have benefited from a positive interaction between urban and regional policies and, national and European initiatives, in many others local development and innovative planning processes encountered resistances and difficulties, so that results must be evaluated carefully and from a critical perspective. With the general aim of understanding the place of cities and urban policy within the EU’s cohesion policy, the paper provides an exploration of the concepts, the geographies and the principles surrounding the problem of regional disparities in the European Union, with a specific focus on the instruments made available by the European Union to connect urban policy to regional cohesion. Such an exploration focuses on three main arguments that are addressed in the paper: • the problem of regional disparities and the way these have been faced by EU regional policy; • a description of the urban-regional diversities in the European Union; • the role of cities in the EU’s cohesion policy.