A Modern Guide to National Urban Policies in Europe

This Book Modern Guide provides a timely overview and comparison of urban challenges and national urban policies in 13 European countries, addressing key issues such as housing, urban regeneration and climate change. A team of international contributors explore the gap between the rise of international urban agendas and variegated national urban policies, examining whether a more bespoke approach is better than the traditional ‘one size fits all’. 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). 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? Publications on EU urban policies in fact outnumber those on national urban policies. Given the relevance of the topic, it is indeed surprising that there is no comprehensive and comparative work on the trajectories of the national urban policies of individual European countries (as existed in the 1990s, as a sort of preparation to a more coordinated framework for action to be introduced by the European Union, see van den Berg et al. 1998, 2007 and d’Albergo 20102). In this book we invited a group of urban scholars to write, in a comparative perspective, about the trajectories, instruments, goals and eventual impacts of national urban policies in their countries. Taking a long-term perspective on the evolution of national urban policies, our main interest is the persistence, convergence or divergence of national urban policies. We also wanted to know if there are political struggles surrounding the scope and direction of national urban policies. And, last but not least, we wanted to know what the impacts of EU policies are, and in particular how these will affect the next EU funding period (i.e. 2021–2027).