National Urban Policies in Europe, a Contrasted and Fragmented Picture or a Shared Social Construction?

This chapter aims at providing a critical picture of the state of the art of urban policies in Europe. It moves from the hypothesis that despite the current revival of urban policies in many European countries, this is neither the direct nor uncontested result of a programmatic and strategic return of city centrality in member states’ national policies. Nor the direct and univocal result of debates and experimentations promoted by the European integration project since its foundation. On the contrary, a recent exploration carried out as part of a cross-comparison conducted by the national urban policies working group of the European Urban Research Association (Eura) shows that the old urban Europe still unfolds differentiated, contradictory, quite unstable attempts to display urban policies. Looking particularly at national urban policies, the chapter does not provide a comprehensive catalogue of a clear-cut object. It instead tries to track some characteristic features of the last 40 years of the debate on and the design of urban policies in Europe, highlighting its specificity if compared to other contexts. In this perspective, the chapter aims to contribute critically to developing the debate on the specificity of the European city from the sphere of policy design; at the same time, it tries to highlight the fundamentals (if any) of urban policies in Europe.