The European Union conquers the city

Soon the European Union will be visiting your city too. That is the message of the Urban Agenda that was recently drawn up by the European Union. The EU tends predominantly to be associated with ‘Brussels’, supranational bureaucrats and the political tug-of-war between Member States and heads of state. In a city you only really tend to run into the European Union when, in the context of the rotating presidency, the European Council sets up shop there, such as happened in Amsterdam during the first six months of 2016. Currently, we only think of the ‘European city’ as the site of international treaties or important policy proposals: Rome, Schengen, Dublin, Maastricht, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Bologna, Nice, Lisbon. However, this is changing with the arrival of the Urban Agenda, which was published by the European Commission in July 2014.

The key principle behind the Urban Agenda is that many of the economic, environmental and social policy challenges faced by the European Union apply mainly to urban contexts. It therefore makes sense to involve cities more intensively in the implementation of policy and ensure that this policy better reflects the urban reality. With this initiative, the European Union seems to be making a conscious attempt at sidelining the national level of Member States and making direct policy interventions where they can have an immediate impact. At the same time, it is bringing its policy closer to citizens. This proposed change of scale in EU policy raises the question of how it imagines the European city. How does the European Union legitimise its urban policy, and what political rationale can be inferred from it? And how well does the political rationale propagated by the EU stand up when compared to the everyday reality of urban life? When EU policy ventures into the city, what reaction can be expected?

The European Union and the city: A rescaling of neoliberal policy

The EU lays out the key idea behind its vision on the city as follows: ‘Cities play a key role in implementing EU policy, including the Europe 2020 strategy.’