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Discover the final outputs of Joining Forces Project on Metropolitan Governance!

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09 October 2017
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Economy
Governance
Physical Urban Development

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Local Economy
Urban-rural

You are working in the field of metropolitan governance or simply interested in the topic: discover the final results of URBACT Joining Forces project.  Its eight partner cities have worked for two years to explore how strategy-making and governance arrangements at the city-region level can help to effectively address the main challenges faced by urban Europe: competitiveness, cohesion and sustainability. This is a rich and complex topic, but also a key challenge for a number of European cities. Following its final conference (18 May 2010), Joining Forces has produced final outputs regarding its project results.

All over Europe, metropolitan areas or city-regions are increasingly recognised, even by local authorities, as the "real city" level, the right one for designing and implementing more effective development strategies and governance mechanisms. Achieving successful cooperation between cities and their surrounding areas is obviously crucial to improve local cohesion, but even more to increase territorial competitiveness and sustainability.

Joining Forces is an URBACT project made up of 8 European partners facing metropolitan governance issues . Since 2008, these partners have looked for joint, effective and sustainable solutions on why and how to develop metropolitan governance mechanisms. Joining Forces has described and analysed partners' concrete situations in order to propose conclusions and suitable recommendations to the local, regional, national and European authorities. They have worked on the basis of practical examples (case studies) and have considered the theme of metropolitan governance through its different important aspects : Strategic and Spatial Planning, Mobility management and Transport, Main environmental issues (air and noise pollution, waste disposal, water supply), Knowledge economy (Creativity, Research & Education), Private sector involvement in metropolitan Governance (public/private arrangements), Social inclusion, participation and empowerment, Attractiveness & competitiveness (including Promotion / Marketing).

After  two years of  exchange and learning activities, Joining Forces has produced different surveys and reports regarding its project results:

You can find in this document a synthesis of the project general conclusions and recommendations. It summarizes the main outcomes of the project activity : the need for a new vision of urban territories, developing policies on the most effective scale, an overall need for pooling the resources of local authorities , what help from the national and regional governments and from the EU etc. This paper also provides you with a synthesis of the seven thematic seminars held in the different partner cities.

This paper describes the impact the common activity has had on each partner city's local development. Applying URBACT methodology, Joining Forces' partner cities have set up relevant Local Support Groups to make sure that exchanges have an impact on local practices and policies. These Local Support Groups have developed effective Local Action Plans as a concrete output addressing the problems identified at the beginning of the project and drawing on the results of the exchange and learning activities implemented by the partner over the life of the project. These Local Action Plans are detailed in this compendium.


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