Register to URBACT CityLab on Metropolitan Governance!

Nation-states, regions, counties and cities are more and more dependent on decisions out of their direct control. International flows of goods, capital, knowledge, people, geared by private and public networks, transform and destabilize the territorial dynamics at local and national levels. The only certainty left in the global era is the key role played by expanding cities also known as metropolitan areas which have become indispensable nodes of the world economy.

However, urban poles have a competitiveness and resilience that do not solely depend on their capacity to connect to the international grid of cities sharing command functions. They must also address more local issues such as urban sprawl, mobility, social polarization and spatial segregation, energy efficiency and cosmopolitanism. The failure to manage these ever growing urban regions can be a source of economic collapse, social conflicts, and environmental problems. The difficulty is not only to find a balance between the economic growth, the human factor, and the earth’s concern at a local scale, but also to contemplate a territorial inclusiveness agenda in the fragmented urban sphere.

Several URBACT projects are directly dealing with these issues whereas a number of others consider issues which have a clear metropolitan dimension. A few months before the completion of the first URBACT Working Groups, it appears relevant to organise a cross cutting confrontation of findings and first conclusions drawn from the work already achieved. This is the main reason why it was decided to hold a specific URBACT CityLab.


CityLab main questions:

• How do cities deal with the complexity of managing both the morphological and functional city regions which are cleaved by national, regional, and administrative boundaries?
• What types of innovative arrangements do they develop in order to overcome the resulting political, financial, and / or administrative divisions?
• How does the citizen remain engaged and the system maintain legitimacy in increasingly complex governance arrangements?
   

About the CityLab:The CityLab is designed as an opportunity for different URBACT projects and other European projects working on metropolitan challenges to exchange their findings and first conclusions at an intermediary phase.

It is not the place for delivering final conclusions and /or political statements. It is conceived as a working event, a step in the current process of elaborating common conclusions. 

The work will be organised through 4 parallel workshops which will deal with four major groups of issues. The 4 parallel workshops will be made of 2 sessions: a first one in the morning and a second one in the afternoon. The audience should be the same in the two sessions in order to make them real workshops, where conclusions are drawn collectively. Workshops conclusions will be reported to the plenary and discussed with the audience and local ad European officials.

Free conference – Translation in English and French The second seminar of the URBACT project "EGTC", Expertising Governance for Transfrontier Conurbations, will be held in Tournai, Belgium, on 11 February 2010, the day befor the CityLab. It will deal with the theme "Implication of civil society within cross-border agglomerations".

Further information on EGTC pages.