URBACT CityLab on Metropolitan Governance: Outputs now online!

An URBACT CityLab was held on February 12th, 2010 in Lille, on issues related to managing metropolitan areas across national, regional and local boundaries. You are working in this field or simply interested in the topic, discover the outputs of the one-day event.

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 directly deal with these issues whereas a number of others consider issues which have a clear metropolitan dimension. This event was organised within a few months of the completion of the URBACT II Working Groups from the First Call for projects, to facilitate a cross-cutting confrontation of findings and first conclusions drawn from the work already achieved.

Key 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?
Which models of governance are best suited to tackling the great urban challenges of the 21st Century (climate change and resource depletion, demographic change and migration, globalisation, competitiveness and social cohesion) ?

About the CityLab:Citylabs are dynamic working meetings with active participation between participants. 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 was organised through 4 parallel workshops dealing 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, with the same audience in the two sessions in order to make them real workshops, where conclusions are drawn collectively and then reported to the plenary and discussed with the audience and local and European officials.

Workshop reports and powerpoints: