Cities forge lobbying links

Date: 23/11/1995

By Tim Jones

EUROPEAN cities are emerging as a force in their own right. As the European Commission tries to weld disparate member states into a single market, large cities are already clubbing together to promote their common interests in the EU and beyond.

Often city dwellers, whether they live in Madrid, Edinburgh, Berlin or Milan, feel they have more in common with each other than they do with country folk from their own member state.

“We have the same preoccupations,” says Jean Rochet of the 66-member Association of European Metropolitan Cities (Eurocities). “The biggest urban areas often find themselves with the same problems: safety, immigration, education and so on.”

Marketing companies have already identified the emergence of a 'European consumer'. Benetton, Pepe Jeans and Lufthansa - to name just a few - market their products almost identically across the EU. While fast-moving consumer goods, particularly aimed at the young, tend to make up the bulk of these Euro-products, services aimed at business executives are also becoming more and more homogenous.

As a result, Europe's cities are networking as never before. Apart from Eurocities, a swathe of other groupings including Quartiers en Crise, Eurométropoles, Commission Four of the Committee of the Regions and Capital Cities have sprung up to lobby for them.

Even the networks have started to network. Eurocities President Walter Vitali and Pierre Mauroy of Eurométropoles agreed in October to merge the two organisations and find a joint home for their secretariats.

The European Commission, in the guise of a series of directorates-general from regional affairs to telecommunications, is actively encouraging a development that it feels makes a reality of the theoretical single market. In a study published in 1992, the Commission rejected the idea that a single 'urban hierarchy' had appeared in Europe. Instead, a series of overlapping hierarchies of cities in the 'old core', the 'new core' and the 'periphery' of the EU had started to emerge.

However, common phenomena could be identified: growing average prosperity in many cities, but also the increasing self-segregation of different social classes and ethnic groups, and rising crime.

For Walter Vitali, mayor of Bologna and president of Eurocities, these various challenges highlight the common financial needs of cities. “These problems are becoming increasingly difficult to cope with in view of both the persistent financial difficulties faced by local government and the accumulated delays in the setting up of telematics and transport networks, which alone will permit us to rebuild and develop our urban structures while taking into account the quality of life,” he told a recent conference.

The Commission's only specific aid programme for cities is URBAN, funded to the tune of 600 million ecu from 1994-99 and aimed at Objective 1 and 2 regions. It is designed to aid research into the social problems in some urban centres, support social and economic regeneration programmes, and environmental improvements.

The Commission also encourages the activities of the major city lobbies, although these are increasingly doing things for themselves.

Eurocities, for example, has a highly-structured system for developing policy and consulting with the EU's funding bodies. The group, which represents cities with at least 250,000 inhabitants (Ghent was rejected this year for being too small), has a series of committees chaired by its leading member city governments. In the area of social affairs, chaired by Birmingham, the committee has organised conferences on refugees and the situation of young and disabled people in cities. DGXXII, the Directorate-General for education and training, has helped fund an inter-cultural education project.

Cities are also concerned that they are missing out on the 'Information Society' revolution much heralded in the European Commission's White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness and Employment.

To address this need, cities' groups have created the Telecities project, with the help of the Commission's DGXIII (telecommunications), which aims to fully exploit the potential of new technologies. This now boasts a network of 50 city authorities.

The URBAN initiative has, as one of its aims, the promotion of employment at the local level. Member states can bid for funds for mobile advice units, programmes to help the long-term unemployed, labour-intensive initiatives and work in the service professions.

The cities themselves are trying to address structural problems in this same sector. The city government of Munich has worked on plans to get round the mismatch of skills and needs in the local labour market, while Lyon has analysed ways of increasing urban tourism, inevitably at the expense of their rural neighbours.

Constant pressure from cities to deal with the problem of traffic congestion and all its knock-on effects - economic inefficiency, death and injury and pollution - have prompted the Commission to act.

Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock will soon release a Green Paper on 'Citizens' Networks', the Commission's first comprehensive policy statement on congestion and public transport. It aims to discourage the use of cars and promote more efficient public transport by encouraging best practice and drawing attention to successful initiatives.

The cities' next big push will be for parts of their 'Charter of European Cities' to be incorporated into the Union's treaties during next year's Intergovernmental Conference. “At an institutional level, despite the creation of the Committee of the Regions, cities and urban areas have not yet been officially recognised or called upon to actively intervene in the various phases of decision-making and implementation of Community policies,” say Eurocities.

For this reason, the two main city lobbies will press for a clear reference to urban areas in the treaty and an extension of Union competencies in this field.