Urban issues in nation-state agendas: a comparison in Western Europe

Urban issues in nation-state agendas: a comparison in Western Europe

A comparative perspective is used to consider the resulting types of policies (area-based programmes, mainstream state policies, re-spatialization of local and regional government through institutional reforms, institutional innovation and maintenance of local government) as well as the problematic issue of the formulation of integrated and effective policy strategies for cities. Furthermore, the paper takes a view of the uncertain and weak impacts of many of these actions, and proposes a tentative explanation for how and why urban policies enter states’ political agendas.

Political responses can be explicit or implicit and the resulting policies may have either direct or indirect effects on cities

In order to address urban issues, national governments perform a variety of actions, which can be classified into a policy typology based on 2 variables. When political attention for urban issues gives rise to national decisions, policy-makers can choose between: political responses that are either explicit or implicit and the resulting policies may have either direct or indirect effects on cities. The resulting typology of policies is illustrated in the figure below.

State policies are explicitly urban when they are designed and implemented on the basis of an evident and prominent territorial focus of an urban nature. In such cases, an urban target is clearly detectable in the public debate and in the official documents of the policy. It provides the spatial criteria through which problems to be dealt with are identified and circumscribed. Additionally, it provides a reference through which decision-makers can choose from existing menus the policy recipes and instruments that are to be used. State policies are only implicitly urban when actions, even those which produce consequences on the social and economic lives of cities, are employed without such a specific spatial criterion, so that their impacts on an urban scale are incidental. National urban policies are to be considered direct when state actions confront causes or consequences of urban challenges without the involvement of other actors – namely, infra-national governments. Such actions may be based on cooperation between central and local actors, even though the former usually maintain political and administrative control over the policy process. Policies are indirect when the national decision-makers’ main aim is to provide local actors with conditions and resources (political, of legitimization, instrumental, financial, cognitive, such as those often resulting from institutional reforms) for taking on urban challenges through their own policies.

The 4 analysed countries share several common elements

The explicit and direct national urban policies consist of area-based programmes addressing either economic problems – mostly concerning wider urban areas, or social problems – concerning narrower zones. Such programmes are carried out in France, UK and Germany, but are not present in Spain as national initiatives. As a result of the homogenizing effect of the European Union’s urban policy (epitomized by the URBAN Initiative), these programmes fall under the category of ‘urban development programmes’ that are also carried out by other European governments. In the 4 analysed countries share several common elements, such as:

• a target territorially circumscribed to those areas where economic or social problems or shortfalls arise (the former typically concerning agglomerations or city-regions; the latter concerning the inner cities in the UK and the Zones Urbaines Sensibles in the French banlieues);
• a smaller financial size and duration than mainstream state policies, therefore making a comparatively minor impact. On the other hand, they are more resilient than mainstream state policies. Furthermore, they are able to generate the potential for change and for learning from past experiences. In France and the UK, this has led to several generations of similar (but not equivalent) interventions;
• a tendency to hypertrophy, sometimes due to the coexistence of multi-year initiatives launched by former and new governments, with the consequent possible coexistence of actions that refer to different strategies;
• a model of action usually consisting of major decisions made at the national level, procedures of competitive bidding between cities in order to get grants from the central government, implementation needing cooperation with the local level, and centralized procedures of impact assessment.

Policy-making to address urban issues can bring about substantial consequences

Even the most symbolic aspects of policy-making to address urban issues can bring about substantial consequences. This is especially the case when the lack of well-designed and effective strategies aimed at practical problem-solving is compensated for by a willingness to build consensus, for example, to address social alarm or to distribute resources among a set of recipients narrower than the wider public of policy-takers. Symbolization processes are not only useful for building consensus, but also for indirectly providing substantial distributive choices with a wider legitimization. Thus, latent motives turn out to be rather important in the making of policies responding to perceived urban challenges.

Contact info

Ernesto d'Albergo
Department of Innovation and Society, 'Sapienza', University of Rome
Email: ernesto.dalbergo@uniroma1.it

Publication date

09 June 2010

Document type

Research