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The Urban Agenda for the European Union: EU Governmentality and Urban Sovereignty in New EU-City Relations?

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Foregrounding Urban Agendas

Part of the book series: The Urban Book Series ((UBS))

Abstract

The Urban Agenda for the European Union forms one of the elements of contemporary European Union policy framework. The chapter analyses the content of the Urban Agenda from a critical perspective, focusing on new EU-city relations and on the interpretation of the urban issue, respectively. The chapter proposes that the Urban Agenda ought to be conceptualized as a ‘dispositif’ of governmentality for the construction of the European Union’s future spatiality. The complex relationship between powers and territories is at the centre of the governmentality approach. On the one hand, the Urban Agenda supports new ways of organizing and managing European territories with new multi-level partnerships. On the other hand, despite its voluntary basis, it produces new territories by both mobilizing a new spatial order and introducing implicit considerations in order to distinguish between the ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ territories, with the demise of the regional scale. Therefore, in the wake of the urban age ideology, the Urban Agenda discourse counts as a ‘soft’ powerful mechanism of political legitimization of a new urban sovereignty endorsed by the EU, which counters the most recent national developments since the global economic crisis and the substantial consensus that Eurosceptics have been achieved within national governments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Equally, European cities have played a role in the competition to acquire EU government offices and EU administrative and policy headquarters within their cities and territories. Brexit has been a major turning point in the geopolitical and geo-economic struggle between European cities to pull Europe’s locational centre of gravity towards their respective territories, as was the case with the European Medicines Agency’s relocation during the final competition between Milan and Amsterdam in 2018.

  2. 2.

    While assumed that the ‘global’ has been constructed as a social fact (Bartelson 2010), behind the current and confusing debates about definitive meaning, causes and consequences of globalization, there is recognizable “a wide yet largely tacit acceptance of the factuality of globalization as such, as a process of change taking place ‘out there’” (Bartelson 2000: 180).

  3. 3.

    This approach is exemplified by a number of policy agendas at different institutional scales: e.g. the Territorial Agenda for the Cohesion Policy, the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the global ‘New Urban Agenda’ as part of the Habitat III process (see for critical analyses: Watson 2016; Parnell 2016; Caprotti et al. 2017).

  4. 4.

    See groundbreaking writings such as Jensen and Richardson (2004), Walters and Haahr (2005), Swyngedouw (2005), Moisio and Luukkonen (2015).

  5. 5.

    According to Brenner and Theodore (2002), the approach of this chapter moves away from the assumption that neoliberalism is an ensemble of coordinates that will produce the same political results and socio-spatial transformations everywhere. On the contrary, as Ong (2007: 3) emphasizes: “Neoliberalism is conceptualized not as a fixed set of attributes with predetermined outcomes, but as a logic of governing that migrates and is selectively taken up in diverse political contexts”.

  6. 6.

    The Pact of Amsterdam underlines that the Urban Agenda for the EU will, in addition to the organizations mentioned in the Pact, make use of existing European policies, instruments, platforms and programmes such as the opportunities offered by Cohesion Policy, including its sustainable urban development strand, Urban Innovative Actions, URBACT, ESPON, the ‘Covenant of Mayors’, CIVITAS 2020, Reference Framework for Sustainable Cities (RFSC) and EUKN. It will make full use of the European Innovation Partnership ‘Smart Cities and Communities’ as established by the Commission.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Simonetta Armondi

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  1. Simonetta Armondi
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Correspondence to Simonetta Armondi .

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  1. Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Simonetta Armondi

  2. Department of Urban and Spatial Planning, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Sonia De Gregorio Hurtado

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Armondi, S. (2020). The Urban Agenda for the European Union: EU Governmentality and Urban Sovereignty in New EU-City Relations?. In: Armondi, S., De Gregorio Hurtado, S. (eds) Foregrounding Urban Agendas. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29073-3_1

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