Europeanization in Time: Assessing the Legacy of URBAN in a Mid-size Italian City

Abstract

The 2007 mainstreaming of URBAN raised important questions about the sustainability of its regeneration approach under the new regulatory regime, and particularly about the policy legacy left by this Community Initiative in its participating cities. Taking advantage of the recent conclusion of the 2007–2013 programming period, these questions are tackled here both theoretically and empirically. Building on the general model of Europeanization, the article posits a trade-off between local misfit with the URBAN approach and the durability of the policy change induced by the scheme. The argument is then illustrated through an in-depth study of Pescara, a mid-size Italian city that participated successfully in URBAN only to lose most of its policy innovations in the immediately subsequent programming period, when it took part in the country's mainstreamed funding scheme, the “Programmi integrati di sviluppo urbano”. With hindsight, the study suggests that URBAN was set up to fail exactly those cities with little experience in integrated and participatory regeneration that it was supposed to help the most. It also concludes that future European Union policy-making and implementation should factor in the misfit/durability trade-off to maximize effectiveness given the Union's goals as well as its involvement expectations.

Keywords:

• URBAN community initiative
• mainstreaming
• Europeanization
• Pescara
• ERDF

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the European Planning Studies reviewers for helpful comments, and Concetta Di Cicco and Michela Giammarini for their help with data and documents. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Pier Domenico Tortola http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4865-572X

Notes

1 While Europeanization has been defined in different ways (see Olsen, 2002; Clark & Jones, 2009), most EU scholars agree that this research programme's primary focus is on the consequences of European integration on member state structures and policies (Börzel & Risse, 2000; Sedelmeier, 2012a). The planning literature is, in this respect, no exception.

2 At the same time, there are notable exceptions to this general picture. As Janin Rivolin and Faludi (2005) note, for instance, the main push for the inclusion of environmental concerns into the ESDP came from Nordic countries rather than from the group of leading old members. Moreover, expanding the definition of spatial planning beyond its most explicit instruments reveals important deviations from the upload/download pattern described earlier, such as in the case of the “territorial pacts for employment”, a EU-sponsored local development initiative modelled after the Italian “patti territoriali” (Celata & Coletti, 2014).