Metropolitan region policies in the European Union: following national, European or neoliberal agendas?

ABSTRACT

The paper depicts the emergence of metropolitan region policies in Europe as being linked to the globalization debate and demonstrates how the idea of supporting metropolitan regions as national growth engines appeared to become not only an element of European regional policy but has appeared more and more in national urban policies as well. We propose to regard the diffusion of the underlying spatial development ideas as being linked to Europeanization processes as a form of transnational socialization and learning. We demonstrate how the urban dimension has been more and more strengthened in EU regional policies since the early 1990s and how influential some national level policies might have been for the European level. Some new member states show recent shifts towards more neoliberal development models arguing for more competitiveness through metropolization. We propose that this interrelates to a general shift towards the paradigm of a regional policy based on growth potentials and competitiveness across the EU. While the cohesion objective is nevertheless maintained, there seems to be a widespread consensus among policy-makers in Europe that to a certain extent the metropolitan paradigm is a logical and unavoidable result of economic transformation and globalization and is needed to achieve overall competitiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Metropolitan regions
• central and Eastern Europe
• Europeanization
• spatial planning
• urban policy
• regional policy

1. Introduction

In the last two decades, there has been an increasing interest in regional policy research and practice in the concept of metropolitan regions. However, the idea of forming and promoting metropolitan regions is only partly based on empirical observations of current urban and regional development (e.g. Krätke 2007). The idea to support the formation of internationally renowned competitive city regions should in our view also be seen as a form of regulation through national and European policy agendas (e.g. Kübler 2012) reflecting changing paradigms of spatial policy. Both, empirical and normative aspects of metropolization seem to be reflected in a widespread big city enthusiasm and the rise of ‘city-centric narratives’ (Morgan 2014, 297) which adds a strong discursive dimension to the topic. Ideas about the economic power of global cities and a dominant discourse picturing the big agglomerations as being international, cultural, innovative and economic hot spots have also raised fears of an increasing socio-spatial polarization to the disadvantage of peripheral areas in particular (Leber and Kunzmann 2006; Lang 2011). In fact, due to a shift in spatial development priorities on European and national levels, policies supporting peripheral and disadvantaged areas seem to have lost importance.

We understand metropolization as a multiple process combining empirical dimensions such as the concentration of population and (economic) activities, normative-political dimensions such as policy frameworks supporting the formation of metropolitan regions and discursive dimensions adding particular values (e.g. about a good life) and relations (e.g. urban-rural dichotomies) to the general debate, which is based on the notion of (metropolitan) regions being social constructs. The basic idea of this paper is to focus on the normative and discursive dimensions of metropolization and to analyse the evolvement of metropolitan policies at European and national state level as being linked to the Europeanization of spatial planning. In this context, we will suggest to depict the Europeanization of spatial planning as a multiple, circular or multi-directional process and not one-way top-down. With this and the subsequent papers of this issue, we want to shed light on the discursive backgrounds of metropolitan policies in the European Union and in selected Central and Eastern European countries with recent policy shifts.¹

The idea to support metropolitan regions has turned into an important part of European spatial policies at least since the elaboration of the European Spatial Development Perspective (European Commission 1999a) and the Lisbon Strategy (European Council 2000). Metropolitan policies have emerged in Western Europe, notably in England (HM Government 1972; Wilson and Game 2002), France (Brunet 1989; Jean and Vanier 2009, 318ff), Germany (Egermann 2009) and Switzerland (Schweizerischer Bundesrat et al. 2012), and – more recently – also in Central and Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Poland and Romania (Egedy, Kovacs, and Kondor 2016; Mikula and Kaczmarek 2016). Whereas some of the earlier policies of metropolitan region building have to be seen in the light of local government reforms in order to achieve more effective administration (for England: Redcliffe-Maud 1969), the recent wave of metropolization is mainly linked to motives of competitiveness and growth in the light of globalization (Knieling 2012). In this sense, metropolitan region building turns to be an issue of European and national policy instead of being linked to regional self-organization in a sense of more efficient metropolitan governance (Kübler 2012).

The paper at first briefly sets out some central ideas from the Europeanization literature applied to urban planning as a conceptual framework. It then depicts metropolitan region building in Europe as being linked to the globalization debate and a general shift towards neoliberalism. In our third chapter, we look how the idea of supporting metropolitan regions as national growth engines appeared to become an element of European spatial policy before highlighting some policy formation processes at national level. Here, we argue that the diffusion of the underlying spatial development ideas is a matter of horizontal or circular policy transfer in times of Europeanization.

We conclude that there seems to be a considerable shift towards the paradigm of a growth and innovation based regional policy which is partly realized via the formation of strong metropolitan regions. It is not the aim of the paper to judge if this shift is helpful for achieving balanced spatial development and territorial cohesion or simply better planning,² but rather to try to better understand why and how this concept made this international career and became influential at various spatial levels. In this context, we want to highlight that strengthening metropolitan policies is also a matter of dispute. There has been strong opposition from advocates fighting for maintaining distributive policies and for on-going support to rural and disadvantaged areas mitigating a more radical focus on metropolitan development. Nevertheless, while the cohesion objective is maintained, there seems to be a widespread consensus among policy-makers in Europe that to a certain extent, the metropolitan paradigm is a logical and unavoidable result of economic transformation and globalization.

2. Metropolization as a form of Europeanization?

Since we have been observing the introduction of metropolitan region policies across a number of European countries, we might have to locate these shifts within a wider process of the Europeanization of spatial planning. In recent years, Europeanization became the buzzword for explaining the convergence of spatial planning programmes and instruments in Europe. Acknowledging the specificity of particular (national) planning cultures through state traditions and welfare systems, governance arrangements and actor constellations as well as particular economic systems, there seems to be at least a partial and soft harmonization of normative and ideological backgrounds of planning throughout the EU. In this context, we should understand Europeanization not primarily as a top-down process through sector policies and funding regulations, as a form of organizational learning and convergence through transnational collaboration or as the diffusion of the concepts and ideas from EU framework documents into national policies.³ We suggest to understand Europeanization more generally as a ‘transnational socialisation and learning processes’ (Clark and Jones 2008, 309), a multi-directional, interactive or cyclical process of institutionalization at European and national scales within which discourse plays a major role. Our hypothesis is that this becomes visible, for example, in the rise of metropolitan policies throughout Europe which gives ground for a neoliberal or new post-regional agenda (Herrschel 2012). Throughout Europe, these changes in planning and regional policy have not or only to a small extent turned into revised legal framework documents but are nevertheless meaningful in terms of their consequences not only for planning practices but also for the organization of space and for peoples’ everyday lives.

So far, the Europeanization literature related to planning has concentrated on changes in the national planning systems as a whole, on the introduction of a multi-level governance system and on the relevance of European spatial development policies or transnational collaboration (e.g. in ESPON or in interregional and cross border cooperation programmes) for the national levels. Documents such as the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) or the Territorial Agenda (TA2020) are seen ‘as meta-narratives of European spatial development policy’ (Reimer, Getsimis, and Blotevogel 2014, 6) which has put some pressure to individual countries to adapt, executing paradigmatic influence. Local, regional, national and supranational actors have their equal share in this discourse, in particular, when it comes to the formation of hegemonic thought. We argue that the role of ‘the EU’ in top-down Europeanization is mistaken in a way that the role of regional and national actors (e.g. via the committee of the regions, the European Parliament or national positions shaping the EU spatial planning policy agendas during the circulating presidency)⁴ is clearly underestimated. It has to be acknowledged that member states play a vital role in the formation of EU policies.

In the context of the ESDP, there is greater conformity between the European and national policy guidelines among the old member states who actively contributed to the planning discourse leading to the ESDP compared to the 12 new member states (Böhme and Waterhout 2008, 241f). Hence, there might be a special situation for the new member states who could not use these discursive channels during the pre-accession period, arguing for a more top-down form of Europeanization in this period. Hence, in the literature, special emphasis is given to the transformation of planning in the new member states preceding and following their accession to the European Union. This reflects general interest in legal, administrative and institutional homogenization or convergence across the EU in spatial and political sciences as well as in regional and area studies. Here ‘the’ European Union is portrayed as main driver of Europeanization while at the same time, member states can still follow their own paths of development (e.g. Raagmaa, Kalvet, and Kasesalu 2014).

The transformation of planning in the new member states also reflects a particular turn towards neoliberal policies. ‘In these countries, the fragility of the planning systems following the breakdown of socialist-influenced structures led to a particular willingness to accept market economy and rather neoliberal tendencies’ (Reimer, Getsimis, and Blotevogel 2014, 8). This coincides with a more general neoliberal shift in public service provision, public government and policies being catalysed through processes of Europeanization (Waterhout, Othengrafen, and Sykes 2013). So, there is a tendency at EU level, that issues of balanced spatial development and territorial cohesion are de-prioritized and replaced through a logic of competitiveness, place-based development and growth-based concentration (Avdikos and Chardas 2015). We could argue with Servillo (2010) that through discursive chains, these strategic concepts become hegemonic, making other ways of thinking, other ‘rationales’ and policy options marginal (see also Waterhout, Othengrafen, and Sykes 2013, 144).

It is in this context that policies favouring metropolitan regions are on the rise at national and supranational level in Europe and beyond. Some authors would argue, this is a process of Europeanization through transnational learning and policy transfer.⁵ To be more precise, we suggest to perceive this process as being part of a more general shift towards neoliberal development concepts in the fate of the globalization debate and a general global trend favouring the big cities as economic engines and attractive places to work and live as a specific preference of the current capitalist society (see also Krätke 2007; Waterhout, Othengrafen, and Sykes 2013; Avdikos and Chardas 2015).

3. The discourse on global cities and the importance of metropolitan regions

In the last three decades, the question of metropolitan region building has shown up more and more often on European and national political agendas. In the same time, the bigger cities have also been the subject of numerous reports underlining the idea that they should be strengthened as central places for economic development, innovation and job growth (Jouve 2000). In a current UN report, ‘extended metropolitan regions’ are portrayed as nothing less than ‘the engines of economic growth, innovation, resilience and human development’ (UN-Habitat 2013). This shift in the recognition of cities can also be seen as part of a renewed general ‘optimism about cities’ (Gordon and Buck 2005, 6), making changing ideas about the positive role of the urban and its political, institutional and economic implications as important as ‘real’ changes. Competitiveness, cohesion and governance are argued to be the core themes representing the current paradigms of urban policy in Europe or – at least – ‘the acceptable basis of social thought and action, across business, academic and political communities’ (Gordon and Buck 2005, 7).

The discourse about metropolitan regions has had several forerunners identifying big cities as nodes of globalization, such as Friedmann’s World-City Hypothesis (Friedmann 1986) or Sassen’s work on the Global City (Sassen 1991). They have identified cities as the emerging spatial scale, replacing countries as central nodes in a globalizing economy. Both emphasize cities and global city networks as a major driving force behind the new spatial organization and the international division of labour. This position has been further adopted by the Globalisation and World Cities Research Network monitoring the relation between cities (Beaverstock, Smith, and Taylor 1999). And in 2002, Friedmann concludes that ‘almost the whole world will coexist in a single global urban network, driven by worldwide competition’ Friedmann 2002, XV). Most authors in the context of the global cities debate mainly reflect on their ability to concentrate control functions (as main location for transnational corporations) or on the development of services needed to execute these functions (Derudder 2006). In scientific as well as in political discourse, there has been a clear link between globalization and urban politics ever since (Newman and Thornley 2012).

Metropolitan regions are not a totally new concept, but aspects relating to their spatial definition and their perceived importance in the global economy have changed considerably during the past three decades and thus the concept has received new meaning. The interlinked conceptual and analytical processes, both, in terms of urban policies and in terms of economic and demographic concentration, are often discussed using the term metropolization. Krätke perceives metropolization as ‘the main trend of spatial development in Europe’ (Krätke 2007, 2), understood as a concentration of economic development potentials and innovation capacities in metropolitan regions and major urban agglomerations (Krätke 2007, 25). We see both, a normative and an analytical dimension to this definition. The normative dimension refers to the increasing promotion of metropolitan region building in urban and regional policy, the analytical dimension to structural concentration processes which can be captured by a number of economic and demographic variables. In the reminder of this paper, we shall focus on the normative and discursive aspects of the concept.

The main arguments to promote metropolitan region building are often linked to the above mentioned clues of the global cities debate combined with a rhetoric of competitiveness, innovation and growth. This is linked to the major goals of EU Regional Policy: to reduce economic, social and territorial disparities between the regions and to support competitiveness, economic growth and job creation – with a more and more dominant emphasis on the latter. Thus, cities are more and more seen as economic drivers, capable of boosting the competitiveness of the surrounding areas, the EU member states as well as Europe as a whole (Territorial Agenda 2011, 7). That is why the concept of metropolitan regions has become an increasingly influential idea together with the belief that development policies for cities and regions have to be integrated in order to achieve a maximum effect. Urban agglomerations and metropolitan regions are more and more seen as the engines of economic development in the EU as well as the most important nodes of Europe’s integration in the global economy (Krätke 2007; Jurczek 2008; Wiechmann 2009, 127).

Consequently, and following the paradigm of a Europe of the regions, at EU and national level, the definition of metropolitan regions is always only partly analytical, and to a large extent political (normative) or symbolic (see also ARL 2007, 3). In most EU countries, the concept refers to capital regions as well as second tier city regions with a high concentration of population and economic, political and cultural activities (ARL 2007). A key element in most of the definitions of metropolitan regions is their international or European significance (or sometimes ‘potential’ significance). This can be measured in terms of the concentration of functions linked to competitiveness and innovation as well as gateway and control functions in a global economy (ARL 2007). Wiechmann suggested a European consensus concerning the definition of metropolitan regions as functional agglomerations with at least 500,000 inhabitants in their core, a concentration of tertiary functions and being recognized as growth poles of European significance (Wiechmann 2009, 125).⁶

4. The rise of the urban dimension and the introduction of metropolitan policies at European level

In order to understand the emerging role of metropolitan regions in urban policy, it is important to reflect the policy context in which it has developed. Indeed, the European debate about the increasing role of big city regions dates back to the late 1980s and turned more and more into a frame of reference with paradigmatic influence. We argue that since then, the perception of big cities as the drivers of economic and intellectual development as well as the consequent policy to promote metropolitan region development have become hegemonic thoughts. Even though the EU has only had a formal responsibility for coordinating regional policies since 1991, most policy-makers, researchers and observers have argued that it has had an increasing role in tackling urban challenges as well.

In the early 1990s, the idea that cities matter because of their ability to concentrate economic activities has become more and more vigorous. Two influential research studies have encouraged the promotion of urban interests: the Cheshire report in 1988, focusing on urban problems, and the Parkinson report in 1992, proclaiming the renaissance of large European cities (Cheshire et al. 1988; European Institute of Urban Affairs 1992; Berg, Braun, and Meer 2007, 41). This comes along with the first Urban Pilot Programme, later culminating in the URBAN Community Initiative (European Commission 1999b). Although the pilot projects and the URBAN I initiative (1994–1999) focused on issues of urban regeneration and cohesion in a local perspective, they are part of a shift towards introducing a policy focus on large urban agglomerations. One of them was represented by the position paper ‘Towards an urban agenda in the European Union’ (European Commission 1997) which highlighted not only the current trends of European cities, but has also represented the inception of the EU’s Urban Audit, a pilot project designed to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of European cities (Parkinson 2005) and in general called for a more pronounced urban perspective in European policies. This has happened among other arguments highlighting ‘the potential of cities as autonomous creators of prosperity’ (European Commission 1997, 8). Also the Commission’s Communication entitled ‘Sustainable Urban Development: a framework for action’ (European Commission 1998) has called for a clear urban dimension in regional programming supporting the objective of strengthening economic prosperity and employment using a rhetoric of competitiveness and growth.

Next to national policy initiatives in various European countries, since the mid-1990s, with immediate support of the European Commission, a number of large European cities formed the METREX network as a bottom-up initiative in order to push ‘the metropolitan dimension to planning at the European level’ (METREX 2000, 1). Whereas the origins at the 1996 founding conference in Glasgow were very much linked to regeneration issues focused on the metropolis itself, on its website, METREX nowadays postulates the role of metropolitan regions as containing ‘core business, cultural and governmental functions’ stressing that ‘their wellbeing is vital to the sustainability, competitiveness and social progress of Europe and its people’. From its start, METREX managed to get support from European institutions and has been playing its role in strengthening the urban dimension of European regional policy.

An indirect, but one of the most important milestones in shaping the urban agenda in Europe was the approval of the Lisbon Strategy in 2000, aiming to turn the European Union into the world’s most competitive knowledge-based economic region. In 2004, the European Economic and Social Committee presented a statement concerning metropolitan regions, urging the Union and the European institutions to strengthen the urban dimension of European regional policy. The Committee highlighted the ‘direct connection between the role of European metropolises and the Lisbon Strategy’ arguing that metropolitan areas are at the heart of rapid global economic changes and would be ‘important contributors to the European growth strategy’ (European Economic and Social Committee 2004).

Over the past 10 years, informal Ministerial Meetings have adopted a range of Declarations, one of the most important ones being the Leipzig Charter of 2007 (European Commission 2007), stressing the role of cities as places of extraordinary opportunities for economic development and as centres of knowledge, innovation and growth. Not only through via the biannual Informal Meetings of Ministers Responsible for Spatial Planning and Territorial Development (European Economic and Social Committee 2011) but also with the re-orientation of structural funds for the 2014–2020 period (European Commission 2013a), the Commission has become more and more concerned and directly involved in urban affairs and thus strengthened its urban metropolitan policy.

5. Metropolization and national spatial policies

Above, we have argued to perceive the rise of metropolitan policies as a matter of Europeanization and to view Europeanization as a multiple, circular or multi-directional learning and institutionalization process. Hence, within this chapter, we aim to portray the rise of metropolitan policies and the discursive framing from a national perspective. Parallel to the outlined changes of European regional policy towards a stronger urban and metropolitan focus, the idea to promote metropolitan regions and to introduce a metropolitan dimension to national urban policy has gained importance in a number of European countries at least since the early 1990s. The main argumentation which has been used to bring about these new priorities in spatial planning is linked to structural economic changes, the change towards a flexible network economy, processes of globalization and internationalization leading to a perceived decreasing significance of the nation states (Blotevogel 2001; Gordon and Buck 2005) or to a shift within which nation states become ‘players at the urban scale’ (Newman and Thornley 2012, 127).

Countries such as France, the Netherlands and Germany have been early promoters of the metropolitan regions concept (Megerle 2009). In 1989, a comparative study has been published on behalf of DATAR (Délégation à l'aménagement du territoire et à l'action régionale) – a French authority responsible for spatial development – about the role of the European urban systems, aiming mainly towards French politicians and planners (Brunet 1989). The main argumentation follows spatial development perspectives calling for strong metropolitan regions to avoid spatial marginalization within the larger European context on the one hand, but also arguing for a more balanced spatial structure through the strengthening of secondary urban centres to reduce the relative overweight of Paris on the other. The European debate was also influenced by the German approach to support the emergence of Metropolitan Regions with European and global significance (Ritter 1997; Blotevogel 1998; Egermann 2009). The idea of defining metropolitan regions with international functions in Germany emerged in the early 1990s with the approval of the Action Framework of Spatial Planning Policy. At the same time, the German Standing Conference of Ministers Responsible for Spatial Planning (MKRO), in which the German federal government and the federal states are represented, has developed a national metropolitan region concept which has become a reference point for all future spatial development policies in Germany (Adam 2003; Göddecke-Stellmann et al. 2011). This has defined a network of six metropolitan regions, being extended in 1997 and in 2005 with five further regions. The MKRO’s 2006 Leitbild (spatial development vision) defines centres, inner metropolitan functional zones as well as transition zones (BMVBS 2006).

More recently, also in some of the new member states the introduction of metropolitan region policies has been discussed – following the dominant market driven logics of post-socialist transformation of urban systems with a strong focus of international investment and economic development on the main agglomerations (Sýkora and Bouzarovski 2012).

In Poland for example, starting from 1998, there has been an on-going discussion around spatial planning giving much attention to ideas of metropolitan region building although without coming to a concrete metropolitan reform framework (Mikula and Kaczmarek 2016; Ehrlich, Kriszan, and Lang 2012). This is because regional disparities in Poland have increased (Czyż and Hauke 2011; Domański 2010) and metropolitan areas are already developing much faster than the rest of the country (the most eloquent examples being Krakow, Warsaw or Poznan) and advocates of rural areas, which are in Poland quite strong, have delayed any reform introducing formalized metropolitan regions. However, the 2010 National Strategy of Regional Development defined a new regional policy for Poland clearly following a paradigm of selective concentration based on territorial potentials, strategic intervention and ‘mechanisms of competitiveness’ to be implemented through territorial contracts defining projects and development targets with the Voivodships (Ministry of Regional Development Poland 2011, 8, 13). This new focus implied a clear departure from redistributive policy principles whereas the cohesion objective is still maintained on second place following the competitiveness objective (Ministry of Regional Development Poland 2011, 11). This paradigm-shift is said to be pushed by reports from World Bank, OECD and ESPON as well as a number of recent EU policy documents (Szlachta and Zaucha 2010). Nevertheless, at present, there is no integrated national urban policy or formal legislation for metropolitan areas and metropolitan region building. Institutionalization of metropolitan regions has been left to bottom-up initiatives based on the collaboration of local governments and administrations with Poznan metropolitan region being a prominent example.

Similar policy trends can be observed in Hungary, where the centrality of Budapest has been increasing in the past years with a strong accumulation of economic, political and demographic resources in the capital city (Lux 2015). Minor cities face major challenges in order to survive in a ‘metropolitan world’ (Lux 2015, 23). Historically, Hungarian regional policy has always been controversial and has been characterized by rapidly shifting policy objectives either supporting the growth and international visibility of Budapest or trying to reduce its overweight in the national urban system (see Egedy, Kovács, and Kondor 2016). At least since 2007, the Hungarian Government implemented a regional development policy targeting six further development poles additional to Budapest in order to achieve a more balanced territorial structure and to achieve European visibility with strong urban centres. However, this and various further attempts to counterbalance the concentration on the capital region and achieve a more balanced spatial development in Hungary were not successful, and socio-spatial polarization has been increasing in the past years with Budapest as single dominating core. Furthermore, as regional policy has followed the principle of de-concentrated concentration, areas outside of the few bigger agglomerations have continuously lost government support (Egedy, Kovács, and Kondor 2016), leading to increasing peripheralization.

In Romania, since 2001, in order to achieve a more polycentric spatial development of Romania, regional policy has been based on the growth pole concept, hoping that the development of other regions could be better promoted by concentrating resources on selected core regions with the idea that through spill-over effects wider areas would benefit (Dranca 2013; Benedek and Cristea 2014). This was followed by certain attempts to delimit metropolitan areas where the initiatives of local actors have been granted more freedom. The National Territorial Management Plan defines metropolitan areas as being established in partnership through the voluntary association of the main urban core and the adjoining urban and rural settlements within a 30 km distance which would cooperate at different levels. So far, empirical analyses have shown that these approaches have not lead to decreasing disparities between the urban areas and their neighbouring areas but rather furthered polarization. Since 2001, regional policy in Romania has more and more focused means for regional development on metropolitan regions, whereas the number of such areas with (potential) European significance was reduced by government decision from 12 agglomerations in 2001 to 7 in 2007 and only 5 primary metropolitan regions with international potential in 2012 (Benedek 2013; Benedek and Cristea 2014). In the 2007–2013 European Regional Development Fund programming period, estimated 50% of funds were spent in 7 national growth poles and 13 urban development poles. Hence, the focus was rather on a concentration of funds following perceived regional potentials rather than on territorial cohesion – producing an at least arbitrary regional policy (Dranca 2013, 54).

Current national attempts to introduce metropolitan region policies can be seen as a response to economic and demographic concentration processes (UN-Habitat 2013; EC 2011; Lang 2011) and as a strategy to achieve European and global recognition. Although the balance between cohesion and competitiveness differs between the CEE countries, there seems to be a general tendency to focus the latter and further strengthen the core regions as a strategy to catch up with the old member states and thereby putting less attention to intra-national regional differences (Maier 2012, 143). While we can clearly note that the early approaches of national metropolitan policies advocated through the French DATAR and the German MKRO have influenced European policies by large, the influence of more recent policy debates and shifts in some CEE countries on the wider European discourse is not yet clear. Following our understanding of Europeanization as being characterized by multi-directional learning processes, we suggest that these national debates further triggered a more general shift towards neoliberal thinking at EU level.

6. Conclusions

Across Europe, and in particular in Central and Eastern Europe, we have witnessed processes of metropolization in the past years. This refers not only to a concentration of people and business activities in metropolitan regions but also to the rise of metropolitan region policies favouring a small number of international and competitive city regions (Lang 2011; UN-Habitat 2013). The discourse framing these policies dates back to the early 1990s when at various levels urban issues entered national and European political agendas. Political will, funding strategies and discursive framing have played a major role in creating the perception of big cities as being the current hot spots of social, cultural and – in particular – economic development. However, the concentration of development to a few metropolitan cores gradually has led to the relative marginalization of and increasing development differences with other regions (Krätke 2007; Smetkowski et al. 2011).

Although this process is seen as problematic and the cohesion objective is maintained at EU level, there is nevertheless at least a rhetoric shift towards strengthening the competitiveness aim of the Lisbon Agenda, playing down the need for distributive policies and for fighting peripheralization. The idea to concentrate development in a few very strong metropolitan or capital regions in order to achieve European significance has turned into a widely acknowledged paradigm in times of globalization and the hegemonic competitiveness discourse. It is often forgotten that this discourse – or ‘competitive city-regional narrative’ (Morgan 2014, 301f) – is empirically based on a few very successful metropolitan regions leading to downplay the role of politics and other rationales.

In European regional policy, growing social and spatial disparities have been widely recognized, for example, in the reports on economic, social and territorial cohesion in the EU (e.g. EC 2011, 2013b). At the same time, the idea to achieve competitiveness and growth via promoting the formation of a smaller number of strong, globally networked metropolitan regions, has gained ground. Moreover, this position has been more and more portrayed as a natural consequence of the changes in the global economic system. In the current reform of regional policy, enhancing the urban dimension is very likely to turn into a key element of EU cohesion policy in future (European Commission 2013a). It is remarkable, how the arguments supporting the introduction of an urban dimension to the EU’s regional policy have shifted from a call for urban regeneration in times of decline towards portraying cities as the main drivers for innovation and competitiveness. This has already been true for the formation of METREX as well as for commissioned background reports for the European Commission (Cheshire et al. 1988; European Institute of Urban Affairs 1992).

The focus on the competitiveness narrative and the introduction of metropolitan region policies at national levels has by far not been without opposition. It seems, however, that advocates of the cohesion approach and supporters of distributive policy rationales have lost ground in the past years. Hence, at least at a rhetoric level, a focus on the (perceived) need to form strong, internationally visible metropolitan regions seems to be omnipresent in Europe. Subsequently, policies favouring disadvantaged areas seem to lose ground although on a rhetoric level, cohesion principles are still maintained. Despite some variation in the emphasis between competitiveness and distribution, the promotion of metropolitan regions in functional as well as in symbolic terms as well as the shifts in regional and urban policies we have described in this paper can be seen as a consequence of the Europeanization of spatial policy within the EU linked to the growing dominance of the competitive discourse. This is particularly visible in the national ways to design and implement the European Union’s cohesion policy via regional operational programmes.

In this context, the transfer of metropolitan region policies and of the underlying empirical and normative foundations cannot be seen as a one-way process from European to national to regional level. The formation and emergence of these policies are multi-directional with promoters at city-regional, national and European level influencing each other over the past two decades. Current metropolization in the EU thus follows European, national and – seemingly – more general neoliberal agendas, reinforcing and mediating each other at the same time. Further research is needed at national and regional level, to better understand the relation between the multi-scalar discursive, structural and political dimensions linked to the formation of metropolitan regions across Europe and beyond as well as the implications for funding regimes and national regional policies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This paper and the special issue in total are also the result of a two-day workshop in Cluj-Napoca in November 2012 organised by Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca/ Romania and Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig/ Germany (see report: Nagy 2013). The aim of the workshop was to discuss European and national policy ideas and paradigms following and opposing the metropolitan regions model with researchers dealing with metropolitan regions in Central and Eastern Europe.

2. For a critical assessment, see Lang (2012).

3. There is no commonly accepted definition of Europeanisation. For a more complete discussion of the term in relation to planning, see, for example, Böhme and Waterhout (2008), Dühr, Colomb, and Nadin (2010, 103ff), Giannakourou (2012) and Reimer, Getsimis, and Blotevogel (2014).

4. Looking at the process leading to the Territorial Agenda starting from 2002, at least nine different working groups under the respective presidencies participated in the elaboration (Waterhout 2008, 9ff).

5. In political studies, the convergence of policy in various political systems – for example, in the framework of Europeanisation processes – can be explained with the concept of policy transfer. Policy transfer can be seen as a ‘process by which knowledge of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political system […] is used in the development of similar features in another’ (Benson and Jordan 2011, 366). At the one hand, this facilitates policy innovation, but dense networks of policy transfer also seem to limit the room for more varieties in urban policy – through particular policies becoming hegemonic ideas. Hence, despite the fact that the concentration of development in a smaller number of metropolitan regions leads to growing disparities and furthers socio-spatial polarisation, there is still a harmonisation of urban and regional policy in the EU supporting processes of metropolitan region building. 

6. A widespread empirical definition was elaborated in the framework of the European Spatial Planning Observatory Network (ESPON). The project titled ‘The role, specific situation and potentials of urban areas as nodes in a polycentric development’ defined under the headline ‘Enabling cities to act on the European and global scenes’ 76 metropolitan growth areas based on population and GDP, competitiveness, connectivity and knowledge basis (ESPON 2006, 115). Since then, the so-called MEGAs have become a standard element in European wide monitoring of spatial development (e.g. in the progress reports on economic, social and territorial cohesion).