Local, national, European and international elected representatives are meeting from Thursday 16 March to Friday 17 March for the fifth edition of the ‘Cities Forum’. The gathering has already seen the European Commission officially launch the new European Urban Initiative (EUI).
Unveiled on Thursday by Cohesion Commissioner Elisa Ferreira, the EUI aims to provide an “integrated set of services” to support sustainable development, quality investment and innovation in urban areas. The Initiative will receive €450 million in funding from the ERDF, and will target cities of all sizes. The Hauts-de-France region will be responsible for the operational management (“Entrusted Entity”).
Innovation and sustainable development
The EUI has two components. The first (strand A), dedicated to supporting innovation, comprises 75% of the total budget (i.e. almost €315 million). The second (strand B) is dedicated to capacity building and sustainable urban development policies.
Together, they have three objectives: to enable local authorities to experiment with innovative projects that can be transferred to other cities, to strengthen the capacity of cities to design urban development strategies in a participatory way, and to facilitate access to knowledge and the sharing of expertise between urban areas.
The Initiative foresees, among other things, the creation of a knowledge exchange platform (Portico), the establishment of a network of urban contact points responsible for informing the Initiative of local needs and strategies, as well as funding.
Funding in sight
Indeed, the EUI will allow urban local authorities to obtain up to €5 million euros with 80% co-financing. A first call for projects under the umbrella of the Initiative, which closed in January, will reward projects supporting the values of the European Bauhaus (see EUROPE 13101/19) in urban municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants. The beneficiaries will be announced in June.
A new €120 million call for projects on greening cities, sustainable tourism and talent development will be published in May. New themes will follow in 2024 and 2025.
" There is a lot of discussion about money and little discussion on what we do with money, how you implement things”, Ms Ferreira said. “We really want to move into a more qualitative approach, and that’s what we are trying to stimulate [with the EUI].”
Description of the Initiative: https://aeur.eu/f/5uo
And the EUI website: https://aeur.eu/f/5up
Urbanisation of cohesion policy
More broadly, the Forum is an opportunity to discuss the urban dimension of the cohesion policy for 2021-2027. With 72% of Europeans living in urban areas, at least 8% of the ERDF within the 2021-2027 cohesion programmes must be allocated to cities.
The Forum also looks at how the New European Bauhaus can have an impact on local development and the role of cities in the implementation of the ‘Green Deal’. (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)