Namur, 16/07/2001 (Agence Europe) - The Ministers and High Ranking civil servants responsible for spatial planning in the EU Member States, decided, on Saturday in Namur, to meet more regularly and, where possible, to organise joint informal meetings with the Ministers responsible for policies linked spatial planning (transport, environment…). Denmark, contrary to Spain, has announced its intention to organise such an informal Council. This undertaking represents the main result of the informal Council of Ministers for Spatial Planning, which kept itself to the presentation of examples and a few major principals (importance of urban policies…), in an area that has difficulty in becoming concrete despite the adoption of a development plan for the Community area, in 1999, after six years of talks.
We must be the architects of the coherence of the European area, stated Michel Foret Minister for Spatial Planning in Wallonia to his counterparts, at the Council opening. He underlined that the challenge is two fold: that of cohesion and that of coherence. Cohesion for a spatial policy in an enlarged Europe, coherence with other Community policies. The Commission, in its report on cohesion, insisted on territorial cohesion, in addition to economic and social cohesion. Let us recall that spatial planning is not a Community policy.