- EU Approaches to Urban and Territorial Development in Times of Slow Growth: Case Studies from South East Europe   585 kb by    Elisei, Pietro & Pascariu, Gabriel | pietro.elisei@urbasofia.eu    Short Outline Design of urban policies and tools for optimizing the use of public funds (especially EU) in urban and regional contexts. Abstract The Lisbon Agenda and its pounding reminder on making Europe the most competitive economy in 2010 landed in the port of the financial crisis. Most of Urban contexts in Europe are not hyperdynamic, especially from the viewpoint of economic growth. The gap of wealth between EU member states is widening , that is unofficially sanctioning the limits of EU social and territorial cohesion policies.The current programming period (2007-2013) proposes to mainstream into the Operational Programmes the investment for the cities. This choice poses some questions about effectiveness of cohesion policies in Europe; it can enlarge the development gap between most advanced and less developed member states. In fact, States having an advanced and organized territorial governance system (both vertical and horizontal) could benefit of the mainstreaming, as they have the policy framework capable to effectively canalize the EU funds into the suitable places with appropriate methodologies (strategic territorial agendas, local urban policies…). Other States, especially the recent post socialist ones, do have neither a relevant planning tradition in designing urban tools (old-fashioned planning systems run) nor a developed governance framework to manage the mainstreaming of the structural funds. Authors will present case studies from Romania and Italy proposing a comparative overview on instruments linked to use of EU funds in urban and metropolitan contexts: Practices are going to be analysed in convergence and competitiveness areas. Furthermore, a specific attention is going to be paid to new inputs of the 2014-2020 policies for territorial cohesion, where is considered the idea of proposing place based policies. Finally, the paper faces the questions of what to take into considerations in designing new instruments for EU funds in cities: how to adapt urban policies tools to the paradigm shift introduced (places matters) for counteracting the effects of economic and financial crisis. Keywords territorial cohesion, urban policy frameworks, slow growth, financial crisis Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper