PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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are seen as being intimately related and in need of being treated in more integrated ways,
particularly in urban areas. Note that “urban sprawl” emerges as a central concern in
these EU policy statements – something to keep in mind for our discussion of EUfunding
for the Budapest ring road in Chapter 9 (which also defines the term concisely).
5.4.1 The Communication “Towards an Urban Agenda in the EU”
In 1997, partly in follow-up and reaction to the 1996 UN Habitat II Conference in
Istanbul, the Commission presented a Communication entitled Towards an urban agenda
in the European Union (CEC 1997a) that outlined the challenges facing European cities.
It acknowledged Europe’s towns and cities as the primary sources of wealth creation but
also focused on the problems facing urban areas. Interestingly, the terms sustainable or
sustainability do not appear in any of the headlines or subsections of the report.
However, the document emphasizes the strong relationship between urban and transport
policy matters by ultimately highlighting
the impact of some key actions in four policy areas which have a particular bearing on
the growth and development of Europe’s cities:
policies which promote economic competitiveness and employment
policy in favor of economic and social cohesion
policies which help the insertion of cities into transEuropean networks
policies promoting sustainable development and the quality of life in cities”
(CEC 1997:8)
The fact that the relationship between urban developments and EU cohesion
strategies is clearly acknowledged and dealt with extensively in the Annex is important,
but we reserve our discussion on cohesion objectives to later chapters. What interests us
here is the fact that the Commission, in its section Transport and transEuropean
Networks, presents the TENs as crucial for urban development and urban policies. There