PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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5.4.4 The EU’s Input Papers to the 9 th UN CSD Conference in 2001
Official EU inputs to the 2001 United Nations Commission on Sustainable
Development Conference on Transport and Energy mention urban sprawl as a key trend
and reason for concern, finding that it has encouraged longer trips, pushed people further
out of urban centers and discouraged people from walking and cycling (EU 2001:4).
Another short Issues Paper by the EU (EU 2000) for the CSD session of the previous year
“sets out some of the main points and recommendation for action” of the EU on the
sectoral theme of Integrated planning and the management of land resources. Here, we
find the EU urging that “land use and urban planning should be better integrated with
transport planning in order to achieve spatial structures which will reduce the need for
travel and traffic.” The EU also wants to:
encourage governments to adopt integrated policies in order to minimise unplanned
urban sprawl and avoid the [sic] urban congestion.
encourage governments to co-operate in order to share knowledge, to implement best
practices and to develop common strategies at different levels
emphasise the responsibility of all sectors for sustainable land use management as
well as the importance of co-ordination of cross sectoral co-operation in land use
planning, including effective stakeholder participation and public/private partnerships.
[Emphasis added.]
These are ambitious EU recommendations which we should keep in mind when
analyzing EU funding for transport infrastructures in CEE (see esp. Chapter 9).