Session 1 - Montefiore

from city centres, while retaining all the advantages
of a city location, or enabled people to live in one
city and work in another.
The mix of forces include both micro and macro
socio-economic trends such as the means of
transportation, the price of land, individual
housing preferences, demographic trends, cultural
traditions and constraints, the attractiveness of
existing urban areas, and, not least, the application
of land use planning policies at both local and
regional scales.
Overall, evidence suggests that where unplanned,
decentralised development dominates, sprawl
will occur in a mechanistic way. Conversely,
where growth around the periphery of the city is
coordinated by strong urban policy, more compact
forms of urban development can be secured.
1.4 Links to EU policies
In essence, through the realisation of the 'internal
market', Europe's new prosperity and economic
development has put pressure on cities. The role
and contribution of cities to Europe's economic
growth, jobs and competitiveness, while also
delivering social and environmental goals, has
been addressed extensively by the EU institutions
together with the regional and local authorities
(European Commission, 2005). Sustainable urban
development appears prominently in many
European policy commitments, not least EU
regional policy.
To this end substantial EU Cohesion and Structural
Funds budget transfers to Member States provide
powerful drivers of macro-economic change
to support EU integration. However, analysis
shows that they can also create inadvertent
socio-economic effects that have promoted the
development of sprawl. The coordination of
land use policies and Structural and Cohesion
Funds investments remains key to support the
containment of urban sprawl, which is complicated
by the fact that EU intervention in many other, if
not all, policy domains, impact on or are impacted
by urban development.
Urban sprawl — a European challenge
One illustration of the extent of these
interrelationships is the EU commitment to
sustainable development and policies to tackle
climate change: how can we ensure that the growth
of urban greenhouse gas emissions due to the
dominance of car transport in the EU's sprawling
cities does not threaten to undermine EU Kyoto
commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
by 2020?
Overall, the EU has an obligation in relation to the
wide range of environmental, social and economic
impacts of urban sprawl to define a clear and
substantial responsibility, and a mandate to take an
active lead in the development of new initiatives to
counter the impacts of sprawl.
1.5 Who should read this report?
This report is targeted at all those actively involved
in the management of Europe's urban areas. The
aim is to inform about the impacts of urban sprawl
in Europe today and that without concerted action
by all agencies to address the underlying causes, the
economic social and environmental future of our
cities and regions can be compromised.
Subsequent chapters of this report describe the
patterns of urban sprawl that have emerged
throughout Europe during the post war period
(Chapter 2), which are related to the global social
and economic trends that form the fundamental
drivers of sprawl (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 reviews
the evidence of the impacts of urban sprawl,
and concludes that the sprawling city creates
major and severe impacts in relation to a variety
of environmental, social and economic issues
affecting not only the city and its region but also
the surrounding rural areas. Finally, Chapter 5
examines the principles that could underpin the
framework for action at EU level to combat urban
sprawl. This would include increased policy
coherence built around measures to secure policy
integration via close coordination between policies
in different domains, better cooperation between
different levels of administration, as well as policy
definition according to the principles of sustainable
development.
Urban sprawl in Europe 7