challenges

The EU’s ever-tightening focus on the urban agenda has led, in recent years, to a clear recognition of cities as motors of regional, national and European development. Cities appears as crucial nodes, as centres of excellence of European territory, that can drive economic competitiveness and, at the same time, can forge territorial cohesion – itself an essential condition for the growth of long-term competitiveness. The opportunity to pursue the territorial dimension of cohesion will take substance with the forthcoming programming period. As cities seem to be crucial for the aim of a more coherent spatial framework of European development, urban policies will be one of the pillar of the European strategy. There are two major topics that have gained in importance to cities over the last decade: first, the evolving relationship between cities and the European Union, with a wide production of guidelines and EU raccomandations, and second, the rise of new forms of ‘governance’, be it at the local level or in the multi-level context of the European Union. The paper faces the role of EU cities in relation to the EU territorial cohesion objective and tries t