The various policy and strategic documents for the preparation of the next Community programming period 2014-2020, for the first time, attach significant importance to functional regions and urban-rural relations in the design and implementation of new policy instruments, cohesion, urban and rural development policies.
The study starts from the recognition of the growing importance of the concept of “functional region” in the political and academic agendas from 4 components:
- Reinforcement of the territorial dynamics of urban-rural integration
The increase of the direct influence of cities on territories more or less distant (commuting movements, use of equipment, intercompany relations, etc.) has not only raised the emergence of new concepts – employment basin, functional urban area (AUF) , functional urban region (RUF), metropolitan region, etc., but also the development of studies that highlight the expansion of the functional city far beyond the city-center (morphological). The same type of debate has been developed in other areas, with particular emphasis on the functional economic regions or the “FEMA – Functional Economic Market Areas” at both academic and management levels.
- Need for statistical information on a territorial basis organized on a non-administrative basis
The delimitation and characterization of functional urban areas or functional economic regions require the provision of geographically-based information organized in an adequate and comparable manner. Urban Audit (Eurostat), for example, has produced information since 2003 on comparing European cities. Urban Audit currently uses two concepts: city (administrative boundary of the city) and “larger urban zone” (LUZ), which aggregates the various administrative spaces included in the same “functional urban region”. Based on data from 2001 and for a set of 92 European metropolitan areas, only 49% of the inhabitants of “larger urban areas” reside in their respective administrative cities, which is less than 25% in many cases, such as Manchester, Paris , Athens or Lisbon.
- Affirmation of new principles and strategies for cooperation and territorial cohesion
Awareness of the negative effects of urban growth on surrounding rural areas, but also the need to manage in an integrated way the various systems that articulate urban and rural spaces (transport, green corridors, water resources, etc.) and the revaluation of various functions of rural areas close to urban centers (leisure, food supply, logistics, etc.) have led to the idea of urban-rural partnership as one of the guiding principles of spatial planning at European level and in the various Member States, especially from the formulation adopted in 1999 in the Community Space Development Scheme (EDEC). Since the ESDP, the principle of a new urban-rural partnership has been the subject of successive enlargements, being explicitly associated with new forms of territorial governance (Territorial Agenda, 2007), territorial cohesion objectives (Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion, 2008) and post-2013 cohesion policy (Territorial Agenda 2020, 2011).
- Development of new modalities of territorial governance in non-administratively functionally integrated areas
Flexible geographies defined in terms of functional relations raise new questions at the level of basic policy instruments, or with territorial incidence, as well as forms of territorial governance. In recent years, several countries have promoted, with very different success, various forms of urban-rural co-operation and coordination. At the same time, international institutions (OECD, for example), European networks (Eurocities, Metrex, etc.) and community entities (Commission, European Parliament, ESPON) have developed initiatives to compare examples of good urban-rural interaction.
