Matera Seminar ESPON The Territorial Effects of the Structural Funds in Urban Areas ECOTEC, ECORYS-Nl; IRS; MCRIT; Nordregio; OIR; SDRU

Structure Focus Towards a typology of urban areas First policy recommendations Challenges for the next phase

Focus Work has concentrated on identifying consistent indicators and methods for identifying those urban areas that might be eligible for Objective 2 style programmes in the future – across the EU 27+2 Assessing the territorial effects of structural funds in urban areas has not been a priority

Towards a typology of urban areas Economic trends –Changing employment levels –Changing prosperity –Levels of dependency/vulnerability –Economic structure Social trends –Education levels –Income levels –Health –unemployment Environmental conditions

Data availability Common European data sets at NUTS 3 Nationally available data at NUTS 4 or 5 Data that is specific to individual urban areas –Through case study analysis –Awaiting data that will become available through the Urban Audit 2

Initial typology Building on FUAs – using common data (at NUTS 3 level) –Limited economic data Employment* GDP* Economic structure (estimated) –Limited social data Unemployment* Education levels Population levels

Initial basic typology

Mapping of typology

Accessibility and the typology 1

Accessibility and typology 2

Structural Funds and the typology

Developing the typology The strength of this typology is that it makes use of comparable datasets enabling robust comparisons to be made across the European territory. The weakness is that it applies at the NUTS 3 level, is particularly ‘blind’ to sub-urban level difficulties and utilises a limited set of indicators. An extended typology has been developed, but the data is not available to populate it.

Extended typology The elements of sustainable development – Munasinghe 1993

Components Multi-criteria analysis – PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluations) Status indicators (11) Performance indicators (17) But: – from a total of roughly 1,600 FUAs in Europe (including the accession countries and Switzerland) only about 100 FUAs showed a relatively complete set of indicators

First policy recommendations Urban NUTS 3 areas tend to perform badly in EU 15 (particularly local/regional), an urban focus thus valuable Not to attempt to undertake a comprehensive assessment of all urban areas in the EU for Structural Fund purposes To undertake an initial assessment based upon NUTS 3 level data To use MCA to undertake urban-centred analysis in partnership with urban authorities To make use of data from Urban Audit 2 to assess the potential role of the Structural Funds in assessing urban–level difficulties

Challenges for the next phase To assess the effects of the Structural Funds in urban areas –Data from –Case study analysis To assess the role of urban typologies in decisions regarding eligibility for Objective 2-style actions –Particularly issues of scale and competence To test the MCA approach using Urban Audit 2 data But, resource constraints