Research Report 2006 - 2007

The European URBAN Experience: The academic perspective

The study aims at presenting recent and current academic research on the implementation of URBAN I & II programmes in different European cities and countries. It should provide an overview of the existing studies (with references, sources, authors, locations), and, above all, an analytical synthesis of the issues, research questions and answers addressed by these studies.

This is not as easy as it seems to be. Although there are many (young) researchers from different fields of study (e.g. political and administrative sciences, sociology, urban planning, geography etc.) involved in the area, as yet not even a fistful of academic studies has been published officially. The URBAN literature is mainly made up of grey literature: unpublished dissertations, Diploma papers (Degree and Master theses), expert reports and conference papers, some scattered articles. Grey literature is not widely circulated and therefore difficult to get knowledge of and to obtain. In other words, in this research area there is a lack of systematic recording of available literature and a lack of communication or networking between the researchers.

Therefore, the project has 4 objectives:
1) to systematically detect the academic URBAN literature in order to provide a full bibliography
2) to systematically analyze and synthesize the literature. Here, the particular focus is on questions of governance: What is the impact of URBAN on (national, regional and) local governance structures and dynamics? In how far has URBAN the potential to empower the subnational level and local actors? What is the importance of exchange and policy learning offered through the transnational dimension of URBAN (and URBACT)?
3) to further networking and exchange between young academic researchers within the Network of Young European Urban Policy and URBAN researchers
4) to feed back the (intermediate) findings to URBAN activists and practitioners by presenting and discussing them at URBACT conferences.