Cities’ Political Sovereignty and the EU's Territorial Agenda

Under the pressure of cultural, technological and institutional factors, tightly intertwined, European cities are undergoing profound structural changes in their economic base. Constrained by the nature of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ shocks and by their own, highly diverse adjustment capacity, European cities – whose strategic sovereignties have substantially increased in the past two decades – may enter intentionally (or unintentionally) development trajectories that put at risk both the ‘European model of city’ and the ‘European model territory’. In particular, cities’ development trajectories, that may be expected to be profoundly different, may not prove to be functional to the long-term meta-objectives set in the ‘Lisbon Agenda’, in the ‘Europe 2020 Strategy’ and, more generally, to the attainment of the political goals defining the ‘European project’. The paper explores the possible divergence that may consolidate between cities’ social preference functions and the European Unions’ territorial and social agenda, and discusses the limits of the ‘territorial competition paradigm’ with regards to achieving a sustainable evolution of the European urban system