Meeting in Strasbourg
On November 21st members of the URBAN Intergroup took part in a meeting co-organised with EUROCITIES Metropolitan Areas Working Group. The main topic of the seminar was the presentation and discussion around the report on “Metropolitan Areas in Action”.
This report is a work of specialists, from various countries, researching on metropolitan areas. The final report represents 3 years of exchange of knowledge and 1 year of research, ensured by the Metropolitan Institute of Budapest.First part of the study presents the main findings of the research, whereas the second part focuses on five cases of European metropolitan areas: Lille, Warsaw, Brno, Bratislava and Stuttgart. The report was presented by Peter Austin, the planning advisor at City of Oslo and 15 experts taking part in the MAIA project were present to exchange their experience with the URBAN Intergroup’s members.
Final results arouse much interest and a debate followed with the exchange of opinions and ideas.
“City is like a human being. You cannot impose rules and let it adapt to them. We, people interested in urban development have to work together and we need to cooperate with the urban areas,” said Cristina Gutierrez-Cortinez (EPP/Spain).
The MAIA study also shows that what concerns the metropolitan areas and their further development is their size. Therefore should we adopt a proper legislation for the metropoles?
“Can we say that metropole is a legal status? If we want to give any legal status to these areas firstly we have to discuss more if such status helps? What should count is not the name we give to these areas, but specific processes they are undergoing,” commented and concluded Jan Olbrycht (EPP/Poland).
