ABSTRACT
If scholars basically agree on the current trends occurring in European cities (see Chapter 12), still controversial is the general interpretation of such trends and the role played by urban policy in this respect (van Kempen 2007; Scott 2008). Do rising inequalities show a substantial “Amer icanisation” of the European city (Häußermann 2005)? Should we explain this trend as being due to the supremacy of global players over local and urban ones? Is there still room for European cities to develop their own policy agenda leaning to address local and urban interests or mitigate emerging risks? Or do these facts disclose the weakening capacity of European urban cities to govern the huge social and economic transformation occurring in the last decades? Our study is positioned within such broader theoretical context. Indeed, current trends can be interpreted as a critical rupture in the functional and programmatic link between competitiveness and social integration (Pahl 2001), which is one of the main features of the “European city model” (see Chapter 1). Alternatively, trends can be understood as challenges that put the European city model under strong pressure, requiring systemic adaptation and resilience capacity (Maloutas and Pantelidou Malouta 2004; Matznetter and Musil 2012). Two aspects of the “European city model” are especially challenged by concomitant trends towards stronger austerity policy and increasing social pressure due to the rise of unmet social needs: (a) the capacity of state intervention to provide the regulatory framework and financial resources necessary to support place-based economic growth and welfare policies (Andreotti et al. 2012; Ranci et al. 2014) through institutional multi-level coordination (Kazepov 2010); (b) the capacity of urban governments to elaborate local policy strategies aimed at mediating market logics and the pursuit of public interest (Van Kempen and Murie, 2009; Body-Gendrot et al. 2012). In this concluding chapter, we will consider these two aspects as crucial criteria to evaluate the resilience vs. rupture of the “European city model” thesis on the basis of our previous analysis. We will analyse the peculiarity of the statecity relationship on the one hand, and the capacity for cities’ policy action on the other. Our general hypothesis is that a progressive dissociation between social protection and pro-growth policies has occurred in European cities. As the competitiveness-social integration nexus is one of the most important peculiarities of the “European city model”, an analysis of such dissociation will eventually show the extent to which European cities have differently distanced themselves from this original pattern, which has been considered as unitary and largely encompassing different social welfare regimes.
