GUD EU Law · Governing the Urban Dimension of European Law
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-06-01 → 2025-11-30
- EU contribution
- €211,755
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Governing the Urban Dimension of European Law
The Governing the Urban Dimension of European Law (GUD EU Law) project aims to advance our understanding of the urban dimension of the European Union’s (EU) legal system. How do EU rules conceptualize urban areas and their specific dynamics? How does their influence shape cities and, within them, the role and capacity of urban actors and institutions to address today’s urban challenges? At the same time, how do cities respond to this influence, and in what ways can these reactions contribute to reshaping EU rules themselves? Although urban areas occupy only around 2% of EU territory, they host approximately 75% of the European population and generate about 85% of the EU’s GDP. Owing to their spatial density and social dynamism, cities are key sites of opportunity, innovation, and the articulation of diverse interests within the EU. Yet they also face acute challenges, including economic restructuring, environmental degradation, and social inequalities, all of which significantly affect citizens’ quality of life. In response, EU institutions increasingly engage with urban issues and are often called upon to regulate the conflicts that emerge in cities. Through this engagement, EU law shapes urban social and political dynamics, generating processes of transformation as well as contestation and resistance. While legal scholarship has so far paid some—albeit limited—attention to cities, it has largely conceptualized them as unitary actors, often without distinguishing them from other sub-national institutions. The central contribution of the GUD EU Law project is to reconceptualize cities as collective actors and to examine how the internal dynamics among the myriad actors operating within urban settings are influenced by EU norms. To this end, the project adopts an original interdisciplinary approach that combines legal analysis with insights from urban sociology and public policy studies. It analyses judicial decisions and implementation practices to examine how EU law addresses and shapes urban areas and their socio-political dynamics across three interrelated policy fields: urban mobility, air quality, and housing.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
‘GUD EU Law – Governing the Urban Dimension of EU Law’ explores how constitutional principles can enhance integration of urban policies with the European Union (EU) legal order. It critically analyses EU judgements and practices of the EU Urban Agenda to provide a richer understanding of how EU law impacts environmental sustainability and social inequalities in EU cities. Based on this, it will advance proposals for a refashioned interpretation of constitutional principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, constructing an empirically-based understanding of when and how EU institutions should regulate policies with implications on urban spaces. GUD EU Law innovatively combines doctrinal legal research with critical geography’s contextual case analysis and semi-structured interviews to experts. Conceptually, it analyses trends the effects of EU law on urban spaces reveal about limits and possibilities of the EU to solve urgent societal issues, advancing debates on constitutionalism, policy and sociology. To achieve these objectives, I will be supervised by Prof. Le Galès at Sciences Po’s Center for EU Studies and Comparative Politics, a top institute home to one of the largest multidisciplinary groups studying public policies at EU and city level. Besides enhancing my scientific knowledge and skills, as well as my international network and profile as independent researcher, thereby improving my career opportunities, the project will advance EU research excellence and raise institutional and public awareness about the need for governing the urban dimension of EU law. I will distil findings in two journal articles, and formulate evidence-based proposals to govern the urban dimension of the EU in a policy brief. Dissemination to scientific and policy community will involve an urban lab and a multi-stakeholder conference. Communication to wider audiences will involve a course, a newspaper article, and interactive city maps.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- FONDATION NATIONALE DES SCIENCES POLITIQUES · ParisCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union