MAPPING URBAN NETWORKS OF ROMANIAN CITIES IN COHESION PROJECTS 2007-2013: A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS.

AuthorTursie, Corina
PositionReport

Introduction

For more than twenty years, policy developments occurred in the field of spatial planning, leading to the territorialization of the cohesion policy of the European Union (EU). In more detail, territorialization of a policy depends on its "capacity to promote territorial development and/or territorial cohesion, targeting a specific territorial scale (from urban to European)" (Medeiros, 2016, p. 95). The goal of territorial cohesion "makes explicit that there is a territorial or spatial dimension to the primary social and economic goals of the EU" (Duhr et al., 2007, p. 303). A "key to interpreting [...] territorial cohesion" (Rivolin and Faludi, 2005, p. 198) is the concept of polycentrism, embedded in a multilevel governance system.

Territory became a new dimension of EU policy since its introduction in the European Spatial Development Perspective (European Communities, 1999). The cohesion policy of EU officially introduced this territorial component for the first time in the multiannual financial perspective 2007-2013, adding the strategic goal of territorial cooperation as the third objective of structural funds, along with the first two, convergence and competitiveness. The new objective aimed to enhance three strands of territorial cooperation, financed by INTERREG: cross-border cooperation (CBC), transnational and interregional cooperation.

The assessment of the results of the strands of territorial cooperation proved to be challenging "due to their complexity, to the particular fuzziness of their objectives, and to shortcomings in monitoring systems and data collection" (Barca, 2009, p. 97). While spatial planning was seen "as an experimental field for European governance" (Rivolin and Faludi, 2005, p. 195), it was argued that, as a financial EU instrument, INTERREG is a "top-down stimulus for bottom up processes" (Bohme and Waterhout, 2008, p. 235), offering "a multilevel forum for the exchange of ideas" (Giannakourou, 2012, p. 120) having as hallmark "networking, learning and innovation" (Colomb, 2007, p. 355) and facilitating 'policy transfer' and 'horizontal Europeanization' (Duhr and Nadin, 2007, p. 376). It was also pointed out that "the intensity and effectiveness of territorial cooperation vary greatly, with the greatest impact occurring in regions where integration and cooperation are already well developed (e.g. Baltic Sea, Benelux area)" (Barca, 2009, p. 98).

Situated at the Eastern periphery of Europe, the first years of European integration represented for post-communist Romania a 'funds frenzy', 'pro-cohesion' period (Munteanu and Servillo, 2014, p. 2267), EU funds being seen as catching-up tools. EU influence brought positive changes in terms of "learning and networking effects [...] since the first cross-border cooperation projects" (Munteanu and Servillo, 2014, p. 2267).

This paper aims to be an assessment of the realities: the urban networks that emerged from territorial cooperation projects involving Romanian cities, during the first seven years of EU membership. Who are the networking partners and what influences the intensity of their connections? The general purpose is to discuss the effectiveness of INTERREG in producing polycentric connections between cities, at each of its operational levels: cross-border, transnational and interregional.

The paper is organized as follows: section two provides a theoretical discussion on polycentrism as a part of the EU normative agenda; the third section develops the research questions, our methodology, the dataset we built, the methods we used and also, provides the results. Apart from summarising the methodological and substantive findings of this paper, the final section also addresses limitations and future research questions, as well as emerging policy implications from this analysis.

Polycentrism and the normative goal of a balanced EU territory

At the core of EU Urban Agenda, we find the concept of polycentrism. The Agenda acknowledges the "polycentric structure of Europe" (Urban Agenda for the EU, 2016, p. 4). Even though it is at the core of the EU normative agenda, polycentrism proved to be a "versatile and fuzzy" concept (Burger and Meijers, 2012, p. 1127), despite the attempts of clarification (Kloosterman and Musterd, 2001; Davoudi, 2003).

The European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) was promoting the goal of "polycentric" and "balanced spatial development of the European territory" (European Communities, 1999, p.10), as a guiding principle in order to achieve two rather competing goals: to boost the global market competitiveness of Europe and to limit the intra-European regional development disparities. ESDP revealed the existence of "one single globally outstanding, dynamic integration zone" (European Communities, 1999, p. 20), a pentagon composed by the metropolises of London and Paris, defined as global cities, complemented by Milan, Munchen and Hamburg. Outside, there was a large periphery with a few disconnected metropolises, meant to expand furthermore, along with the Eastern enlargement.

According to this polycentric rationale, the EU core area is characterized both by morphological polycentricity--populous cities with big economies and highly developed infrastructure, as well as by functional polycentricity--a sort of space of flows, composed by networks of flows and cooperation between urban areas. Complementing morphological and functional polycentricity was considered a policy goal of European spatial development, leading to the creation of "several dynamic zones" (ESPON, 2005, p. 37) of economic integration, as growth areas outside Western Europe's Pentagon. The European Spatial Planning Observation Network (ESPON), as an applied research programme aimed at supporting the formulation of territorial development policies in Europe, financed several research studies on measuring polycentricity.

ESDP seems to be inspired by seminal theoretical works which considered the concepts of 'globalization' and 'network' as interconnected: in a globalised economy the biggest economic advantages belong to the most connected actors (Sassen, 1991; Castells, 1996; Taylor, 2006). Global or world cities were advocated since the 80s (Friedman and Wolff, 1982; Sassen, 1991). Understood as "a space of flows" (Castells, 1996; Taylor, 2006), a globalized city is supposed to register higher performances, in terms of 'the quality of services' offered to its citizens (Kaufmann et al., 2005).

In the context of globalization, the old paradigm of territories and nations states is replaced with a new one, of "places, flows and networks," thus "rising the relevance of connectivity" (Pain et al., 2016, p. 1139). Urban systems are perceived as "set[s] of interdependent nodes (for example, centers) and the patterns of interaction between these nodes" (Burger and Meijers, 2012, p. 1130). Moreover, the existence of multidirectional flow patterns with no significant orientation towards a particular center was considered a clearer description of functional polycentricity (Burger and Meijers, 2012, p. 1134). Cities' ability to act is fueled by the multilevel perspective of EU governance, as a new type of governance emerged in the process of implementing regional and structural policy reforms (Marks and Hooghe, 2004), which were designed to produce cohesion between the prosperous EU core and the less developed peripheries, along the divide North-South (in the 80s) and West-East (in the 90s).

As a major difference from state-centric governance, multilevel governance includes new legitimacy for action--the preference for networks and the involvement of multiple actors from different levels, whether above the national level (transnational) or below it (subnational), as well as new spaces for action, across the usual administrative borders, modifying the conventional understanding of the spatial peripherality of a location. This research approaches territorial cohesion from a multilevel perspective on the dynamic formation of core and peripheral regions, overlapping at different spatial scales (regional, national, European and global) (Lang et al., 2015).

The challenge of understanding polycentrism, as in the case of core-periphery dynamics, consist in the fact that it is scale-dependent: polycentricity at one level, may be monocentricity at another (Nadin and Duhr, 2005). This was considered especially relevant in the context of the Eastern enlargement (ESPON, 2006). Encouraging polycentric development at the macro-European scale, focused on growth poles and the associating new growth areas to the European core, criticized by the place-based theory (Barca, 2009), could lead to "increasing monocentricity in the developing peripheral regions of the EU" (Hall and Pain, 2006, p. 4).

At the meso-national and interregional level, in Central and Eastern Europe, encouraging the capital cities to be competitive on a European scale could increase already existing internal discrepancies between them and the other cities. Intranational cohesion gaps have widened in all post-communist countries (Barca, 2009, p. 81; Maier 2012, p. 143). Finally, at the intraregional micro-level, developing a polycentric metropolis, could lead to a more a monocentric, less sustainable region (Kloosterman and Musterd, 2001).

Previous research showed that territorial cooperation increased participants' awareness and knowledge (Stein, 2010, p. 11; Colomb, 2007, p. 362) on endogenous development (Barca, 2012), or territorial capital (Stein, 2010), but also on European strategic concepts like policentricity, hence "increasing the way in which project participants view their neighbours and how regions perceive their own position in the wider European picture" (Colomb, 2007, p. 363). Within this context, this article represents a case study in which we analyze the networks of participants in territorial cooperation projects involving the Romanian cities, during the...

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