PURPLE President Mrs Helyn Clack spoke yesterday (May 9 2016) at a Committee of the Regions conference entitled Rural areas as the key to economic, social and territorial cohesion in Europe: governance and infrastructure in relations between towns, surrounding areas, regions and macro regions.
Organised by the CoR Commission for Natural Resources , the event took place in Innsbruck with a partial focus on the Alpine Space macro region.
Mrs Clack's intervention on behalf of PURPLE came as part of a debate on "Rural-urban links and their significant impact on the regional development of rural areas”.
Mrs Clack began by explaining a little about the nature of Peri-urban Surrey, the area for which she is a political representative, and describing the complicated push and pull between more rural parts of Surrey, urbanised Surrey and of course London in terms of the labour market, commuting and other transport patterns, public service provision and demands upon same, and how al of the above impacts on “community”. She want on to say a few words about the PURPLE network itself, explaining its mission and purpose and how it sets out to be the voice of European peri-urban territories. Mrs Clack pointed out that current ways of living serve to blur the divides between urban and rural areas, creating ever-larger and ever-more important peri-urban areas, with their own specific characteristics, problems and opportunities. In other words, large and growing parts of Europe are characterised by a complex web of inter-relations and interdependencies. She explained that a key PURPLE message in the context of any debate like today’s one is that we absolutely must not unhinge the urban and rural. Where urban and rural co-exist there is peri-urban.
As for any model of urban and rural regional development with an economic slant. Mrs Clack started by saying that she wanted to be clear from the outset that each and every PURPLE region was home to dozens of high tech companies, universities and research institutes, located not just in the most urbanised part of the territory, but also in many lesser known smaller towns in what PURPLE describes as l the peri-urban zone. It follows, Mrs Clack explained, that there are good market opportunities in a wide range of sectors from high and new technology, through the automotive industry, to food and drink. Directly addressing CoR members in the room Mrs Clack went on to state, “but we, as politicians, must see that we create the right conditions to allow business to flourish and provide the education and training, research through universities - and importantly access to fast, reliable broadband. This last point about the pivotal importance of access to reliable broadband was repeated during subsequent debate and Q & A.
As Mrs Clack was sharing a platform with a representative from OECD who was later to speak about how their (OECD’s) own thinking is evolving at present in terms of defining “rural”, Mrs Clack took the opportunity to emphasise the fact that PURPLE members have been involved with the RURBAN initiative, repeatedly making the point that urban-rural “linkages” very often describe superimpositions where urban and rural features and characteristics co-exist in the same landscape, the same economy and the same set of complex human inter-relationships.
With regard to future matters, Mrs Clack reiterated the fact that, in common with CoR itself, PURPLE has been happy to lend its support to the European Movement Call for a White Paper on Rural Policy and that this is just one dimension of a broader push by PURPLE for recognition that the challenges faced by rural areas in all their diversity, including peri-urban territories, must be taken into account at the EU level and that a large proportion of the EU population lives in rural and peri-urban regions and that this constitutes an integral part of the European dynamics. Looking further ahead still of course. Mrs Clack reminded her audience, exactly the same principles should apply to our discussions about the EU budget and policies post-2020, PURPLE members believe that EU investments – including those made within cohesion and rural policies – must maintain a strong territorial and place focus with more specific attention being paid to peri-urban areas in order to better support growth, jobs and innovation.
