PURPLE president Helyn Clack, together with Vice President Michel Rijsberman and North Holland CoR member Cees Loggen, shared the same platform at the recent Committee of the Regions Forum on the Urban Agenda event held to coincide with the adoption of the Pact of Amsterdam on the EU Urban Agenda. All three appeared as part of a workshop entitled “Functional urban areas and urban-rural linkages”.
Mrs Clack began her intervention by warning against any overplaying of the link between urban and economic success pointing out that Surrey was the biggest single contributor to the UK exchequer outside of London itself and was at the same time 75% non-urban. Paradoxes abound and for example the M25 motorway is a vital transport link and the busiest road in Europe but it also often seems to function as the biggest car park in Europe!
Mrs Clack was keen to point out that many organisations such as counties and provinces already manage both urban and rural issues on a day to day basis, managing urban/rural collaboration from within the same organisation. She wanted to know how we can best tap this experience which is surely a good starting point for exploring best practice. As regards governance, we will clearly need flexibility around the composition of partnerships/consortia and avoidance of dominance of city or urban agendas and recognition that place-based policies may cut across existing administrative boundaries. The nature of peri-urban areas of the EU in particular means that urban and rural activities share the same space. Often of course, the competencies for administration of urban and rural issues sit within the same organisation and Mrs Clack was keen to explore the opportunities and challenges that arise from this.
Session moderator, Peter Ramsden pointed out that Mrs Clack had spoken – albeit briefly – about Surrey and the urban area without once explicitly mentioning the Green Belt. London would doubtless love to just grow and he wondered why it shouldn't it be allowed to do so, Green Belt or no Green Belt, Mrs Clack’s riposte to that was that local authorities in Surrey act to protect the Green Belt at the same time as encouraging and driving sustainable growth. In other words, in common with many PURPLE member regions, Surrey is a peri-urban region capable of maintaining both economic and environmental interests at the same time …. proof that one can be a very successful area without building all over it. At the same time there is a real capacity issue and there are limits to what can be done in one defined area - the M25 motorway had already been mentioned and airport expansion plans for London are very much a live debate at present. In sum, Mrs Clack concluded what we need in reality is a "balance between urban growth and peri-urban delivery".
Both Mr Rijsberman and Mr Loggen were able to draw directly upon their own experiences in terms of multi-level and multi-actor governance arrangements within the Randstad region. For Mr Loggen this was looked at in the context of the challenges for water management. Mr Rijsberman explored the sheer complexity of relationships between settlements of different sizes with different sorts of linkages and interactions in place.
Jan Olbrycht MEP was one of a number of representatives at the workshop who responded to Mrs Clack’s challenge to share thoughts as to how the European Institutions might help move the debate beyond an outdated urban - rural typology. He has found PURPLE’s work interesting insofar as it goes to try to establish identity for particular types of areas and encourages working together as opposed to battling against. Thinking back to the RURBAN initiative and PURPLE’s involvement there, he was interested to note the need to move beyond power relationships beyond urban centres and surrounding areas and beyond arguments over terminology. Although there may be bigger and smaller cousins, there should also be fairness and equality. For Mr Olbrycht, Mrs Clack’s description of peri-urban areas - and Surrey in particular - resonated strongly with his own personal experiences of the areas around Brussels.
