What is the context and setting for the project?

In May 2007 the European Ministers responsible for urban development signed the “Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities” with the aim to improve the policy setting for integrated urban development, with a particular focus on deprived communities.

In November 2008, in Marseille, they called for the implementation of the charter for the cities and with the cities. They also wished to increase the focus on climate change in recognition of its rising importance.

Today we face the additional challenges of a gloomy economic forecast, and long-term growing pressures on public budgets. Such changes in emphasis are natural and must be accommodated. Indeed long term projections suggest that the task will get considerably harder!

But what is the perspective as seen by the city?

Three quarter of the European population will soon live in cities, urban areas or metropolitans areas. And cities are complex organisms. They are all different. Yet they face similar challenges. There are literally thousands. And they are growing. Both in number and population. City leaders face the tortuously complex task of handling multiple, often conflicting, decisions on multiple fronts. They compete to attract the best talents, to grow their economies, to deliver resilient communities and economies, and to create great places for their inhabitants and visitors. This is increasingly important in a knowledge society, with more fussy people that are increasingly mobile.

Cities need tools to support their dialogue: to help them answer the tricky questions:

• How best to share experience and learn between each other?
• How can they best cooperate to deliver a well balanced territorial development?
• How can they apply diagnosis, operational and assessment tools that can be shared between the elected representatives, their technical departments, professional bodies, and their citizens?

Is the current process for doing so most efficient and effective? Our thesis is that this is not so. The dialogue is well meaning. Yet it is rather expensive to set up. It is also not as structured as it could be: or where it is, it is perhaps focused on a specific theme or profession. The need today is to understand the inter-play between these. To know how actions in one area, like physical development, will have an impact in others: like societal well being, economic return, or environment. An integrated holistic approach is more and more vital. We know that for any system to be optimised it takes increasing levels of understanding about the impact of a change in one area to another. They need a framework and tools to support the dialogue.

There are many tripwires here too. Structural disfunctionalities. Big and small ‘P’ politics. Resource and capacity constraints. Large, and perhaps more particularly smaller, towns and cities require all the help they can get. They need quality tools to do their jobs. Modular tools that are relevant and useful. They all have some tools, but are they the best, and how do they find out where to find new and better ones? Building on the great ones that already exist makes much sense.
So, it is in the context of these Ministerial requests and the real-life needs of cities that this project was launched. It is sponsored by France following the French European Union Presidency 2008.

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