The urban agenda for the european union: EU governmentality and urban sovereignty in new EU-city relations?

Abstract

The Urban Agenda for the European Union forms one of the elements of contemporary European Union policy framework. The chapter analyses the content of the Urban Agenda from a critical perspective, focusing on new EU-city relations and on the interpretation of the urban issue, respectively. The chapter proposes that the Urban Agenda ought to be conceptualized as a ‘dispositif’ of governmentality for the construction of the European Union’s future spatiality. The complex relationship between powers and territories is at the centre of the governmentality approach. On the one hand, the Urban Agenda supports new ways of organizing and managing European territories with new multi-level partnerships. On the other hand, despite its voluntary basis, it produces new territories by both mobilizing a new spatial order and introducing implicit considerations in order to distinguish between the ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ territories, with the demise of the regional scale. Therefore, in the wake of the urban age ideology, the Urban Agenda discourse counts as a ‘soft’ powerful mechanism of political legitimization of a new urban sovereignty endorsed by the EU, which counters the most recent national developments since the global economic crisis and the substantial consensus that Eurosceptics have been achieved within national governments.