Urban economies change ever more rapidly. Businesses and products, and the technologies used to develop them, come and go. They grow, shrink, reinvent themselves or change their location altogether, on a global scale. Besides the strong service economy in most cities, there is also a substantial need for producing and handling material goods, even in urban economies that are not export-oriented. In our case we loosely refer to this as “metropolitan industry”.

LandLand is a finite resource and the way it is used is one of the principal drivers of environmental change. Increasing land take affects fertile agricultural land, puts biodiversity at risk, increases the risk of flooding and water scarcity and contributes to both the causes and effects of global warming. Moreover, the effects of land take differ depending on the value, quality and functionality of the land.

Scope

Port cities have historically been an essential element of European society and economy. Despite overall growth in maritime transport, many European port cities are experiencing the relocation of port-related activities from central areas to other locations. The loss of this economic activity is leaving deteriorating inner city areas. Today brownfield waterfront sites are strategically valuable but their development can be hugely constrained by costs of decontamination treatment, plot fragmentation and complex landownership.

The Baltic Sea Region (BSR) includes Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark as well as North-West Russia and Northern Germany. The BSR is the first European macro-region having a vision for spatial development (adopted in 1994, renewed in 2009).

The region is a highly heterogeneous area in economic, environmental and cultural terms. Spatial integration is hindered by the existing divides. Some of the countries are EU member states, whereas the others are not foreseeing EU accession.

Scope

Europe’s seas have become important in terms of policy making on both European and national level. The exploitation of seas and coastal areas for economic purposes is becoming increasingly important, but there are also growing concerns on environmental issues.

To date, there is no elaborated territorial impact assessment methodology/model that has proven to be well-suited for assessing the ex-post impacts of CBC programmes. The service provider will develop a step-by-step methodology, describing how to determine the ex-post impact of cross-border cooperation (CBC) programmes on the territorial development of the border regions. A test of the methodology will also be performed in five stakeholder territories by providing evidence on how the elaborated methodology works in practice.

The Alpine area is composed of territories with different demographic, social and economic trends and a rich cultural, linguistic and biological diversity. This diversity goes along with a variety of governance systems and traditions. The region has a strong identity and a longstanding tradition in cooperation. This unique territory has important potentials for dynamic development, but is facing major challenges at various levels including the pan-Alpine, regional and local levels as well as in cross-border areas.

The current economy operates mainly on a ‘take-make-dispose’ model – a linear model where every product is bound to reach its ‘end of life’. This leads to a growing pressure of production and consumption on the world’s resources and environment. A circular economy model strives towards using and re-using our resources in a more resource efficient through preserving and enhancing natural capital, optimising natural resource yields by circulating products, components and materials, as well as fostering effective waste management and minimizing detrimental practices.

Green Infrastructures (GI) are considered a benefit, inter alia, for territorial development because they provide multiple functions on the same spatial area. The underlying principle of GI is that the same area of land can offer many environmental, social, cultural and economic benefits at the same time, provided its ecosystems are in a healthy condition. However, valuable European ecosystems are being degraded by land fragmentation, urban expansion and the building of transport and energy infrastructures.

Based on the Swiss experience in defining the so-called “action areas”, this service contract is aiming at exploring the added value and potentials of new forms of cooperation areas. In particular it should analyse for which tasks and territorial/political context “action areas” do make sense in terms of territorial cooperation.