This engaging and topical book comprehensively explores the complexities surrounding the EU Cohesion Policy, which has been addressing regional and urban development across Europe since the 1980s. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it considers the goals of this long-term investment policy, which is to reduce territorial disparities between Member States and their regions, and its role in the European integration process. Bringing together contributions from an interdisciplinary team of eminent scholars and policy practitioners, chapters offer expert analysis of the disciplinary genealogies of the EU Cohesion Policy, its contemporary issues, and perceptive reflections on its future. The book provides keen insights into current academic-policy debates, and a deeper understanding of the EU Cohesion Policy’s achievements. The expert’s insights contribute to the debate that this policy must face to address the most pressing European challenges. Each chapter includes different perspectives ranging from political, economic and legal to the urban and social dimensions and investigates ways to boost research-policy dialogue on Cohesion Policy. Offering a forward-thinking account of the topic, this timely book will be welcomed by students, academics, researchers, and policymakers alike in disciplines including human geography and geopolitics, European politics and policy, economics, public policy, and urban and regional studies.

This book highlights the discontinuities and the ongoing development of the urban question in policy-making in the context of the controversial current issues of global reversal and regional revival. It critically examines contemporary public policies and practices at the urban, regional and national scales in order to offer a timely contribution to the debate on the significance of the urban dimension and interpretation in terms of the theory, policy and practice of social-spatial research in the twenty-first century. Focusing on Europe, it explores the current urban policy agendas at different scales - and the mobility of those agendas -, their implications, contradictions and controversies. It brings together original contributions from multiple disciplines but with an urban perspective, including empirical case studies and critical discussions of the following topics: the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the global "New Urban Agenda" as part of the Habitat III process; the Urban Agenda for the European Union; national spatial policies related to urban agendas; urban agendas at regional/urban levels; city regionalism discourse and state rescaling; new formal regional and metropolitan governments as a solution (or problem); the role of new actors in regional urbanization dynamics; multi-level governance processes in developing an urban agenda; informal assemblages at the metropolitan scale aiming at constructing the urban concept and dimension. Given its scope, the book is of interest to urban, regional and EU policy-makers, scholars and students working in the fields of urban geography, urban studies, EU urban and regional policies, and planning.