Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona

Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) took part in the XV European Week of Regions and Cities (EWRC 2017) – the main event dedicated to the European Union's regional policy. Every year, it hosts more than 100 seminars and 5,000 participants in Brussels, to discuss the main challenges for cities and regions and the role of the European Union to help them overcome them.

In the seminar Metropolitan Governments Shaping EU Urban Policy, AMB presented its agreement with the Government of Catalonia to manage 30 million euros of ERDF funds in the period 2014-2020, and outlined its priorities for the future of cohesion policy beyond 2020.

This seminar was one of the dissemination activities for the MEANING project (Metropolitan Europeans in Active Network, Inducing Novelties in Governance), in which AMB was involved in order to promote active citizenship in the metropolitan area, while enhancing its European identity by exchanging experiences and building thematic networks of metropolitan cities. The event brought together political representatives and specialists from AMB and the Metropolitan City of Milan (Italy), the metropolitan area of Gdansk-Gdynia-Sopot (Poland), the City of Zagreb (Croatia), the Metropolitan City of Bari (Italy), the city of Riga (Latvia) and the metropolitan area of Porto (Portugal).

Working for a better future

During the European Week of Regions and Cities event, which celebrated its 15th anniversary this year, special emphasis was placed on three aspects related to its slogan: 'Regions and cities working for a better future'.

The risks of globalisation were analysed from the perspective of building resistant regions and cities, the possible adjustments to the EU's regional and urban policy over the next five to ten years were considered, and finally, the participants shared experiences and best practices related to the management of the programme during the period 2014-2020.