Iván Tosics was the keynote speaker of the European Metropolitan Authorities (EMA) forum, which was held in Warsaw on 20 October 2017. The theme of the conference was Metropolitan areas as drivers of development in EU policies. The opening keynote presentation had the title „The Metropolitan Challenge In Europe” and included the following parts: 1. Benefits of metropolitan cooperation and the main bottlenecks; 2. Recent policy trends in metropolitan cooperation in the EU countries; 3. Good practices of metropolitan coordination: planning and governance solutions; 4. EU policies and tools for metropolitan areas: lessons from the present and ideas for the future. Tosics’s presentation is available here (pdf).
In the presence of 100 people, representing metropolitan authorities and areas from EU countries, Ivan gave also the summary of the whole days’ meeting, emphasizing that under the unfavourable conditions of Brexit and he internal debates among EU countries Cohesion Policy is much endangered. Metropolitan areas can become important players on European level if they have good institutional framework. To achieve that both the European and the national levels have to do more, acknowledging the huge advantages of metropolitan cooperation. An important step would be the increasing the urban dimension in the post 2020 Cohesion Policy and giving to metropolitan regions enhanced role in the planning and implementation.