Parliament gave great support to this new territorial agenda and helped with revision process. From professor Hübner’s point of view there is a common understanding of territorial priorities within the framework of EU 2020 among Member States and European institutions. One of the consequences of bringing space to political thinking is the concept of spatial or territorial capital, which along with social and intellectual capital has to play important role within cohesion policy framework. European space is becoming more and more territorially interdependent. To benefit from it, however, European territory needs to get better connected; it has also to increase its opportunities for mobility. Involvement of many actors and interaction between different territories defines the additional requirements. In this context multi-level governance within efficient strategic framework reinforced by accountability of all its elements would create the opportunity to increase both quality of life and global competitiveness of European economy. Professor Hübner analyzed how the concept of territorial cohesion evolved and what kind of new perspective it created. She stressed that there is a need of better understanding and measurement of the territorial impact of sectoral policies. In other words, territorial impact assessment of sectoral policies is necessary. They should help with territorial cohesion, which is also about maximising the positive effects of spatial agglomeration and mitigating the undue concentration effects. Territorial cohesion promotes polycentric development of the territories in order to encourage the emergence of secondary poles. The other meaning of territorial cohesion is to develop cooperation to overcome divisions and inequalities. There are important issues that need to be addressed beyond administrative boundaries: pollution, flood risk, migration, security... Hardly any major European challenge of today and tomorrow can be limited to the political and administrative boundaries. Thus, this need of cooperation should occur on many different levels and engage many different actors. This creates the importance of functional areas and regions. But what is essential about them is that they have to be identified bottom up, on the basis of the goals of regional development. The cooperation should be also about the way how development centres could help with pulling other areas forward. All major European challenges require territorial perspective (i.e. low carbon economy, sustainable growth, climate change, migration) and actually this is regional policy which can provide the response to fundamental questions Europe faces today. Professor Hübner underlined that energy which Europe needs can come and is already coming through the multilevel governance. Cooperation and sharing responsibilities must play a key role in governance machinery, which should be aware that main drivers of change are businesses and universities cooperating with local and regional authorities and civil
aesop events / 5. aesop ifhp lecture series / reports
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