The Governing the Urban Dimension of European Law (GUD EU Law) project aims to advance our understanding of the urban dimension of the European Union’s (EU) legal system. How do EU rules conceptualize urban areas and their specific dynamics? How does their influence shape cities and, within them, the role and capacity of urban actors and institutions to address today’s urban challenges? At the same time, how do cities respond to this influence, and in what ways can these reactions contribute to reshaping EU rules themselves?
Although urban areas occupy only around 2% of EU territory, they host approximately 75% of the European population and generate about 85% of the EU’s GDP. Owing to their spatial density and social dynamism, cities are key sites of opportunity, innovation, and the articulation of diverse interests within the EU. Yet they also face acute challenges, including economic restructuring, environmental degradation, and social inequalities, all of which significantly affect citizens’ quality of life. In response, EU institutions increasingly engage with urban issues and are often called upon to regulate the conflicts that emerge in cities. Through this engagement, EU law shapes urban social and political dynamics, generating processes of transformation as well as contestation and resistance.
While legal scholarship has so far paid some—albeit limited—attention to cities, it has largely conceptualized them as unitary actors, often without distinguishing them from other sub-national institutions. The central contribution of the GUD EU Law project is to reconceptualize cities as collective actors and to examine how the internal dynamics among the myriad actors operating within urban settings are influenced by EU norms. To this end, the project adopts an original interdisciplinary approach that combines legal analysis with insights from urban sociology and public policy studies. It analyses judicial decisions and implementation practices to examine how EU law addresses and shapes urban areas and their socio-political dynamics across three interrelated policy fields: urban mobility, air quality, and housing.
