Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GUD EU Law (Governing the Urban Dimension of European Law)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-06-01 bis 2025-11-30
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.
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.
GUD EU Law generated original knowledge on how EU law conceptualizes, engages with, and reshapes urban society in the context of some of today’s most pressing urban challenges. To achieve this objective, the project was structured around two main research activities.
First, the project conducted a contextual and process-oriented analysis of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in key urban policy areas. Departing from the conceptualization of urban markets as socially constructed, and drawing on an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining EU legal studies, urban sociology, and political economy, this analysis uncovered the conflicts and actor dynamics that shape urban regulation and the way EU law’s influence redesign them. This activity resulted in a more fine-grained understanding of how EU law operates in urban contexts, moving beyond abstract doctrinal analysis.
Second, the project examined how EU law is experienced and implemented in practice by local actors, including elected officials, public administrations, and urban stakeholders. Building on primary and secondary documentary sources and a series of semi-structured interviews, this component identified and documented cross-city variation in policy outcomes in the fields of urban mobility and air quality. By tracing how EU legal requirements are interpreted, contested, and adapted at the local level, the project demonstrated how the same EU rules can generate differentiated regulatory effects across cities, depending on local institutional configurations and actor coalitions.
Together, these two activities allowed the project to connect judicial interpretation with everyday regulatory practice, thereby offering a comprehensive account of the urban dimension of EU law and its concrete effects on urban governance.
First, the project conducted a contextual and process-oriented analysis of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in key urban policy areas. Departing from the conceptualization of urban markets as socially constructed, and drawing on an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining EU legal studies, urban sociology, and political economy, this analysis uncovered the conflicts and actor dynamics that shape urban regulation and the way EU law’s influence redesign them. This activity resulted in a more fine-grained understanding of how EU law operates in urban contexts, moving beyond abstract doctrinal analysis.
Second, the project examined how EU law is experienced and implemented in practice by local actors, including elected officials, public administrations, and urban stakeholders. Building on primary and secondary documentary sources and a series of semi-structured interviews, this component identified and documented cross-city variation in policy outcomes in the fields of urban mobility and air quality. By tracing how EU legal requirements are interpreted, contested, and adapted at the local level, the project demonstrated how the same EU rules can generate differentiated regulatory effects across cities, depending on local institutional configurations and actor coalitions.
Together, these two activities allowed the project to connect judicial interpretation with everyday regulatory practice, thereby offering a comprehensive account of the urban dimension of EU law and its concrete effects on urban governance.
By adopting an explicitly urban perspective on EU law, the project seeks to deepen our understanding of how EU governance affects urban society and what this influence reveals about both the limits and the potential of the EU to address pressing societal challenges associated with urbanization.