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Explicit national urban policy has only recently become a Portuguese concern, and the
first cautious steps forward have just been taken. The possibilities of a more explicit
national urban policy are being considered, in particular the coordination of such a policy
on the national level, among the ministries most involved. The Ministry of Equipment
Planning and Territorial Administration (MEPAT) coordinates the PROSIURB
programme initiated in 1994, a programme explicitly oriented to the development of
urban centres outside the metropolitan regions of Lisbon and Porto. PROSIURB has a
very small budget and is mainly regarded as an additional financing programme along
with the resources from the European Commission.
In a sense, the EXPO ’98 project is also an exponent of national urban policy, because it is
an initiative of the national government, which is also the leading partner in the firm
EXPO ’98 that carries out the project. The present government considers national urban
policy a matter of importance, because it perceives a distinct role for the larger towns in
the internationalisation of the Portuguese economy. Such a policy can be implemented
only if, in the eyes of the government, certain conditions are fulfilled.
The special position of the federal member states and Spain
The administrative organisation in the federal states of Germany, Belgium and Austria, as
well the administrative organisation in Spain result in the fact that the national
governments in these member states are not in the position to pursue explicit urban policy
to the same extent as the United Kingdom, France or the Netherlands. The intermediary
level of government comprises most of the competences for urban policy. In fact, some of
these ‘regional’ authorities are urban regions: Hamburg and Bremen are Bundes Lander,
Brussels is one of the three Belgian regions, Madrid is an autonomous community in
Spain and the urban region of Vienna is one of the Austrian states.
In federal Germany, most competencies are on the level of the 16 states and on the local
level. On the national level, the Ministry for Regional Planning, Building and Urban
Development and the Ministry of Transport and the Environment have influence on urban
development. The Regional-Planning ministry formulates the guidelines and principles
for spatial development in Germany, and recently refined them in the
Raumordnungspolitische Orientierungsrahmen (framework of orientation for spatial
planning policy) in view of the German Reunion and the spatial integration of the new
federal states. The most important task of the federal government is to create the marginal
conditions for the lower authorities, and notably to put certain matters of urban interest on
the agenda, such as the importance of sustainable urban development. The German
government tries to give more and more substance to that task in view of the intensifying
international competition among cities and the necessary spatial integration of the ’new
German towns’.
Belgium, like Germany, is a federal state, where many of the responsibilities concerned
with urban development are vested in the regional authorities. Under the infrastructural
policy of the Belgian state, relatively much is invested in the infrastructure needed for
towns (among other things, the connection to the High Speed Rail network). Before
Belgium became a federal state, there was not really a national vision of urban