Torino Internazionale, together with the City of Turin and 8 more European partners, participates in the EU-funded project CityRegions, which aims to identify best practices, develop and test innovative solutions to foster cooperation at inter-municipal and metropolitan level.
75% of the project costs is co-funded by the European Union through ERDF funds within the Central Europe programme.
CityRegion’s backbone principle stems from the awareness that in the Central European Region about 70 % of the population lives in urban areas where social infrastructure, economic activities, workplaces and cultural life are concentrated. These areas require an increasingly diversified and efficient management at the metropolitan scale, to produce economies of scale, which are essential in today’s precarious public spending framework.

CityRegions involves 5 metropolitan areas located in five different European countries, each of them being represented by two partners (the City at the center of the conurbation and the entity that represents the metropolitan area). The partners are : the City of Leipzig (project leader) and the Ministry of the Interior of Saxony in Germany; the City of Wroclaw and the region of Lower Silesia (Lower Silesia) in Poland; the District of Prague 9 and the Regional Development Agency of the Central Bohemian Region in the Czech Republic; the City of Graz and the Graz Regional Management & Region Graz in Austria; the City of Turin and Associazione Torino Internazinanle / Strategica for Italy.

The most tangible results of CityRegions will be the pilot projects developed by the partners in each metropolitan area, the position paper shared by the partners, the policy conclusions reached and the possibility of formalizing operational forms of understanding among stakeholders included in the metropolitan areas. These will be presented to the European Commission to keep the debate on European regional and metropolitan policies alive.

The first phase of work, undertaken in 2013, has produced for each metropolitan area: a stakeholder mapping, the analysis of past and present forms of metropolitan cooperation, with particular attention to the cases of success and failure, and a comparison with other experiences of metropolitan governance. As part of this work, each partner has identified a pilot project for metropolitan cooperation.

The second phase is deployed throughout 2014 and is dedicated to the development of the pilot projects, whose results will be presented in September in Dresden. The pilot projects will focus on: commercial potential of brownfields ( Leipzig ), inter-municipal governance arrangements for the provision of services (Wroclaw) , public transport (Graz), urban traffic management (Prague), spatial and metropolitan dimension of the third strategic plan for the Turin metro area.

In 2013 the Turin partners visited and studied successful experiences in the field of metropolitan governance (Lyon, Brabantstad, Zurich), brought into the project its best metropolitan practices (The Agency for Metropolitan Mobility, the Metropolitan Railway Service, The Green Belt / Corona Verde, The consortiums of municipalities…), released a researdch on the mapping of metropolitan transformations, hosted the seminar on “cooperation among municipalities” and in collaboration with IRES produces an analysis on the experiences on metropolitan and intermunicipal forms of cooperation in the Torino area. The pilot project (tendered to a consortium of experts grouped under the Politecnico fìdi Milano and IRS) is currently under way and will concentrate on the process of metropolitan strategic planning in its manifold dimensions – the participatory mechanisms, the technical dimensions, the multi-level scope of the strategic perspective.