Green Urbanism as an element of the EU environmental policy

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

10

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

1

FEDERAL STATE AUTONOMOUS EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

FOR HIGHER PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs

Green Urbanism as an element of the EU environmental policy

BACHELOR'STHESIS

Field of study: International Relations

Degree programme: HSE and University of London Parallel Degree Programme in International Relations

Sivenkova Daria Nikolaevna

Reviewer

Professor

Entina E.G.

Moscow, 2020

Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction

Literature review

Methodology

1.History of EU environmental policies

1.1Outline since 1970s - 2000s (EAPs and Phases)

1.2EU Sustainable Development Strategy 2000 - 2020

1.3Low Carbon Economy by 2050

2.EU levels of policy implementation on matters of ecology

2.1Common European and Global values promotion level

2.2Regional and State specific level

2.3Local and Non-state level

3.New European cities

3.1Sustainable Cities

3.2Healthy Cities

3.3How new city types influence economy of European states?

4.Cases studies

4.1Northern and Western Europe

4.2The UK

4.3Southern Europe

Conclusion

List of References

climate change green urbanism city

Abstract

This paper contributes to the debate on the issuesof urban development and its link to the environmental policy of the European Union (EU) as one of the main aspects of European international and domestic statehood policymaking. In particular, it analyses an idea of Green Urbanism and sustainability of the city development that has become one of the key agenda-setters somewhat 10-20 years after the EU has acknowledged in 1970s that climate change and other climate related problems can only be mitigated by undertaking a number of profound, consistent and gradual steps directed at the improvement of level of life of the people who live in the cities. The study, hence, emphasizes that during the half a century period the European Union in general and its Memberstates individually have adopted and implemented a number of policies and directives aimed at the improvement of the ecological and environmental conditions not only on the national and sub-national levels but also both globally and locally. As a matter of fact, and through the course of environmental policy history, EU's initiatives have gradually shifted their focus from immediate reduction of pollution effects,in order to benefit global environment, to the long-term action process. This was done after acknowledging that environmental problems should be primarily solved on the smallest scale possible, for example, on the city level. The idea behind it was and, as it will be argued further on, still is that cities started to play a much more significant role in the global political processes and have also developed their unique political, economic and social environments, making evolution of urban spaces key determinant of the level of development of a particular state. As a result, at the beginning of the new millennium European Union and European citiessubsequently focused on broadening the idea of sustainable development and introduced a number of environmentally friendly city types, in particular, green cities and healthy cities. Moreover, a variety of the initiatives adopted and the ways they were executed produced a broad range ofcase studies, each of which successfully supports the notion that the EU has become a world leader in introducing Green Urbanism as a key element of the environmental policymaking.

Introduction

At the beginning of the XX century ideas of the `Industrial Revolution above all means' as the only way to make a state prosper started to be questioned by precisely those powers who benefitted from this capitalist development the most. European cities while being the biggest profiteers and suppliers of national wealth at the same time started to experience major social and ecological problems on local level. These issues regularly disrupted further processes of monetary capitalization and undermined an idea that human and environmental sacrifice was acceptable, especially concerning the fact that technological development has accelerated considerably.Moreover, the two World Wars and economic crises between and after them, which threatened the revival of major world powers, has led to the idea that business-as-usual was unsatisfactory both because the amount of available work force in the Old World has significantly declined and because the majority of the city-based factories and production were either destroyed or abandoned and could not meet the needs of the new century.

By the 1970s, the pace of the development of the European economy reached, and then exceeded,previous max points leading to the new wave of rapid emission of dangerous pollutants and awaking global concerns, especially on the global level. The United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) took the center stage in mitigating environmental damage which has been caused by the unthoughtful exploitation of planet's resources and an irrevocable harm that this has caused to the human health. The European Union, which upon its creation in the 1957 and up until the middle of the 70s has lacked any environmental legislature, bureaucracy and policy and was primarily focused on the revival of economic and trade relations between some European states, suddenly became one of the most active world players, eager not only to implement various environmentally friendly policies but also to promote them internationally and to become a key agenda-setter for the years ahead (Jordan et al., 1999).

Furthermore, the precise focus of the EU environmental policy was from the beginning directed at the ecological development, prosperity and health of and inside the Union's cities. This was due to the fact that Europe has always been one of the most urbanized places in the world, while the rest of the states around the globe seemed to start closely follow this tendency only by the second half of the XX century. Thus, the European Union's environmental policies and legislature, which became main building blocks for its collaborations with various international organizations (IOs), such as OECD - the establishment of the Polluter-Pays principle, UN - international environmental summits, including profound Commission Reports, i.e. Brundtland Report of 1987, and WHO - European Healthy Cities Project taking place since 1987, have also made the EU a major developer, supporter and PR-manager of the sustainability, health and social prosperity within cities, promising that these will not compromise economic development of weaker and/or less developed states.

Since the beginning of the XXI century Members of the European Union, however, started to be more engaged in the formulation and implementation of the national and local environmental policies.These were supposed to shape future economies of states in order to tie it closely to the social development within countries and in particular within cities which by that time became main hubs for all global processes. For example, the EU Sustainable Development Strategy's (EU SDS) target is that by the year 2020 European states are supposed to create a long-term improvement in the quality of life in cities by focusing on the creation of communities that will be able to use and allocate resources effectively and will create urban economies capable of performing sustainabledevelopment which will not undermine environment neither locally nor globally (EU Commission on Environment, 2019). As a continuation of this policy, the EU has also already set itself an ambitious goal of making its economy low carbon by 2050 while allowing all members to reach equal levels of development and decarbonize economy. This should be exercised without causing any critical disruptions to the amount and quality of goods produced and promises that the Union will stay competitive on the world market even if the rest of the world continues to use environmentally and socially harmful means and ways of production.

Additionally, by becoming one of the most active players on world's environmental arena and understanding that to tackle global natural degradation initial steps should be taken consistently and on the smallest scale possible, quite populated and extensively urbanized Europe has focused on the city-wide programs and strategies. Transfer of ecologically harmful production to cities' periphery and further on into the mainland, that has massively taken place at the dawn of the green boom, very soon has proved itself to be insufficienton its own and brought only minor effects to the overall picture of urban environment. Contrary to the expected results of instant economic and social prosperity, European citizens showed a dangerous dynamic in the development of the health-related problems which in turn significantly affected social cohesion and economic performance of individuals.

Yet, these health problems were of a completely different manner than those with which the EU has started to battle when environmental concerns became globally important for the first time. New problems, as Barton et al. 2009 argues, resulted not from the direct effects of the pollution itself, as it was in the XIX - beginning of XX centuriesand concerned issues of bad sanitation, poor water supply and general hygiene, but from the indirect influence of the existent urban spaces which lacked green and healthy infrastructure and presupposed only stress-related activities. As a result, the authors continue, by the beginning of the XXI century the amount of people with obesity, cardiovascular problems and diabetes has picked, making governments search ways to improve general lifestyles of people. This in turn implied by itself a profound all level cooperation between bureaucrats, city planners, ecologists and general publics in producing a healthy urban environment which, as Figure 1 shows, was aimed at extensively affecting all population groups and penetrating both local and global ecosystems and economiesstarting from the most immediate ones (Barton & Grant, 2006).

Fig. 1: Human ecology model of a settlement. Source: Barton & Grant (2006).

Such a profound development and an establishment of several far-reaching programs, for example such asEurope's Environmental Action Programs (EAPs) since 1973 and Healthy Urban Planning (HUP) Phases under the auspices of WHO since 1987, were directed at the gradual improvement of the quality of life in the EU's urban areas. Consequently, due to the variety of actions taken, this led to the adoption of multiplicity of concepts with the central stage being taken by the broadest of them - the sustainable development idea.

The classical and, probably, the most famous definition of sustainable development was given by the Brundtland Commission in 1987 “Our Common Future” Report as a `development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'. While the definition in later years was often accused by being misleading and unclear, the idea of development which is able to better the living conditions of current generations without harming their descendants has produced a variety of concepts, such as green, healthy, smart, resilient, low-carbon cities etc. These, as de Jong et al. (2015) claims,can be used interchangeably as long as the results which they are aimed to produce can be categorized as the ones devoted to the rising levels of social well-being, economic growth and ecological regeneration of city environments. Thus, the notion of economic prosperity becomes as closely tied up to the notion of urban sustainability, as the idea of health is connected to the environment in which people live in, placing the four concepts as main pillars of, possibly, each and every XXI century agenda.

The breakthrough in the EU's environmental policy, hence, can be defined, on the one hand, by the adoption of multiplicity of concepts that are nonetheless focused on the production of similar results, and on the other hand, on the acknowledgement of different social,economic and evencultural environments of Member statesthat significantly influence the policies conducted and the pace at which they are implemented. The common sense seems to dictate that Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (UK), especially before the start of the Brexit turmoil in 2016, and Northern European states, such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark, are taking the biggest share in the climate change mitigation, specifically focusing on the issues which are concerned with making urban spaces sustainable, healthy and green. These states, apart from being ones of the most prosperous and economically stable EU members, are at the same time those that can potentially suffer the most from the disturbances caused by ecology related troubles, resulting from either their unthoughtful actions or those of their neighbors, and make their position on the global market relatively worse off in the upcoming years.

The pollution, as it is widely known, does not have borders and at the beginning of the 2000s the EU concluded that even though Germany, and the rest of the most active sustainability promoters and `fighters' for ecology,introduced and self-imposed strict measures to protect the environment in the 1970-1990s, their actions since then had only a limited impact on the overall pollution levels throughout the Union but did not improve the overall situation. Their behavior allowed the rest of the Member states, of which there was a majority, to continue economic build-up and to keep the introduction of pollution mitigation measures in stock for later days, as it happened with Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Spain, Portugal and Italy etc., with a small proportion of city-based exceptions in the last three.

These actions, however, did not significantly change neither the amount of environmental problems to be dealt with nor the effects that they hadproduced on the well-being of European citizens and on the quality of life within cities.The initial idea of keeping environmental degradation at a constant rate, by allowing some states to produce and, hence, pollute as much as they wished to while others will overperform their environmental objectives, as a result, compensating for neighboring polluters and making themselves more sustainable, has collapsed at the dawn of the new century. Furthermore, it made the transformation towards green urbanism harder but at the same time more demanding and urgent for those from the weaker branch. This happened because economic and trade relations in the world started to change rapidly and a demand for the goods to be produced from the environmentally friendly, high standard materials and, even more importantly, by the people who work in safe and healthy environments became more pronounced.

Noticeable changes in this overwhelming majority started to take place only in the last 10-20 years, when they have managed to at least relatively catch up with the leaders and, due to several economic crises, the overall pace of globalization slowed down and trade relations became a lot more careful and profound.These modifications, for example, are especially remarkable in the old industrial regions of the Southern Europe such as Portugal's Seixal and Italy's Milan, as outlined by Barton et al. (2003). Redevelopment of these urban areas, some of which became abandoned after crises, happened under a close supervision of local residents who wished to see their cities in a more living format instead of unattractive concrete and glass. Beatley (2012) argues that Spain's Barcelona, on the other hand, has taken the idea of green urbanism in a more health-oriented dimension and, as the city development plan suggested, was supposed tobuild more than 200 km of bicycle lanes around the city by 2018. Moreover, European cities are actively introducingand promoting carsharing as a comfortable substitution to the usage of personal automobile vehicles in order to minimize the outburst of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the atmosphere - chemicals that are especially harmful to humans' health.

It is, however, true that by implementing different environmental policies and at a different scale, the results, which cities in the EU get, vary significantly and because of that the general situation changes only slightly from year to year. The climate change continues to threaten European urban spaces and peoples' health, yet, as D'Onofrio &Trusiani (2018) quote the World Health Organization 2016 Report `by connecting health to the urban dimension, health becomes a “collective good” that recalls social ethics and rules of civil coexistence, […] and this does not necessarily imply an “extreme makeover” of cities'. This position, it can be argued, gives more space for the maneuver for those European states, cities and, more importantly, governments which are not yet ready to introduce wholesome measures and tighten their belts, while sacrificing short-term economic benefits for the long-term social and environmental ones.

Nevertheless, the introduction of ideas of Green Urbanism and Healthy Urban Planning (HUP) as key elements of the EU's environmental policy has already changed the future of industrial development and economic performance in Europe and is likely to continue shaping it for the years ahead. Questions that stay open, however, are how easy and how long the implementation of these policiesin all European states is going to be and how likely it is that European example of Green Urban Planning will become global milestones and prove itself to be environmentally effective.

So far, the majority of cities have already massively, and quite successfully, transformed from major capital producers, that in the previous centuries was defined by massive social, physical and mental well-being degradation among local dwellers, to the hubs of sustainability, prosperity and equality. In this second type city serves the needs of the people and supplies its inhabitants with the goods produced out of the environmentally friendly materials (these include infrastructure, buildings, common space areas and so on) and by them. What stays disputable, however, is, first, whether the changes that have already taken place in European cities are really sustainable and policies are long-standing. And second, whether they can help people shape places that they live in to match their views and to allow them to govern collectively so that renovation and regeneration of old urban districts can serve the accumulation of common social and ecological benefit. As a result, environmental policymaking, which hasalready become one of the pillars of the EU law-making, is likely to become even more profound in future and will, probably,make Green Urbanism a self-sufficient strategy able to mitigate climate change on its own.

Literature review

The literature that has focused on the analysis of the development of the European Union's urban areas and its connectedness to the mitigation of climatic disturbances is quite vast and is constantly expanding. Moreover, an amount of the official documents, reports and scientific studies and papers produced on this topic has almost doubled since the beginning of the 2000s. This tendency can, possibly, be explained by the rise of global awareness in environmental changes that became especially threatening in the last several decades and have pushed forward the need to act as the places that are, as it is claimed by environmental studies, to be hit first are cities with biggest sufferings to be experienced by those who live in them.

As a consequence, the only way to slow down self-extinction processes launched by humanity's unthoughtful actions and exploitation of planetary resources in the previous centuries, the majority of which happened in cities, was to establish a profound framework of urban legislative, bureaucratic and professional development. These, in turn, are to be aimed at the regeneration, renovation and redevelopment of areas that have been causing biggest disruption to ecosystems and continually underminedpeoples' health.

The first wave of such changes started to take place in the 1970s among the board of developed states who felt their primarily responsibility as they were the ones who exploited planet the most and were ignorant of its needs and those of people who, following realist and Marxist theories, produced wealth on which the power of such states was based in previous centuries. The European Union, thus, has become one of the biggest proponents and actors in the world and threw all its efforts to solve the problem of mass environmental degradation. It has started from the smallest scale possible, first national, but later on narrowed it down to the regional and further to the local, sometimes referred as city, level and introduced measures and steps for sustainable development of urban areas that went hand in hand with making urban spaces greener, healthier and humane.

For the simplicity of the analysis conducted in this paper, we will regard that Green Urbanism is essentially comprised of two major components, that can possibly include all the rest. These components are to be health Barton et al., 2009; D'Onofrio & Trusiani, 2018; Price & Dube, 1999; Rosenzweig et al., 2011; Tsouros, 2015; EEA Report, 2009; EU Commission Report, 2007 & 2016; WHO Report, 2009 & 2014and sustainability Beatley, 2012; Bulkeley, 2006; Campbell & Coenen, 2017; Caragliu et al., 2011; D'Agostino et al., 2017; Ehnert et al., 2018; Guy & Marvin, 1999; Hepburn et al., 2018; Hodson & Marvin, 2017; Knill & Liefferink, 2007; Kovacs et al., 2019; Mega, 1996; Pallemaerts et al., 2007; Potjer & Hajer, 2017; Wilkinson, 1997; Brundtland Commission Report, 1987; EEA Report, 2019; EU Commission Report, 2001, 2010 & 2011; EU Directive, 2004; Council of the EU Report, 2006; Leipzig Charter, 2007. For many scholars, health parameters are the main pillar of any city development as it provides a broad and a clear picture about the level of economic, political and social improvements within a society and ultimately makes a particular state more popular, richer, by attracting foreign direct investments (FDI) and, possibly, even more secure. For others, health is just one of the factors of sustainability because, as it can probably be inferred, simple improvements in health levels are not enough to make a society prosper or to make a city greener as there are other factors that should be also considered. Thus, the idea of green urbanism that is proposed in this paper should be regarded as a bridge between the two and is supposed to explain why the concept was understood so differently by various states and led to distinct results, although all of the idea implementors were perusing similar goals and objectives.

For example, Lehmann (2010), if we sum up Figure 2, defines Green Urbanism as a concept that promotes zero-pollution and zero-waste city design, careful with water management and cares about biodiversity within urban areas, supports development of energy-efficient infrastructure and public spaces and pays attention at the incorporation of social and cultural heritage as essential parts that make up the “face” of a city.Adding to this, Beatley (2012) claims that sustainability, mobility, health, resiliency and renewability, and environmentally friendly governance are all the subject areas that can be applied to the idea of making cities greener. This overwhelming dispersion, hence, allowed states to choose the policy that was the easiest for them to implement and then successfully claim that they are slowly moving towards making urban spaces greener and healthier.This stayed true even if they have only developed laws and policies but have delayed progress in other areas, thus, producing unbalanced results within one community.

Fig. 2: The 15 principles of green urbanism and their interconnections. Source: Lehmann (2010).

When looking at the gradual development of urban and environmentally friendly policies, which we look at in-depth in the 1st chapter, historical outline(Barton et al., 2009; Hey, 2005; Hodson & Marvin, 2017; Holzinger et al., 2006; Jordan, 1999; Jordan et al., 1999; Kelemen, 2010; Knill&Liefferink, 2007; Langlet&Mahmoudi, 2016; EU Commission Report, 2011; Leipzig Charter, 2007; WHO Report, 2009) is also essential because it allows to track down all the changes that have occurred so far in different states, evaluate specific outcomes and, probably, also predict future tendencies in green city design. Moreover, the historical development of law making and policy implementation cannot be looked at separately from the progress that has occurred in the climate change itself which, as it is often argued, continues to downgrade irrespective of all the actions that are taken by countries around the globe and is predicted to worsen significantly in the years to come if more profound measures are not taken (Betsill&Bulkeley, 2006; Collier, 1996; Jordan &Lenschow, 2000; Kelemen, 2010; Kern &Bulkeley, 2009; Langlet&Mahmoudi, 2016; EU Commission Report, 2016; Environment Directorate of OECD, 1981).

To support the arguments stated above, this paper will be heavily based and will refer to the environmental and urban redevelopment archival documentsBrundtland Commission Report, 1987; EU Commission Report, 2001; EU Commission Report, 2007; EU Commission Report, 2010; EU Commission Report, 2011;EU Commission Report, 2015; EU Commission Report, 2016; Environment Directorate of OECD, 1981; EU Directive, 2004; Council of the EU Report, 2006; Leipzig Charter, 2007 and numerous organizations' reportsEEA Report, 2009; EEA Report, 2019; WHO Report, 2009; WHO Report, 2014a lot throughout the whole study and particularly in chapter 1. The goal of this thesisis to analyze Green Urbanism as a particular feature the EU environmental policymaking and track down changes that have taken place since 1970s and look at the effects that this produced on local, state, regional, EU and on the global arena. This will also be done in order to understand historical advancement of approaches, the limitations and the blind spots that the official documentation produced and the results that this has led to. This, hence, often presupposed further progress, and sometimes even regress, of environmental strategy and while grasping basics of the foundational core on which current ecology friendly and, arguably, one of the most profound and far reaching strategies is based.

Thus, the importance of the policies taken throughout the European Union, as it was several times indicated before in this paper, is that such actions are of a multi-level importance and are either pursued by a collective assembly of some states, on the individual basis or even by some localities within one particular administrative body. This division was first suggested by Collier (1997) who examined the importance of global Kelemen, 2010; Kern & Bulkeley, 2009; Knill & Tosun, 2009; Brundtland Commission Report, 1987; EU Commission Report, 2001; Council of the EU Report, 2006 and the EU levels D'Agostino et al., 2017; Ehnert et al., 2018; Holzinger et al., 2006; Jordan, 1999; Jordan & Lenschow, 2000; Pallemaerts et al., 2007; Wilkinson, 1997; EEA Report, 2009; EU Commission Report, 2007 of decision-making, supported by a number of other scholars, respectively.The two-level analysis was soon broadened to incorporate individual state level (Bulkeley, 2006; Jordan et al., 1999; Kern, 2019; Potjer&Hajer, 2017; van Winden et al., 2007; Leipzig Charter, 2007). Furthermore, we will also look at the decisions being taken within states, otherwise referred to as on the local level (Beatley, 2012; Mega, 1996; Price & Dube, 1999; Rosenzweig et al., 2011; Tsouros, 2015; EU Commission Report, 2016; WHO Report 2009, 2014), and will grasp basics of what role non-state actors make in environmental resolution-making (Betsill&Bulkeley, 2006).As such, these levels of decision-making were chosen specifically for this thesis to show inconsistencies between policy-making and actual policy-execution in different geopolitical entities and to analyze the possible flaws of such a broad categorization suggested by scholars.

Another interesting tendency that can be noticed while analyzing green urban redevelopment of European cities is that actions are never taken out of the blue and always have a connection to either some IOs, most often the World Health Organization, (Barton et al., 2009; Barton & Grant, 2011, Tsouros, 2015) or special programs, directives and summits.These papers, in turn,specifically concern issues of sustainability and redevelopment of city infrastructure(D'Agostino et al., 2017; Hey, 2005; Holzinger et al., 2006; Jordan &Lenschow, 2000; Wilkinson, 1997; EU Commission Report, 2001, 2007, 2010; WHO Report, 2009).

Moreover, successful Green Urbanism, following the definition that was given earlier in this chapter, very ofteninvolves rejuvenation of current economy and production in cities and balances between environmental concerns and trade relations dictated by globalization (Campbell &Coenen, 2017; Collier, 1997; D'Agostino et al., 2017; Hepburn et al., 2018; Hodson & Marvin, 2017; Holzinger et al., 2006; Kelemen, 2010; Knill&Liefferink, 2007; Pallemaerts et al., 2007; Price & Dube, 1999; Wilkinson, 1997; EU Commission Report, 2001, 2011; Environment Directorate of OECD, 1981; Council of the EU Report, 2006). Some authors also discuss peculiarities of “knowledge-based economy” and “new capital of the cities”, that will be discussed in chapter 3,which are predicted to play the major role in the nearest future and, hence, their development should also be taken into account (Caragliu et al., 2011; van Winden et al., 2007; EEA Report, 2009; EU Commission Report, 2016; Leipzig Charter, 2007).

Additionally, this thesis will also examine several cases of urban redevelopment in different parts of the European Union, in particular those that took place in Northern and Western Europe, Southern Europe and separately in the UK, and will evaluate the outcomes of such planning (Beatley, 2012; D'Onofrio &Trusiani, 2018; Kovacs et al., 2019; WHO Report, 2009).

As a result, the aim of this paper is to explain why Green Urbanism (a subject of this study) has become one of the central ideas of the EU environmental policymaking - an object - and show which influence it has on the economic and regional development of Member states. Parts of this thesis will, consequently,explain a relationship between the two aspects under examination through historical (chapter 1), administrative (chapter 2) and economic (chapter 3) advancements that have taken place since 1970s. The last chapter will touch upon all three areas to explain the difference in the results that city regeneration idea has produced in various environments. Hence, this written work will prove that although environmental policy of the European Union has been enlarged significantly after incorporation of urbanism and city sustainability in it, it cannot be exercised everywhere equally successful and will continue to bring different results at least for 20-30 years more. As such, this paper is important in disproving the idea that commonly accepted legislature is enough to bring balanced results and benefits on the individual level, even in such closely connected entity as the EU.

Methodology

This work is intended to understand the idea of green urban redevelopment as an element of the EUenvironmental policy from a variety of perspectives and to explain how this relatively old phenomenon has shaped the image of contemporary European cities. Additionally, it will focus on what successes and failures it experienced and resulted in and how effective the applied policies turned out to be to the mitigation of climate related disturbances and health problems caused by it.

The general methodological approach that will be used for investigating the research problem of this thesis is a qualitative method which will be presented from a neutral point of view and will also result in a fact that a considerable part of the analysis will be of a descriptive manner. The neutrality of the claims in this paper is explained by the variety of actions taken by European cities and a diversity of outcomes they led to and results produced. As it was acknowledged earlier in this work, regeneration of old industrial areas within and around cities in different parts of the Union most often happened in a single case format. The reason for this was the discrepancy in the level of country's development, size of trade flows that went through the urban area, the role that the city itself has been playing in global trade relations and so on.

Nevertheless, cities in the European Union, that went through such changes and the majority of time have acted on the individual basis, never operated in the isolated manner but often used the method of upscaling that we will borrow from Kern (2019). Principally, as the author argues, there are four methods of upscaling: horizontal, vertical, hierarchical and embedded. As their names suggest, horizontal upscaling engages in the transfer of knowledge, expertise and experience between different cities, usually the leading ones, that are focused on the accomplishment of similar goals. Vertical, on the other hand, rotates around the creation of various initiatives, programs and lobby groups at the local, regional and nationallevels, some of which often have access to the Union's highest bureaucratic authorities and bodies responsible for legislation. Hierarchical upscaling, as the name supposes, overlooks the implementation of EU protocols and forces those unwilling to do so to put them into action on lower levels and be consistent with them. Yet, apart from the most commonly used top-down approach, the hierarchical mode of policy setting also presupposes a bottom-up one that allows locally successful experiments in application of Green Urbanism to become nationally acknowledged and have some influence on policy proposers within the borders of the European Union and sometimes even outside of them, for example on the board of the World Health Organization or the United Nations. The last but not the least, the embedded upscaling links governmental authorities from different levels and allows them an exchange of ideas and experience at the same time minimizing the divides produced by the strict bureaucratic hierarchy and allows participation of professional agencies and local publics in decision-making processes.

Furthermore, a significant part of the current thesis will be an analysis of specific cases around the EU. Most of them were previously examined and produced by a variety of authors, moreover, the majority of them were directly linked to the city under the examination - they have either lived or worked in the city for some time or were a part of some program that specifically focused on urban and healthy renovation of an area - and, thus, can be trusted to present unbiased positions. For the simplicity, in chapter 4 we have subdivided our cases to 3 different case study areas, subject to the regional division of Europe and to the amount of policies adopted and actions taken that were successful. These are to be Northern and Western Europe, Southern Europe and the United Kingdom, that we will look at separately due to the special climatic, social and economic features of the islanding country. Such selection, probably, can be explained by the amount of actions that were taken within regions and how self-active states within these regions were. The tendency that this thesis has outlined somewhere earlier in this work is that Northern and Western Europe and the UK were and still continue to be one of the most active participants and promoters of reduction of climate change influence on cities' environment and peoples' health in the world. States that represent these regions are profoundly engaged in creating policies, initiatives and programs, develop legislative acts and, arguably, take up the biggest burden while others, especially those of Southern Europe with minor exceptions of states that are mostly developed among their regional neighbors, for example Italy, Spain and Portugal, stay strong on industrial development and usually blame those that are richer and more developed for their inability to pursue sustainability and green their urban landscapes as this might disadvantage their economies in the short and long term.

From the theoretical perspective, environment and environmental policymaking have long ago become one of the cornerstone ideas of International Relations (IR). International Political Economy (IPE), Political Science, International Political Theories (IPT), Development Management studies and so on have become closely tied up to the explanations of economic development of states and regions and projected their findings on cities as the smallest scales that, nonetheless, are able to resemble and picture currentstate of affairs in the world quite thoroughly and comprehensively. In the study of urban environmental planning processes, such aspects of international affairs as regime theory, global and multilevel governance issues, the importance and role of non-state actors and the transnationality of networks and information that are able to penetrate state borders all play a role in the adoption of specific policies and legislation. Their actions are directed at the mitigation of global climate change and the effects that it has on city regions around the planet and, also, produce additional variables and methods against which we can direct a research.

The potential limitations that we can anticipate experiencing while conducting this study are likely to be, first, a result of some official documentation outdatedness the analysis of which, however, is essential to understand the basics of European Union's environmental policymaking. It will also includestep by step incorporation of the idea of urban redevelopment as a primary way and source to reduce pollution, environmentally harmful energy and goods consumption and health problems caused by ecological disturbances in and around the cities. Second, the ineffectiveness of the multilevel governance approach that might show the inconsistency of a variety of policies and their inability to be effectively and efficiently put into practice on local level, even though they proved to be quite sustainable on state and other higher levels. Third, the multiplicity of concepts related to the idea of urban regeneration and renovation and a variety of indexes, that European Commission Report (2015) outlines, to measure the level of sustainability within a state that look at different variables can all potentially make the analysis too complex and too broad that unfortunately might result in the unintended omissions of some explanations or points of view. Finally, the selection of case studies and their evaluation is going to be presented in a limited manner due to the peculiarity of this work that does not allow to comprehensively look at all EU Member states and their environmental urban policies. As a result, those particularly interested in the in-depth investigation of cases not mentioned in this thesis should refer to the List of References at the end of the paper. Nevertheless, the methodology that was specifically selected for this thesisand was described above in detail is likely to outweigh all the possible problems that might occur during the test of the hypothesis and will prove beneficial and helpful in summarizing our results and findings in the concluding chapter of this research work.

1. History of the EU environmental policies

1.1.Outline since 1970s - 2000

By the early 1970s, the revival of the European economy, thanks to the Marshall Plan and an establishment of EU's predecessors - the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and later on the European Economic Community (EEC) - was mostly completed. For more than 20 years that have passed since the conclusion of the World War II European states became a lot more stable and prosperous, their production was able to cover a significant portion of peoples' demands, trade relations with other states were deepeningand the EEC, arguably, became one of the most reliable and trustworthy entities and partners in the world. However, while economic instability, devastation and poverty were rapidly declining along with the strengtheningof the levels of production, yet another problem has threatened the well-being in Europe and especially in European cities - the climate change.

The problem with the new threat was that while it has been growing for all the previous centuries, it has also stayed mostly unnoticed. Galloping for the accumulation of wealth, rising levels of production, industrial and territorial expansion and being constantly torn by multiple wars states around the world, specifically those of a developed branch, deemed environmental degradation and the problems that it caused to the social well-being and physical and psychological health of city dwellers and workersas matters of last importance. Hence, when the overall situation in the world has drastically changed and evolved into a lot more peaceful, caring and socially oriented relationships, ecologically caused disturbances became the center stage of global affairs.

First significant advances in understanding the importance of protection of the ecology took place in 1972 when the UN held its Conference on the Environment in Stockholm.It was on this summit that industrial countries addressed issues of pollution, population growth, resource extinction etc. and opted for an establishment of a coherent and globally recognized policies that will be focused on the mitigation of climate related problems and will make the world a better place to live in. After a conclusion of the Conference, which unfortunately lacked any significant decisions but successfully set a framework for a dialogue, leaders of European countries have organized a separate meeting in Paris.In autumn of 1972 they have decided to go even further and established a profound Community-wide policy aimed at the elimination of ecological disturbances andeffects that they had on peoples' health and, thus, created the first Environmental Action Program (EAP) in 1973. The main feature of the Program was an understanding that economic development and environmental protection are interconnected, depend on the material and social prosperity of citizens, the majority of which live in cities, and have to be reached sustainably (Hey, 2005). Yet, until the turn of a new decade the vast majority of environmentally friendly initiatives stayed undeveloped as legislative branch of the European Community was still struggling to introduce coherent and all-incorporating laws.

On the international level, the introduction of the Polluter-Pays Principle in 1981 on the board of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was meant to significantly shape the understanding of problems posed by climate change around the world, but most importantly, in Europe. The principle mainly discussed the effects of oil spills and an emission of dangerous pollutants into the atmosphere that uncontrollably spread across a vast territory affecting peoples' health and worsening environmental conditions in the short and long run, often leaving those responsible for this ecological damage unpunished. Hence, the official document acknowledged that the only way to mitigate such disturbances and make production more liable and energy-efficient was to make energy prices reflect the potential harm that their extraction and usage can possibly cause to the overall environmental situation and specifically to the human health within the Community (Environment Directorate of OECD, 1981).

Environmental agenda of the Old World has gone through important changes only in 1986 - with the revision of the 1957 Rome Treaty and an adoption of the Single European Act (SEA) - where it was finally reflected and officially stated that climate related problems and their mitigation, as well as the establishment of health oriented policies on a city wide basis, are to become one of the key aspects and building blocks of future policymaking in Europe. Additionally, Jordan et al. (1999) argues that introduction of the qualified majority voting (QMV) as a part of the SEA has significantly speed up the process of decision-making inside main bureaucratic and legislative bodies. This, he continues, made the adoption of environmentally friendly policies easier and faster and produced an effect of `Europhoria' - an idea that fast policy-setting speeds up implementation on local level, that in turn intensifies generation of new ideas and at the same time rises levels of accountability.

However, pretty much until the launch of the Fourth EAP in 1987, that has also coincided with the introduction of the WHO European Healthy City Project Phase I, environmental strategies of Europe were primarily oriented on rising quality and standards of water and air supply, waste management, and on the harmonization of levels of pollution among Community participants in order not to undermine the establishment and rooting of the still shaky Internal Market. The concept of Healthy Cities in Europe was met with much enthusiasm and made an idea that environmental problems are likely to be most effectively mitigated on the smallest scale possible a cornerstone for all subsequent developments up until our time. As Tsouros (2015) claims, this initiative has become a vehicle of the World Health Organization Health for All program that aimed at bringing this concept on the local level and focused on three main principles: developing general health levels and enhancing its influence on local action, acknowledging urban areas as unique settings for healthy well-being, and making local governments'primary importance in agenda setting and implementation of healthy policies and production of healthy environments.

The introduction of the Fifth EAP in 1993, and an establishment of the European Environmental Agency a year later, was supposed to turn another page in the environmental policymaking and governance of the European Community. First, it allowed for a collaboration and exchange of expertise between local and national public and private actors, second, the adoption of commonly imposed measures could be translated to match varying national conditions and specific needs of a state and allowed for localities to choose what exactly and how to implement and, third, developed new instruments, such as emission standards, that could be adapted to the specific national environment and allowed to achieve stated goals in the most comfortable pace for a state (Holzinger et al., 2006). The third idea was successfully presented in a form of a burden-sharing approach that, as Kelemen (2010) states, was based on differentiated national commitments and approved for large reductions in pollution to be taken by the most economically developed states. The majority of these countries, subsequently, were presented by countries in the North and West of Europe, at the same time allowing those who are less developed to increase their individual levels of emission to economically catch up with leaders and postpone the adoption of ecologically friendly measures on their territories for “better times”.