Green Urbanism as an element of the EU environmental policy

Furthermore, the appearance of non-state actors and a subsequent level of policy implementation that is concerned with global ecology and its influence on the physical and mental wellbeing of people have introduced new Green Urban concepts, for example, such as sustainable cities and healthy cities. As it was stated earlier in this thesis, an idea of sustainable development as a mean to mitigate environmental disturbances and its connectedness to urban areas as a key arena for all actions was proposed by the Brundland Commission in 1987. In the report it was clearlystated that metropoles and the processes that happen within them are becoming more important in terms of the reduction of climate change consequences.Cities are constantly enlarging their sphere of influence and also engage in the adoption of the most profound and all-encompassing strategies that are aimed at the full-scale redevelopmentin order to better living and ecological conditions of current and future generations by introducing sustainability not just as a theoretical concept but as a real pattern of progress. In the XXI century, however, a branch of most developed European states has replaced sustainable city idea to the healthy city one - an urban area type that is especially concerned with an introduction of healthy lifestyles in daily life of local dwellers and pays a special attention to the processes of active education. Additionally, healthy city idea also changed a pattern of decision-making by merging interests of all-level bureaucrats with general public and professional expertise. Moreover, it has also introduced new types of city economies and analyzed the ways in which it has influenced material capabilities of the EU, all of which we will cover in the next chapter.

3. New European cities

3.1 Sustainable Cities

An idea that sustainability is a key for future global and regional development, as well as a main prerequisite for social and environmental wellbeing, notions which became intertwined in the European states in the last decade of the XX century, very quickly penetrated different levels of governments and societies and, arguably, established itself as one of central piecesfor building and measuring the stage of liberal and democratic prosperity. Thus, making sustainable cities the metropoles of the near and possible-to-achieve future if international society works collectively and behaves responsibly towards each other and the climate that surrounds it. As a result, the basic interpretation of urban areas sustainable development was an establishment of small communities that have a strong desire towards self-governance, promote environmentally friendly education, industrialization and everyday life activities, and are themselves enthusiastic participants of ecological protection.

Furthermore, as Guy & Marvin (1999) argue, to really understand the meaning, patterns and a broad picture of sustainability,the concept itself should go beyond simple calculations of physical footprint that has been already left in urban areas by decades of economic growth. An idea should look further estimated amounts of material resource flow curtailing as an ultimate source to overcome all climate change related problems, as sustainable development is what really comes from within. Redeveloping city for it to become sustainable, hence, presupposes a long-term and gradual transformation of both national and local policies, instillation of love in people towards the places where they live in and establishing a pattern of ecological advancement as both a collective and an individual purpose.This, in turn, will catch attention of everyone who is somehow connected to a particular urban area, be it businesses, factories, all-age groups of local dwellers and even tourists, and make them responsible for actions that might hurt the environment.

An adoption by the European states of such a far-reaching view of the sustainable city development as a mean to overcome global environmental degradation and to ensure that all future modernization related activities will focus on providing this industrialization in a harmless format could also be, probably, explained by the vast support that the EU as a whole got from various international organizations and to the amount of policy and law-making activities it individually went through since late 1980s in order to make ecology related concerns one of the pillars of the European Union.The concept of sustainability that was adopted by the majority of Member states in the XXI century, thus, presumed a reorientation from simple quantitative measures, such as how much has the unemployment fallen or how much was the greenhouse gas pollutionreduced, to the rise in qualitative standards that usually looked at the characteristics of green areas that were built in cities, quality of the redeveloped and newly constructed infrastructure (i.e. housing and roads) and on the nature of the produced pollution(Knill&Liefferink, 2007). Moreover, sustainable cities idea has also given a room for a maneuver for less developed European states and their economies. Precisely because it did not demand to implement urgent and full-scale changes on the spot but allowed them to take place gradually and gave countries time to transition their economies smoothly and to establish new social relationships.These connections, in turn, would have been aimed at the provision of stable growth and long-term prosperity of urban areas and peoples' wellbeing.

Such a position, therefore, as it was outlined in the previous chapters, demanded an adoption of official protocols where common goals will be set but individual targets, contrary to what it used to be, will be left out to be established by national and local authorities separately from the European Commission, as a result, introducing the EU SDS, the Leipzig Charter and significantly modernizing the EAPs. What was left unchanged, however, is an understanding that sustainability of the EU's metropoles and their development and adoption of environmentally friendly policies and techniques will stay a priority on local, state, regional and broader levels. Furthermore, they will continue to be vastly supported by the European Union's legislative authorities who, in turn, would go even further and will introduce concepts of green growth and low-carbonurbanism. Additionally, Beatley (2012) suggests that an introduction of the Green Capital City classification, one of several honorable labels given by the European Commission to designated municipalities, that recognized made and ongoing efforts in achieving sustainability, successfully promoted implementation of climate change reduction strategies in urban areas around the EU. Though the competitions that were conducted at the beginning were in their majority friendly and somewhat nominal, their popularity as well as a subsequent prestige and economic and a tourist boom that a city got as a result of winning, soon made such competitions an essential part of the local environmental build up and, possibly, of the European policy-making as a whole by giving knowledge sharing a spotlight and merging different urban concepts under one `ideology' - Green Urbanism.

An urban development of the XXI century that can be considered to be green, Hepburn et al. (2018) argues,is most commonly defined as a short-term primitive growth in state's annual GDP per capita that is at the same time characterized by at least the non-diminishing levels of natural capital. To ensure the long-term prosperity of the city, hence, business-as-usual actions should be significantly curtailed, local economies should reorient towards provision of a high standard living and infrastructure for city dwellers.Publics themselves, on the other hand, should actively engage in environmental agenda setting procedures and organize itin a such a way that policies are implemented from within and in a bottom-up format. This, in turn, can only be achieved by a close examination of the reasons, apart from widely known and accepted industrialization and globalization, that first and furthermost have led to ecological and human health degradation inside cities and specifically on its' peripheries. This could be, namely, the uncontrollable urban sprawl that continue to disrupt sustainable metropolitan area development and up until recently undermined an idea of compact settlement that is often viewed as an ultimate solution to effective management of local, national and the European Union environmental policy making (Kovacs et al., 2019).

3.2 Healthy Cities

Another newly adopted city development type, that often substitutes sustainability concept, is a healthy city idea. Environmental scientists and activists usually refer to it as to a narrower and a more targeted approach of metropolitan area evolution which is less focused on the economy and economic flows within cities and nation states and is ready to substantially compromise them to achieve higher standards of environmental, social, mental and physical wellbeing of people. In this regard, a concept of urban health deals not solemnly with a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, industrial and vehicle produced pollution, waste management and with minimizing water and soil contamination with chemicals, notions that directly affect human health. But, more specifically, pays attention on overcoming various health related diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular problems, depression and constantly rising stress levels, all of which might be regarded to influence urban dwelling conditions indirectly. Thus, because the majority of the reasons that have led to these problems cannot be mitigated on the spot or through some direct measures, but only through a step by step improvement of local climate, their importance in urban planning, urban management and urban citizenship becomes central.

Price & Dube (1999) claim that there are essentially four visible features that have a direct effect on health in a city: economic, cultural, social and environmental. While ecology related aspects are pretty much the same, when compared with what has already been extensively covered throughout this thesis, other three are a little different from what ideas they represent when talked about sustainable development. For example, health related economic elements are focused on the availability and quality of wellbeing services and measure how hard it is to access them for different population groups with different levels of income. Cultural and social features, respectively,take into consideration norms and rules of behavior as well as a traditional family structure to explain how they influence both physical and mental health of urban dwellers. As such, these differences are then able to explain why Germany with its medical system that is known worldwide for its excellence, its, although arguable, blurring of cultural values in metropoles and its constant reshaping of social norms, that as a result make populations more adaptive to changes, has gone so far in the introduction of environmental policies and their successful execution. While, for instance, Spain that is heavily dependent on its cultural and social traditions and who's economy was developing like a sinusoid since its accession into the EU, continue to struggle with an introduction of breakthrough climate change mitigation policies that, in turn, could have also substantially risen levels of health in urban areas around the Iberian peninsula.

Moreover, as some environmental activists suggest, the rise in health related problems, through which the majority of European cities have been going especially actively since late 1990s - early 2000s, was not so much a result of the global economic upturn in metropoles per se. On the other hand, it was more a result of the increase in the individual and personal welfare of people who used to live in city's peripheries but due to the urban sprawl have ended up within urban areas borders. Thus, because this city-spread often happened faster when local governments were able to enlarge the benefits that cities historically had, above all road and compact housinginfrastructure, to its new blocks, it produced heavily car-based and low-dense suburban areas that boomed pollution levels, produced unhealthy tendencies, devastated green areas and undermined leisure friendly activities both in historical centers and in just-recently-rural blocks.

Despite all the action that were taken by European cities since then, one of the key steps to deal with these unhealthy tendencies on the local level, both directly and indirectly, has been undertaken in 2014 after the conclusion of the Athens, also known as Mayors', Declaration under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO).The Declaration as such recognized the importance of two urban health development schemes. Firstly, Health 2020 initiative which focused on the reduction of health related inequalities and emphasized the importance of participatory governance in municipalities and, secondly, Phase VI (2014-2019) of the WHO European Healthy City Network, previous stages of which were covered in chapter 1 of this paper, that was supposed to be used as a knowledge sharing platform while at the same time recognizing uniqueness of geographical position, historical and economic backgrounds and social construct of each and every city of the European Union. Hence, allowing them to rise individuals' prosperity and levels of health in cities at the pace and in the areas, they desired to do so and deemed of having major importance for and influence on citizens (WHO Report, 2014).

Nevertheless, as some argue, neither Athens Declaration nor ideas that it has outlined and framed were not new to the world per se. The EU and its Member states, at the junction of two centuries, have already acknowledged the importance of expertise being shared and a need to simplify ways to access local governments for general publics. They were also concerned with an establishmentof direct communication paths that would have penetrated all stages of environmental policy making in the Union and would have made Green Urban theory one of the official and key elements of legislative papers. What was original in it, however, was a formality that the document has given to all these concepts and the powers that it has prescribed to city governors in shaping national law that concerns various liberal and social policies, such as healthy ageing, health literacy, community resilience, disease control and protection of vulnerable urban populations etc. (D'Onofrio &Trusiani, 2018).

Moreover, such reorientation of political and executive behavior towards cities also demanded local authorities to undertake substantial economic changes in and around urban areas. While the first wave of this transition has happened in the 1970s - 1980s when the majority of European states have significantly abolished their coal industries, the second wave, that happened closer to the XXI century, has reoriented economy of the Member states even further by making it more “social”. It, also, focused on nurturing new “capital of the cities” and on the introduction of knowledge-based economy as, possibly, an ultimate source to overcome environmental degradation and to ensure prosperous and healthy future for people internationally.

3.3.How new city types influence economy of the European states?

Economic rise, industrialization and then globalization were, historically, the three notions upon which collective and individual prosperity and welfare of countries, cities and people were dependent. When in the 1970s the world and the most powerful international organization such as the UN started to`ring all the bells' claiming that exploitative and unthoughtful usage of planetary non-renewable resources is needed to stop and environmental conditions in cities should be increased in order to preserve humanity from extinction, it, thus, produced a wave of significant industrial, political and social changes around the globe with an especially far-reaching stance being adopted by the European Union and its Member states. The birth of sustainable and healthy urban development idea, of which we talked earlier in this chapter, was a first step towards new ecology friendly industrial development. Improvement that focused on the adjustment of current levels of economic build-up and contamination produced by the European countries andtheir municipalities, in order for it then to serve as a building block for climate change mitigation activities.However, for the majority of the EU states a concept of resiliency did not demand a complete and rapid abolition of certain sectors of their economies and even allowed some countries to preserve current levels of pollution, while their industries, national policies and societies were gradually adopting towards an understanding that environment and climate change are the new millennium goals and ultimate targets of the XXI century.

The most significant step in curtailing levels of pollution by restructuring economies, as Campbell &Coenen (2017) argue, was undertaken by Europe's old industrial and, probably, most “dirty” regions, primarily those who's industry was heavily dependent on coal, for example, in Germany and France, but also in Benelux states and a little bit in Italy.As common sense seems to dictate, these regions have been historically dependent on the extraction and processing of fossil fuels and produced generations of people who were employed in these industries, had a special social and economic atmosphere and relationships and usually had a strong political support towards those candidates who promised them stability, hence, being very skepticalabout all the changes that took place in the EU environmental policy making. The key idea here, as authors continue, was to diversify and reorient ecologically dangerous industries while at the same time preserving the majority of workplacesand social benefits that local workers originally had. Firstly, it was done through preserving existing human assets and expertise in manufacturing and engineering that people had while at the same time providing them with jobs in new sectors of economy, such as the production of renewable energy materials, centrally covering all the expenses on the retraining in case it was needed and often rising workers' salaries. Secondly, local policies and initiatives also focused on the regeneration of old factories by making them commonly accessible and turning them into sport, leisure and educational facilities, for example, as happened with mine Solferaine in Germany's Rurh which was turned into an all-age friendly museum and occasionally holds theatrical performances.

As a result, a substantial abolition of the coal mining and coal burning industries in Western European states, without a sharp fall in the economy and industrial performance of nation states and in the welfare of population, was able to significantly cut levels of pollution. Moreover, at the same time it was able to rise health levels by, first and furthermost, lowering a number of people with respiratory and cardiovascular systems problems and curtailing smog production that during a change in the wind direction could have, possibly, reach some capital cities. The focus on purely industrial and economic capitals redevelopment has stayed on the European Union's agenda for several decades and has proved itself quite successful in the mitigation of climate change and ecological disruptions. However, by the 2000s general pace of manufacturing and commercial activities that happened in the West, and particularly in the EU, started to slow down and were becoming gradually surpassed by economic activities in Asian states and Latin America. This, hence, demanded Old World countries to engage in even a more profound and far-reaching environmental policy making and, accordingly, to introduce an agenda that was more socially and educationally rather than GDP growth oriented.

The two central perspectives that were vastly adopted and executed by the Member states and that almost always go hand in hand were the development of knowledge-based economy and “capital of the cities”, otherwise refereed as human capital. Knowledge-based economy is essentially a separate sector of any developed and developing state's economy that is responsible for the creation of a new technological knowledge and is usually considered being an advantage of big and prosperous urban areas. Thanks to their high-tech development, they are able to attract foreign direct investments (FDIs) and educated professionals from other countries, and often show exceptional growth rates by legally trading their findings and exchanging expertise (van Winden et al., 2007). Moreover, apart from foreign market orientation, these activities are also focused on the production of nation-based excellence by using revenues to educate people and produce national environmental elites and scientists that will be able to transfer their experience to next generations and educate whole societies in ecologically friendly manner. Thus, doing so by boosting common and individual levels of health and social well-being, even though uncontrollable urban sprawl continues to exist, and cities become a lot denser.

Furthermore, Kelemen (2010) claims that a significant increase in the amount of wealth possessed by a regular European citizen, that significantly increased in the XXI century when compared with the second half of the previous century, allowed for a quite rapid spread of post-materialist ideas and values among EU populations. Which, in turn, became more supportive of environmental agenda conducted by their governments as everyday life stability and income became higher and generally more reliable. This local level cohesion then produced an increasingly active society who understood its and their authorities responsibility for the ongoing environmental degradation and for the spread of various health related problems, thus, making ordinary people key trend and policy setters and giving them more space to participate and engage in bottom-up agenda suggestion and its further implementation and execution, as well as in a transformation of states' economies and in the curtailing of potentially dangerous industrial activities in and around European cities.

All of these developments and initiatives usually take a form of an urban experimentation or, put differently, of learning by doing. The field of city planning in general and its smaller counterparts of sustainable, healthy, resilient, low-carbon and zero-emission etc. urban regeneration programs still mostly continue to be exercised in a test format. They are also often being short-term or being cancelled before they could have produced any somewhat meaningful results because of the threat that these actions might affect states' economies and individual social welfare too much. This, in turn, then believed to make some populations relatively worse off than others and, hence, constantly undermines the long-term notion of environmentally friendly legislature and substitutes it with short-term economic benefits that are usually being preferred both by governments, who strife for reelection, and people, some of which continue to be unsatisfied with their incomes. The only way to overcome this office-seeking and personal benefit relationship, as was suggested by the European Commission in 2017,is to make urban areas to participate in the intracity and intercity learning and experimentation initiatives (EEA Report, 2019). The basic idea here is that by developing a variety of city-specific and city-wide measures to mitigate climate change, each of which was successful in one or another urban environment, those pioneer cities who only start their ecologically friendly development will be able to choose from a number of possible actions. And, as a result, will minimize costs for their implementation due to the knowledge of outcomes that various policies have produced and the ways they could be overcame or at least curtailed relatively quickly.

Finally, the last chapter of this thesis, will focus on the case study analysis of a number of urban planning initiatives and Green Urbanism as such in the Northern and Western Europe, separately in the UK and, lastly, in the Southern Europe. It will also evaluate and compare how successful or unsuccessful were different policies and their implementation and whether the EU Member states have engaged in the knowledge sharing and were capable of learning on others mistakes while adapting numerous strategies and schemes of city development to their state-specific social, economic and political environments.

4. Case studies

4.1 Northern and Western Europe

Since the launch of the global environmental agenda and its rapid development into one of the key policy making areas in the European Union, states of its West and North, as this paper has stated multiple times in previous chapters, have become one of the major proponents and executors of the majority of the ecologically friendly activities. While some of them, particularly Norway, Sweden and Finland have engaged in the nation and city wide introduction of various climate change mitigating initiatives relevant to their state conditions, Germany and the Netherlands, for example, have also focused on the improvement of regional and common European levels of green urban evolutionand, specifically, of urban health by promoting an array of actions that can be successfully carried out in different cities and with respect to varying social and economic circumstances of countries.

Collier (1997) argues that Germany's central importance in the execution of environmental policies is dependent on two factors: first, on its major historical dependence on fossil fuels, especially on coal, burning of which results in almost 30% of the whole EU CO₂emissions and, secondly, on extremely favorable conditions for local self-governance, thanks to the share that municipalities have in the companies responsible for waste and water management, public transport availability and for powering general urbaninfrastructure. The fusion and deep integration of these two factors have produced a very good background for all climate change curtailing activities throughout Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Moreover, it has allowed its Lдnders to engage in region and city specific activities often producing outstanding results and making Germany one of the leaders of environmental protection in the Union. According to van Winden's et al. (2007) typology, since the start of an urban development era German cities became represented in 4 out of 6 categories with Mьnich being ranked as the Star city (a type that has top scores in almost all green growth and sustainability indicators), Dortmund - Metropole in transition - that has lower but gradually rising sectorial performance despite its declining intracity economy, Aachenthat took a place of the Nicheplayer in transition or a city whose specialization has yet been unable to overcome the effects produced by its declining industries and, lastly, Mьnster being named as an Intellectuals city (a category that emphasizes a presence of knowledge-based economy but currently lacks business ties that could have allowed for this expertise to be shared with metropole areas worldwide). Overall, the importance of this division is contained not only in the classificationitself which shows that German cities are ones of the most diverse in terms of their urban development schemes and the initiatives they proposebut also in that successful green city regeneration is not dependent neither on the size of the municipality itself nor on its population size. It is clear because from the cities listed above only Mьnich has more than one million people living in it that is, nevertheless, significantly lower than a majority of European large towns, that are recognized to play a significant role in the global economy, usually have.

The Dutch urban areas have almost always been one of the “front-runners” in the introduction and execution of environmental policies with one of the possible reasons for this being the special geographical conditions of a country that has `battled the sea' for many years in order to enlarge its territory. Moreover, the heavy dependence of the Netherlands on trade, especially on its marine routes, has also led to substantial changes in how the economy-ecology relationship became perceived by general public and took a form of a `social contract' (Jordan &Lenschow, 2000). For example, all national and local climate change mitigation and pollution reduction policies of the late XX and early XXI centuries were prepared by a collaborative work of different ministries and bureaucrats from all governmental levels, who resembled interests of all societal groups of a deep-cleavage country. Theyalso closely focused on such global tendency as long-lasting sustainable planning that, at the same time, was not supposed to be conducted at an expense of falling conditions of individual welfare of urban dwellers and of their health. One of the focus areas of Dutch green urban growth, hence, became a substantial regeneration of state's energy consumption infrastructure that became gradually adapted to become completely zero-emissionby placement of windmills in shelf regions and in the fields throughout the country. The renewal of its housing stock, furthermore, especially in Amsterdam and the Hague where the majority of buildings continued to have a lot of wooden and bad chemical particles in their facades and basements andan introduction of the new means of sectoral prosperitybecame of crucial importance in such places as Rotterdam, for example, whose intra and intercity economy started to decline together with the fall of the importance of marine trade a big part of which became substituted with air transportation and service sector reorientation globally.

Furthermore, one of the recent initiatives adopted by the government of the Netherlands - the Nature Policy Plan - as Beatley (2012) outlines, has become a breakthrough in terms of management of health conditions of people who live in cities. The Plan's main focus area was an implementation of national environmental standards on the local level and ensuring a sufficiency of ecological networks, such as clean waterways, wind corridors and a good walking and cycling connectivity between green areas and public spaces, that penetrate all types of urban areas and that are especially important for planning and sustainability within and of a metropole. This strategy, for example, was able to legally restrict the height of the newly constructed buildings in the neighborhoods through which goes an important city airflow, regulated the distance between park areas and often provided significant subsidies for those developers who were eager to collaborate with municipal governments and consulted various interest groups and stakeholders and often shared their expertise and experience with other cities, thanks to the development of climate change mitigation municipal networks, that were outlined earlier in this paper.

Countries of the Northern Europe, in this regard, went even further and apart from introducing a variety of legally binding documents that were supposed to limit patterns and ways of city regeneration and effectively control urban sprawl have also focused on the implementation of green urban metabolism initiatives. This development has focused on the reduction of input flows (i.e. tons of energy and food consumed) and on the shortening of delivery lines (both intracity and intra and internationally), thus, creating urban areas that are sustainable and have low levels of pollution. Thanks to the introduction of the private and public transportation fuels that are extracted from renewable energy sources, such as electricity or ethanol, but are also completely independent and self-reliable in the production and delivery of a necessary amount of all-type resources for its citizens who, in turn, consume them in a responsible and almost zero-waste manner - just like the model of the Swedish HammarbySjцstad project in Stockholm emphasizes (Beatley, 2012). This prototype is essentially a recognition, of first and furthermost, the interconnectedness of local and global economies but, secondly, also of the unity of environments and climate change around the world - the tendency that is sometimes referred to in scholarly literature as glocalism.

States of the European North have become one of the key executors and promoters of the glocalism as an ultimate problem and at the same time solution for the mitigation of environmental degradation and climatic hazards worldwide.One of the possible reasons and explanations for this is that cities that have been historically responsible for global pollution now ended up in the most dangerous situations with their existence sometimes being immensely threatened due to the rising global temperatures and sea levels, ineffective waste management, insufficient contamination reduction policies and rapidly decreasing health levels of urban dwellers that have had a perspective of making some cities completely unsuitable for living in the future.

Moreover, Barton et al. (2003) argues that a particular importance in curtailing the problems posed by the climate change in the North of the European Union was given to the small towns - with the most outstanding results being reached by Sandnes, Norway. An urban regeneration of Sandnes that became apparent in early 1990s, on the one hand, was always complicated with the geographical location of the city itself (at the bottom of a fjord) and, on the other hand, with an importance of the city as a transport node for the whole region of Nord-Jжren. The fusion of these two features, as a result, has massively threatened urban health conditions and at the same time made municipality of Sandnes one of the most active and far-going actors in Norway in the health-integrated spatial planning by introducing such programs as Sandnes Bike City in 1991 and the Children's City Council in 1995 (with Children's trail project - an idea that recognized the importance of development of areas that are used by children in their outdoor activities and consulted school kids and their teachers on the ways and types of kid-friendly planning and urban area regeneration). Furthermore, Norwegian cities and towns have become one of the front-runners in the introduction of social environment and health related reconstruction plans that focused on the comprehensive redevelopment of city infrastructure to suit the needs of disabled people. Additionally, immigrants and refugees focusing on the elimination of issues that could have potentially excluded these social groups from integrating with their local communities and from becoming an active participants in the city-wide planning, for example, by adapting buildings and services to suit the needs of all populations' strata and providing necessary levels of either employment or retraining for working age population irrespective of their social, economic or political status.

All of these initiatives, as a result, made European Western and Northern states one of the most successful implementors not only of the common environmental policies per se but also of its narrower branches such as Green and Healthy Urbanism.

Yet, regeneration patterns that these countries used were somewhat different from those that, for example, were exercised in the United Kingdom that is geographically Western but is completely unique in its environmental policy execution.

4.2 The UK

The uniqueness of the UK green urban redevelopment and infrastructure renovation is seen in the limited amount of power that local governments have on environmental policymaking and its implementation. Being defined as a highly centralized and a unitary state where the power of decision-making primarily lies with the fiscal politics of the Westminster, which is able to overrun resolutions taken and, possibly, also unanimously supported by the local municipalities, significantly complicates and slows down an exercise of climate change mitigating and pollution curtailing activities, making the United Kingdom although determined but at the same time a very careful advantages and disadvantages analysist (Ehnert et al., 2018). As a result, pretty much until the beginning of the XXI century, the incorporation of the national environmental policy integration (EPI) programs with the European Union ones was going even slower in such regions as Wales, Scotland and in particular in central England.

Jordan &Lenschow (2000), however, suppose that this so much favored by the top officials top-down approach in the implementation of the environmental policies, on the other hand, was and continues to be an essential part of climate change mitigation action plans performance. Without strong political backing from highest authorities none of the environmental policies would win over views and departments that are reluctant to implement such curtailing activities without extracting direct benefits for their respective departments or constituencies. Nevertheless, because of such overwhelming importance of central government in execution of all environmental programs, some of methods not only lack coherence, after all actions that are acceptable in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh might not be possible to execute neither in London nor in other smaller cities and towns in the subsequent regions, but also do not give a sufficient amount of access to decision-making procedures for urban dwellers and various interest groups and stakeholders whose lives might be directly affected. Thus, making British system of ecology-friendly policymaking look like a vicious circle where central government looks for ways to incorporate localities and general publics into decision-making process but at the same time denies them to have a profound influence over final urban planning regeneration resolutions.

One of the most famous examples of city redevelopment programs has happened in Belfast, Northern Ireland on the edge of the 2000s. Since 1971 to 1991 the city of Belfast has, probably, experienced the most turmoil if compared with other big cities in the UK. Civil unrest that happened in the region has not only left many of city's industries abandoned and boomed unemployment rates to almost 40% in some districts but has also contributed to the rise of the intraregional migration when, for example, local populations were rapidly moving to suburban areas which were not ready to allocate that many people and ultimately demanded both local and central authorities to focus on the development of peripheries rather than on the modernization and regeneration of city areas. From this perspective Barton at al. (2003) claims that becoming a member of the WHO European Healthy City Network in 1998 has saved Belfast and its infrastructure and became the first and crucial step in the introduction of public consultation and strategic health planning.The key aim of which, possibly, was to enhance levels of community building and to overcome social segregation that often played a role of the main obstacle of urban planning in the city region. Apart from rebuilding housing and road infrastructure and an elimination of fragmented regeneration logic, the capital of Northern Ireland was among the first ones to recognize that to make a city green, healthy and sustainable environmental programs should focus more precisely on all-level population needs, rather than on central governments demands, and on the equality in, around and outside of different urban areas, hence, making a city a self-reliant body capable of performing numerous planning tasks in a timely fashion and with a deep social orientation.

Nonetheless, the city that drags the most attention in terms of Green Urbanism and healthy planning initiatives in the United Kingdom is London. The capital of Great Britain has historically been one of the most industrialized, populated and financially and politically important areas in the world. Years and centuries of unthoughtful energy resources usage, vast pollution and natural degradation has produced a significant number of environmental problems in and around the city but has also created many conditions, specifically favorable for the central government, that allowed London, along with other capital cities of Northern and Western Europe, to become a front-runner in the implementation and development of national, local and sometimes even global environmental policy. One of the most far-reaching, long-term and all-encompassing action plans was developed by the London Mayor's Cabinet in 2011 and included in itself three key spheres that in their turn incorporated almost all areas of city life - from social to economic to health - “Retrofitting London”, “Greening London”, “Cleaner Air for London” (D'Onofrio &Trusiani, 2018). The importance of all programs was in that they were all connected between each other and suggested that a 100% performance could only be achieved with a gradual and equal development of all areas of city life and that elimination of poverty, social inequality and unemployment is just as important for managing climate change as building refurbishment, tree planting and food and water supply safety. Moreover, the initiative recognized that an ecological footprint of London is so vast and deep penetrating that it affects not only current local dwellers but also has a potential to have a significant impact on future generations and in particular on children's mental and physical health. As a result, London's local roadmap became more future oriented than the national UK environmental scheme suggests, for example, setting an ambitious goal of reaching 60% resiliency by the year 2025 that is two times higher than the target that was set by the central state's government to be reached by the same year (Beatley, 2012).

Thus far, despite being one of the leaders in the environmental policymaking innovation and a key climate change mitigation promoter on the city and global levels, the United Kingdom has been relatively slower and less far-going in the execution of common national ecology-friendly programs than its Western European counterparts who give a lot more authority and independence to their localities and have given up a strict top-down approach in favor of a broader and, as some argue, harder to implement bottom-up one. Yet, the UK still continues to be placed on the active end of the environmental policymaking continuum of the European Union, whose achievements, unfortunately, are sometimes undermined by less active states of Southern Europe the majority of which are only starting their journey towards Green Urbanism.

4.3 Southern Europe

Environmental policy in the EU's South and especially an idea of green and healthy urban planning as one of the key elements to overcome problems that are posed by the climate change related social and economic activities are substantially different from those initiatives that are proposed by the European Commission and the branch of the most prosperous European states of which we talked in two previous sections of this chapter. As it was outlined before in this thesis, countries such as Portugal, Italy and Spainthough have engaged in city regeneration and health boosting activities since late XX century. Nonetheless, they continue to be relatively reluctant to meet objectives set by the key legislative and policymaking bodies of the European Union in mitigating levels of pollution, in particular greenhouse gas emissions that come from agriculture. Even though common sense seems to dictate that urban areas have little to do with the production of food stuffs or fertilizers, the majority of cities in the Southern Europe, first of all, play an important role in the worldwide distribution and consumption of agricultural products and, secondly, receive direct benefits from this industry by, for instance, designing machinery that could be used in the fields.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that all EU states have different economic bases, there are some common features for all of them - European industrial cities are the ones who suffer from environmental degradation the most and they can only reach sustainability by 100% regenerating their commerce activities and, hence, by fulfilling strategies outlined by the European Union itself and by the World Health Organization. WHO Report (2009) supposes that the only way to unite perspectives of healthy urbanism and economic sustainability in Southern European states is to focus on the implementation of intersectoral development strategies where both public and private interests and stakeholders have an influence - just as examples of Portuguese Seixal and Italian Milan suggest.

Just as some previous examples have shown, the city of Seixal has engaged in a massive urban planning redevelopment program in 1998 after it became a part of the WHO European Healthy City Scheme. Being highly industrialized throughout the XX century but becoming almost completely unused by the beginning of the new millennium, with one of the possible explanations being the movement of workplaces and workforce to the neighboring Lisbon, has created a special atmosphere of multiple cities within one city - Seixal's districts were developing around factories on which people who lived in the neighborhoods used to work. As a result, the majority of blocks had little or no connection, neither social nor public transportation oriented, between each other. Extensive car use, factory heritage and inadequate amount of green areas in the city, all of which extensively influenced people's health and mental well-being, have pushed municipal government to design transparent land-use plans that are developed using professional experience, consultation of local dwellers and even use local media coverage, particularly in newspapers, to constantly update publics on the most important urban redevelopment initiatives (Barton et al., 2003). Yet, despite a 22-year long experience in urban planning, many scholars claim that Portugal in general, and Seixal in particular, are still on their way to reach sustainability and boost overall health levels of citizens and is unlikely to speed up these processes in the next decade at least. One of the reasons for this is a weak performance of Portugal's economy, population aging and outflow of youth etc. to more prosperous EU Member states, for instance, Germany that gives more opportunities for self-development and “destiny change”.

An Italian case, according to D'Onofrio &Trusiani (2018), although has some nation-wide similarities with other Southern European urban planning schemes, is, however, different in terms of its city-wide redevelopment programs. As authors suggest, a lack of common national Health Impact Assessment (HIA) and its unity to city regeneration, that was true for national Italian legislature up until the middle of 2016, has influenced metropolitan planning in such a way that it allowed local and national authorities to unilaterally limit European Commission's proposals on dealing with health problems of local dwellers to individual case experimentation, for example, as happened with the construction of `Bosco Verticale' skyscrapers in Milan, Italy. Moreover, even after being fully adopted, Italy's HIA still lacked direct and clear examination methods and evaluation procedures that would have allowed outside observers to claim that a particular urban planning scheme lacks coherence and is far from meeting common EU goals of improving health levels in cities in general.