Green Urbanism as an element of the EU environmental policy

Nevertheless, claiming that Milan has not done anything to reach sustainability and to turn itself into green and resilient urban area would simply be wrong.City's authorities, in particular Milan's Healthy City Office and Milan's City Manager, have launched three projects in the most distinct parts of the city - Molise-Calvairate district redevelopment scheme (a residential block that borders downtown and is characterized with a lot of social inequality, major income gaps among local dwellers and has a big proportion of physically and mentally disadvantaged people living there), Cascina Merlata - Via Barzaghi area which is highly populated with illegally settled Roma groups and, finally, Chiaravalle-Nosedo-Ex Porto di Mare that used to be located on the city's periphery and employed many workers either on the sewage treatment factory or in the neighboring farms the existence of which became majorly threatened with an uncontrollable urban sprawl (Barton et al., 2003).

Despite the fact that projects, that were covered in this section, were launched as early as the beginning of the XXI century, work on reaching comprehensive levels of urban redevelopment, regeneration and sustainability in these states and regions still continues up until our days. What is clear, however, is that since the beginning of the 2000s Southern Europe in general has become a lot more determined towards implementation of global and EU pollution mitigating activities together with recognizing that wholesome changes are only possible with, first and furthermost, a profound restructuring of cities' economic and social profiles but also with a development of environmental policies that would recognize green, healthy and environmentally-friendly urbanism as one of its key elements.

Conclusion

As it was outlined throughout this paper, idea of Green Urbanism as a mean to boost health levels among city dwellers, without necessarily compromising national and regional economic development, has become one of the most important aspects and elements of environmental policymaking in the European Union since its launch in the 1970s. Since then the EU in general and its Member states individually have engaged in numerous action plans aimed at mitigation of climate change related disturbances and closely collaborated with various international organizations (IOs), such as the UN, WHO and OECD, in order to correlate their national, regional and local pollution curtailing activities with the most urgent global ecological needs.

The general pattern of the EU's environmental policy development can be divided in three rather broad periods that, nonetheless, perfectly show how an understanding of key climate change problems and ways of their elimination have been changing in previous decades. The period of 1970s - 2000s, for instance, is characterized by a profound collaboration of the EU with a number of international actors. An introduction of Environmental Action Plans (EAPs) and Healthy Urban Planning Phases (HUP), among the most important, during this period closely resemble a strong reliance of the Union's internal legislature on directions provided by global actors who, in turn, played key roles as main global agenda-setters and policy promoters in a world that was divided by the Cold War hostility. Ecologically friendly policymaking within Europe during that period closely resembled Members' general struggle between desire to boost their intra and interregional economic activities and to make EU's economy competitive on the global market, areas that became especially crucial since a rapid economic growth in Asia and a collapse of the USSR. At the same time, these developments try to meet demands of domestic and international populations who for decades and sometimes even centuries have been suffering from industrialization and income capitalization, that often did not care about the quality and materials that products were produced from, and now demanded not only to consume healthy goods but also to work in safe environments.

From the beginning of the 2000 and onwards up until our days, the European Union has become a self-sufficient and a self-made actor on the arena of climate change mitigation. The EU Sustainable Development Strategy (EU SDS) that was born during this period, probably, can be referred to as being a key milestone of all changes that have been taking place in the European and nation state environmental policymaking. The main goal of the SDS was to help Union's industries, especially those that were located near or inside urban areas, to overcome and abolish dangerous production tendencies and then regenerate and incorporate them into daily city life by either making manufacturing sustainable or by making these areas green and people-friendly. What, however, was meant to stay unchanged is an ability of these old industrial areas to serve as centers of community building activities but, this time, of health-centered societies that produce generations of responsible dwellers that care more about collective social well-being rather than about individual economic welfare.

These developments, in turn, are supposed to establish a completely new type of European economy by 2050 - a Low Carbon Economy. This type of economic development, apart from being promoted by strong EU Member states and key EU legislative authorities on all levels of environmental policy implementation (global, European, regional, state and non-state and even local), also promises to finally equalizedegrees of industrialization between each and every European country and, thus, to match levels of their economic prosperity and competitiveness the inequality. In areas, in which, as it was often claimed by states who had a less active urban environment regeneration positions, they were not allowed to undertake profound green and healthy city redevelopment strategies as in the long-term it would have left them and their populations potentially worse off than their regional partners and neighbors.

Another tendency that became clear in early 2000s and has been developing since then was a multiplication of levels of policymaking and influence on global climate change conditions that the EU started to exercise. If at the beginning of the environmentally friendly journey the Union was more focused on the implementation of globally recognized programs on national and regional levels, in the XXI century the European Union itself, together with it Member states, have become one of the key players on the urban ecology protection arena worldwide. The EU even went as far as to recognize the importance of localities and non-state actors in promoting certain pollution curtailing and health boosting initiatives that could have taken place in cities. In this respect, European states soon recognized that the most immediate - local - level of decision-making and policy realization is much more important than the rest due to its ability to give independence, from both national governments and EU Commission, to various legislative and executive actors.These aspects, at the same time, does not demand for these urban redevelopment schemes to be synchronized or equalized among different states and/or cities and, hence, allowed for some countries, especially those that still struggled with receiving constant economic benefits, to slow down the pace of transforming their urban areas to become sustainable and healthy.

Sustainable and healthy cities, furthermore, are the two most commonly used types of urban regeneration that are directed at a fully-fledged renewal of economic and social flows and patterns within the European Union. The basic idea of them is to make city a self-reliable and environmentally friendly producer and consumer of energy and fuels (that should be made from renewable materials), ensure good intracity digestive systems, such as clever waste management, supply of clean water and rebirth of green areas etc., and substantially lower levels of health and stress related problems being caused by noise pollution, absence of everyday activity and communitarian lifestyle. These developments, in turn, will influence the structure of economies of European states by slightly diverging it from globalization towards more compact areas of goods production and in particular towards an establishment of knowledge-based economies that could be achieved by creating and educating new “capital of the cities”.

Finally, to better understand changes that have already taken place and those that are going to be exercised by the EU Member states in the future, this thesis has looked at and examined several case study scenarios that for the simplicity were divided into three categories - Northern and Western Europe, the UK and Southern Europe - that represent different ways of green urban environmental policymaking and execution. While the first outline can be referred to as a `perfect example' where national and local governments work in collaboration with each other and have the most profound and far-going initiatives in stock, an example of the United Kingdom is a little more complex than of its regional counterparts. Here local authorities are very tied up to top-down approach by the central government and, thus, although their programs are ones of the most successful in the world, they have a lot less independence in management of urban areas development that, in turn, prolongs an adoption of any policy. Lastly, green urbanism in Southern European states up until our days has a feature of unilateral and individualistic experimentation scenarios that are applied selectively and are very slow in producing tangible benefitsdue to states and populations unwillingness to sacrifice short-term economic benefits for the long-term environmental prosperity.

All in all, European Union's environmental policy is one of the most profound and comprehensive in the world with an idea of Green Urbanism being one of the central elements and building blocks of it. Moreover, redevelopment, rehabilitation and revival of cities is likely to become even more important in future due to a rapid rise of intercity migration flows and urban sprawl that at the same time coincide with a rise of importance that cities play in the international relations, politics and economics.

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