Functional Areas in the EU

The Brno Metropolitan Area (BMA) has participated in the international project Functional Areas in the EU managed by the European Commission and the World Bank. The project lasted two years (from May 2022 to May 2024). 

The aim of the project was to enhance the capacity of participating functional areas to plan and finance investments and services across jurisdictional boundaries. The aim of the project was to enhance the capacity of functional areas to plan and finance investments and services beyond their boundaries. This is because territorial development does not take place strictly within administrative boundaries, but its positive effects are most visible in the whole functional area. This is why EU Cohesion Policy has focused on these areas and, through this project, has sought to strengthen the EU’s approach to functional areas in order to better promote the benefits of this approach that remain untapped. The project focused on:   

• support in addressing key development challenges;
• support in preparing for the 2021-2027 Programming Period;
• dissemination of the key lessons learned, as well as tools and approaches developed within the project to other functional areas;
• development of a toolkit that other functional areas could use to strengthen their territorial approaches;
• organisation of knowledge exchange events in order to transfer findings and workable solutions to other interested functional areas in the EU.

The project involved a total of 12 functional areas across the European Union:

Project in numbers

The main output of the project is a methodological toolkit for improving management, coordination, planning and implementation processes across administrative boundaries. It is intended for all functional areas in the EU, regardless of their maturity, form of governance or available resources. Primarily aimed at representatives of functional areas, it aims to facilitate cooperation and coordination across municipal and regional boundaries by offering tools and practical lessons from other functional areas within the EU. 

The document is structured in six main blocks: strategic focus, territorial focus, governance and administrative capacity, cross-sectoral integration, funding and finance, and monitoring and evaluation. It thus offers practical tools and lessons learned from the different functional areas, which have then been used to develop targeted recommendations in each thematic block. 

Methodological Toolkit

Methodological Toolkit: executive summary

Project outputs with a focus on the Brno Metropolitan Area

Thanks to the project, Brno, or rather the Brno Metropolitan Area, has shared its tools and best practices that can serve other functional areas as inspiration for strengthening metropolitan cooperation. These are not only examples listed in the final document mentioned above, e.g. the management and coordination structures of BMA, the traffic solutions in the Trnitá area, or data at the metropolitan level, but also selected projects that the lead project partners consider important. These include the Integrated Development Strategy of the Brno Metropolitan Area, Brno iD or the international SPIMA project. Furthermore, you can read about BMA’s approach to cooperation with universities and the joint use of data to set up metropolitan structures in the brochure Beyond Governance: Towards Partnership Building. 

The World Bank also prepared a video presenting the Brno Metropolitan Area. The aim of the video is to highlight the achievements and challenges of the Brno Metropolitan Area and at the same time to send a message to the European institutions and the national government to strengthen the metropolitan development. 

The project also included outputs that focused specifically on the Brno Metropolitan Area to strengthen metropolitan planning, cooperation and governance in this area. The main outputs include:

• Action Plan for BMA. This is divided into the challenges faced by the metropolitan area. These challenges include: strengthening metropolitan governance, improving strategic planning capacity at the metropolitan level, strengthening spatial planning capacity at the metropolitan level, and improving the approach towards ensuring sustainability. Each challenge includes specific action steps, their priority, potential barriers and outcomes. The World Bank provided its expertise in this regard, for example in the areas of institutionalisation of metropolitan cooperation or data analysis. 
• Land Suitability Analysis. This analysis identified strategically located land areas and their potential for further development in four areas: industry, logistics and warehousing; office buildings; housing; commercial and retail space. The analysis will be used to identify development areas within the Brno Metropolitan Area. 
• Study visit to the Oradea Metropolitan Area. In early 2023, we had the opportunity to visit the Oradea Metropolitan Area and learn more about their approach to metropolitan planning and management. The visit focused on the institutional and organizational framework that enables Oradea to implement metropolitan projects. Indeed, the institutional dimension of metropolitan cooperation, management and planning is essential for the development of the BMA, as this cooperation needs to be not only linked to funding from European resources. Representatives of the Oradea Metropolitan Area thus presented their achievements and projects in the fields of metropolitan mobility, attracting private investors and strengthening urban-rural relations. This inspiring visit for the whole BMA is described in more detail on the project website. 
• Technical assistance provided by the World Bank and the European Commission to BMA. This assistance responded primarily to three defined challenges in the area of metropolitan governance, linking strategic and spatial planning at the metropolitan level, or strengthening urban-rural relations. More can be found in the graphic below. 

All project outputs, including those focused on the Brno Metropolitan Area, can be found in this presentation from the final conference held at the end of May 2024. 

Important events within the project 

During the project, several important events were held, mainly aimed at exchanging knowledge between the different participants and promoting a proactive approach to tackling different issues at functional area level. Among the most important and relevant for BMA were:

• Workshop “Functional area approaches 101 – How to cooperate across municipal boundaries?“. This workshop took place as part of the European Week of Regions and Cities in October 2022. It addressed the essential role of functional areas in addressing key local challenges. Participants had the opportunity to learn more about the positive impacts and importance of a proactive approach to functional areas. The meeting thus offered guidance on overcoming challenges by sharing real-life lessons from both mature and less mature regional, metropolitan or local governments in the EU. You can read more about the workshop here. 
• Cities Forum 2023 and a workshop entitled “Functional Areas in the EU – from Cohesion Policy to Practice”. The aim of the meeting was to discuss the challenges of development across administrative boundaries and to demonstrate the positive impacts on development outcomes of cities working together within a functional region. The session covered topics such as the support to functional areas under Cohesion Policy in the programming period 2021-2027, or the lessons, challenges and experiences shared by relevant stakeholders. One of them was the Brno Metropolitan Area, which was one of the four invited functional areas. More information about this session can be found here. 
• Presentation of best practices from the project “Functional Areas in the EU” at the EUI event “Fostering the Development of Functional Urban Areas in Hungarian Cities“. During this event in Budapest, Hungary, we as BMA had the unique opportunity to present the approach to planning at metropolitan level and thus provide Hungarian functional areas with inspiration for their possible solutions to challenges at the level of these areas. You can find out more about the event here. 
• 12 online meetings to exchange knowledge on various topics. Throughout the project, online meetings were held, always focusing on a specific topic related to development at the functional area level. These meetings focused, for example, on the topics of strengthening urban-rural relations, green transformation, strengthening metropolitan governance, or increasing the competitiveness of functional areas. One of the meetings was also dedicated to functional area governance models, which was important for us because we had the opportunity to present the outputs of the MECOG-CE project that we are leading and, together with the partners of this project, to present individual partner metropolitan areas and their best practices. All meetings and their outputs are available here. 

These outputs and important events represented an opportunity for the Brno Metropolitan Area to gain not only new knowledge and experience from European functional areas, but also to share its own best practices further. We were thus part of a prestigious group of experts and selected functional areas on the topic of metropolitan cooperation and planning, and made our position visible at European level. At the same time, the project also made recommendations to the European Commission towards the future of cohesion policy based on two years of mutual cooperation. We had the opportunity to actively contribute to these recommendations, which can be found here.