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By AITOR HERNÁNDEZ-MORALES
With GIOVANNA COI
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Happy Thursday, city lovers!
A new survey of the bloc’s mayors reveals local leaders consider access to affordable homes among their top priorities; we dig into the figures below.
Further down, we explore another top mayoral priority — climate resilience — by looking at how aging infrastructure is resulting in the loss of billions of gallons of ever scarcer water in Europe’s cities.
METRO BRIEFING
IT’S THE HOUSING CRISIS, STUPID: Just three years ago, housing barely made the list of top 10 priorities for Europe’s mayors in the Eurocities network’s annual survey. This year, however, facilitating access to affordable homes comes in second place, underscoring the impact the crisis is having across the bloc. Indeed, one in every six of the 86 mayors who took part in the latest Eurocities Pulse: Mayors Survey says it is a major concern.
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While the surveyed leaders accept that housing is not, officially, an EU competence, they still want Brussels to do its part in addressing the crisis. Among their demands is the revision of competition and state aid rules, so that more public cash can be allocated for building social and affordable housing; more EU regulations to rein in short-term rentals, which shrink available housing stock; and new legislation to promote energy-efficient renovations, combining the response to the housing and climate crises.
Climate concerns: The only issue the polled mayors feel is a higher priority than affordable housing is climate action. Addressing the threat posed by natural disasters, rising sea levels and extreme heat is again the top concern for the third year in a row.
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Improving social inclusion and equity is third on the list for local leaders, who also count better urban planning and increased economic attractiveness as top priorities for their cities. Curiously, though, they appear less concerned about crime than they were one year ago.
No one likes the PM: One of the survey’s most striking revelations is about trust in government: While the mayors who participated in the poll have faith in their counterparts at the regional and EU level, less than half express confidence in their national authorities. The distrust likely has to do with their perceived loss of municipal autonomy — a result of the increased centralization in many EU countries — and frustration with politicians in the capital who they view as out of touch with locals.
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While Brussels officials may be geographically distant, they are seen as trusted partners by mayors who appreciate their efforts to engage with city authorities and provide EU funding for local projects. Nearly three-quarters of the municipal leaders express optimism about the EU’s future, highlighting their perception of the bloc as a force for urban progress, and their role as advocates for the European project. Read our story here.
CITY HIGHLIGHTS
FASCISMO NUNCA MAIS? Portugal’s far-right Chega party was the big winner in last month’s snap national election. Although the center-right Democratic Alliance is set to remain in power, the ultranationalist group is now the second-largest in the country’s parliament and could make major advances in this fall’s nationwide local elections.
Municipal might: As it is rare for an incumbent mayor to lose an election in Portugal, Chega — the most-voted party in 60 cities in the legislative election — likely won’t enjoy quite the same level of success in the fall. However, it could easily conquer city halls in the 21 municipalities where term limits prevent the current mayor from running for reelection.
The southern cities of Olhão and Portimão are the most likely to end up with Chega-affiliated mayors, and the group is expected to take over Sintra — the country’s second most populated municipality. It may also end up controlling left-leaning locations like Montijo, Vila Franca de Xira and Alenquer, which have been governed by either the Socialist or Communist parties since the 1974 Carnation Revolution.
Steady growth: In a mere six years,Chega has gone from having just one lawmaker in the parliament to becoming the country’s second-largest political force.
Popular anger over low salaries, lackluster public services and the housing crisis — fueled by the perception that mainstream parties are failing to tackle these issues — is driving the group’s growth. And while Portugal’s political establishment has so far stayed true to the cordón sanitaire that keeps Chega out of government, the party will be impossible to ignore if it controls such a substantial number of key cities.
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The Nazi regime attempted to use the Berlin Olympics to promote racial supremacy. | Public Domain via Wikimedia |
OLYMPIC RE-DO? A century after the Nazis used the 1936 Olympics as a propaganda showcase for their totalitarian regime, Berlin wants to host the 2036 games and highlight just how much the German capital has changed. “No longer do we stand for exclusion and hate, but we instead are a colorful, diverse metropolis which is open to the world,” said Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner. Other candidate cities include Munich — which hosted in 1972 — Istanbul, Santiago de Chile and the new Indonesian capital of Nusantara.
NEW TOURISM CZAR: The United Arab Emirate’s Shaikha Al Nowais will be the first woman and youngest person to head the Madrid-based United Nations World Tourism Organization, which selected her as its next secretary-general on Friday. Read our interview with her here.
PRESIDENTIAL UPSET: Karol Nawrocki, the candidate for Poland’s conservative Law and Justice party, narrowly beat progressive Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski in the second round of the country’s presidential election on Sunday. The win undermines Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s efforts to restore liberal democracy. More here.
IS THERE WALTZ ON MARS? In 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe took off carrying a golden record meant to showcase the richness of Earth’s music. However, it was inexplicably missing the “Blue Danube Waltz” from the iconic space station docking scene in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The Austrian capital’s tourism authority, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the European Space Agency corrected the cosmic error this weekend, with an intergalactic performance beamed to the furthest reaches of the universe, delighting the Johann Strauss Jr. fans among the stars.
URBAN TRENDS
LEAKING CITIES: From the humblest well of a remote village to the sprawling pipe networks in major metropolitan areas, water management is crucial to any human settlement. While Europe boasts impressive historic infrastructure like Rome’s Aqua Virgo aqueduct and Istanbul’s Basilica cistern, which remain partially functional today, the aging nature of most cities’ water networks is becoming a real problem.
According to a leaked draft of the European Commission’s upcoming Water Resilience Strategy, obtained by POLITICO, aging systems are leading to a loss of 8 to 57 percent of the public water supply. As the bloc’s cities face the challenge of global warming and an ever-greater demand for water, this is a major concern.
Drought danger: For example, the water network in Potenza, Italy isn’t among the country’s oldest — most of it dates back to the 1950s — but more than two-thirds of the water it carries leaks away each year. That inefficiency became impossible to ignore last year, when the severe drought in the surrounding Basilicata region drastically reduced water levels in the local reservoir and forced authorities to adopt severe restrictions.
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“This infrastructure has reached, and in some cases exceeded, its life span,” said Vera Corbelli, secretary general of the Southern Apennine District Basin Authority. But the local government doesn’t have the money to replace the existing network, and is looking to Brussels for help.
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Think outside the pipe: Similar issues have been noted in Bulgarian municipalities like Shumen, where 84 percent of the drinking water is going to waste. Public Works Minister Ivan Ivanov is also calling for EU funds to “be deployed quickly for investments aimed to reduce leakages by using digital tools, smart metering, and water efficiency enhancing technologies.”
But NGOs want the EU cash to be used for nature-based solutions like those in the Flemish Blue Deal, which seeks to undo bad urban planning decisions — among them, the artificially straightened river beds that shoo precious fresh water out to sea faster. Leonie and Gio have more on this in the POLITICO Pro Sustainability report.
STATS & THE CITY
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STREET SMARTS
We’re back with our weekly cities-related trivia challenge! Frans Elinder of Stockholm was the quickest to identify Bucharest as the modern European capital where the bust of a former ruler with a penchant for impaling presides over the ruins of an ancient princely court.
The monarch in question is, of course, Vlad Țepeș, or Drăculea, who earned the epithet “the impaler” from his habit of executing Transylvanian peasants, Saxon merchants and Ottoman envoys with spikes. As part of his effort to protect Wallachia from the Turks, Vlad built a fortified, princely residence near the Dâmbovița River in the 15th century — a settlement that would become modern-day Bucharest.
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Despite his reputation abroad, Vlad Drăculea is considered a national hero in Romania. | Creative Commons via Wikimedia |
During his lifetime, Vlad’s Curtea Veche, or Old Court, was known as a place of imposing splendor. And today, its ruins are presided over by a bronze bust of the man who terrified his enemies — and, centuries later, inspired Bram Stoker to create his Gothic vampire, Dracula.
This week’s challenge: Once a cosmopolitan harbor at the edge of the Iron Curtain, this post-war “free territory” has since become a drowsy provincial city with grandiose buildings and a giant crane that remind visitors of its imperial and industrial past. The first reader to identify it — preferably without using a search engine — gets a shout-out in next week’s newsletter.
LOCAL LIBRARY
— Echoing ideas from the previous edition of Living Cities, the Economist cites Nicușor Dan’s presidential victory in Romania as proof that Europe’s mayors are “the unsung moderating force of the continent’s politics.”
— Venice’s canals may be notoriously polluted — Katherine Hepburn suffered from life-long conjunctivitis after taking a dip in 1955 — but this year’s Architecture Biennale is offering visitors espressos made with water from the lagoon, My Modern Met reports.
— The use of luxury flats and pop-up shops to displace lower-income communities is explored in Anna Minton’s op-ed for the Guardian, revealing “placemaking” to be just another pseudonym for aggressive gentrification.
THANKS TO: Leonie Cater,my editor Leyla Aksu and producer Giulia Poloni.
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POLITICO’s Global Policy Lab is a collaborative journalism project seeking solutions to challenges faced by modern societies in an age of rapid change. Over the coming months we will host a conversation on how to make cities more livable and sustainable.