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STRASBOURG – Mayor of European cities, including Zagreb's Tomislav Tomašević, expressed their expectations from the EU institutions for the upcoming five-year period, emphasizing the financing of affordable housing and a more direct relationship with Brussels among the priorities.
Mayors of major Union cities gathered on Monday and Tuesday in Strasbourg, home of the European Parliament, for the conference “A Better Europe Starts in Cities” from which they called on EU parliamentarians and institutions to cooperate over the next five years in achieving the goals outlined in the ten-point declaration.
At the Eurocities network meeting hosted by Strasbourg Mayor Jeanne Barseghian, they asked the Union to develop a “long-term policy for cities and a new partnership” with city leaders to create a “more democratic European Union”.
In addition to demands for cooperation in creating more inclusive cities and achieving the EU's climate goals, they emphasized the policy of achieving affordable housing and, in this regard, more accessible legislation for local public investments and public services, and “directing national governments towards greater fiscal decentralization”.
Eurocities is a network of more than 200 cities with over 250,000 inhabitants, with Zagreb being a full member from Croatia. The goal of the network's work is to advocate for the interests of large urban centers in EU institutions.
“The implementation of EU policies mainly happens at the local level, in cities, and cities have not really been at the table when decisions were made about creating these policies, yet it generally falls on the city's shoulders in the end,” explains the mayor of Zagreb. (October 24, 2024.)