Elementos de una política urbana europea. Experiencias de gestión del desarrollo urbano en Alemania y España

With the Leipzig Charter of Sustainable European Cities (2007), the construction of an Urban Policy Europe gains new momentum. The peculiarity of this process lies in its factual nature, as a result of the progressive consolidation of an urban heritage (acquis urban), understood as the set of values and empirical knowledge derived from the management of urban development processes. The paper addresses the question of to what extent European cities converge in the way they build and implement their urban development projects. The cases of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and Konstanz (Germany) have been selected to be studied. The results evidence a convergence in terms of discourse and type of strategic processes put in place in both cities. However, both cases present differences in their design and implementation derived from their political culture and the local institutional context.