Two former rival cities in Sweden, Malmö and Lund, have created a permanent platform for cooperation and integrated urban development to strengthen the attractiveness and competitiveness of the region as a whole.
- 25 October 2012
Malmö and Lund form a metropolitan area of more than 400 000 people in the Skåne region of southwest Sweden. The area is part of the cross-border Øresund region, with Copenhagen in Denmark, and with a population of more than 3.8 million is the largest and most densely populated part of Scandinavia.
The adjacent cities have traditionally competed against each other but today face many common issues of strategic importance to the future development of the city region.
More competitive cities
In 2011, the two cities engaged in a joint sustainable urban development project, made possible through the support of the European Regional Development Fund. The aim of the 10 month project was to formulate a common policy for strengthening the attractiveness and competitiveness of the city-region and set in train concrete actions to achieve this.
Some 24 high level politicians - including the Mayors - and 42 civil servants participated in the project from the City of Malmö and the City of Lund. Through this high-level partnership a joint vision has been developed along with a growth strategy and an action plan, based on the challenges identified in the urban region relating to sustainable development.
The agreed objective was to make the cities stronger and more competitive, with the aim of becoming an engine for regional growth. Four growth areas for integrated urban development were prioritised: spatial planning and infrastructure; business and commercial development; city branding and event management; education and labour market issues.
Within each area, a number of fields of intervention have been identified, as well as concrete tasks, activities and projects. In this process it has been essential to learn from the experience of other cities and city-regions in Europe in order to formulate a policy based on best practice.
For each of the four growth areas, a steering committee was set up with representatives from both municipalities under the supervision of the cities’ Chief Executive Officers.
Strategies for the future
A significant outcome of the project is that conditions have been created for interaction between the cities on long-term urban sustainable development issues of a strategic nature.
For the first time a joint broad political platform for cooperation between the two cities and their Chief Executive Boards have been created and new relations have been established between elected representatives in both cities, as well as between a range of officials from the departments in each city concerned.
Strategies have for example been developed within the fields of infrastructure, public transport, city planning, sustainable development, mobility management, triple helix (academia-business-public sector collaboration), public-private partnerships, city branding, event-planning and labour market policy. Behind these strategies there is a determined direction for future cooperation, and a clear political mandate on the strategies within each growth area.
The project will be followed by an implementation phase, with a wide range of joint activities and formation of different cooperation projects within the strategies of the four prioritised urban growth areas.
As an indication of the success and the sustainability of the project and its innovative ways of conducting work, the two cities decided to retain the four Steering Committees after the ERDF funded phase of the project was completed at the end of 2011, and the cooperation activities are being integrated into the regular responsibilities of the municipalities.
The implementation of the strategies will have a sustainable long-term effect on growth and employment in Skåne and the Øresund region, and the cities are now also looking at other areas of cooperation and involving other organisations within the metropolitan area, as well as in the surrounding municipalities.
MalmöLund has been established as a ‘new’ metropolitan region. The vision, strategy and action plan developed through the project will provide a benchmark for local urban actions and municipal cooperation for many years to come.