Speaker
Description
Introduction and Research Problem
Over the past decade, the rise of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) has shifted European mobility planning discourse from “traditional transport planning” to an interdisciplinary, integrated mobility approach oriented towards accessibility and quality of life. Through its various channels, the European Commission promotes the SUMP as a principal strategic concept and tool, and as a framework for promoting and managing sustainable mobility across Europe and beyond. Rather than focusing primarily on infrastructure provision or traffic management, SUMPs promote participation, coordination across sectors and government levels, continuous monitoring, and adaptive implementation.
Within this SUMP framework, one of the most significant changes in approach is adopted in its territorial perspective. The SUMP argues that mobility should be planned not only within existing municipal administrative boundaries but within the Functional Urban Area (FUA), recognising that everyday mobility may extend beyond set city limits through commuting and freight movements. The understanding of FUA in SUMP guidelines has developed through successive editions of the Guidelines (2013, 2019 and 2026). The 2013 Urban Mobility Package referred to it as "functioning city" or “Functional Urban Agglomeration”, considering urban cores and surrounding “travel-to-work” areas. The 2019 SUMP Guidelines adopted the FUA using the OECD–Eurostat definition based on urban cores and commuting zones. The most recent 2026 Guidelines incorporate urban, suburban, and peri-urban areas, along with freight and logistics systems, by describing the planning territory as the "functional city". This represents a wider, geographically inclusive understanding of mobility as a phenomenon within supra-urban or metropolitan territories.
While evolving its understanding of FUA, the SUMP framework leaves considerable flexibility for Member States in institutional implementation. So, the SUMP Guidelines prescribe governance functions or arrangements through various “tasks” and set the territory as FUA, but they do not prescribe how to perform them institutionally. This flexibility allows Member States to interpret and translate the SUMP Guidelines according to their existing spatial planning systems, governance structures, legal frameworks, planning instruments, and institutional practices. This leads to diverse interpretations of FUA and diverse governance arrangements of the common SUMP guidelines across Europe.
This study becomes particularly important and timely in the light of two recent European policy developments. The first is Commission Recommendation (EU) 2023/550, which urges Member States to create additional, dedicated governance structures, technical support, and coordination mechanisms in the form of National SUMP Support Programmes for SUMP implementation. The latter is Regulation (EU) 2024/1679 (TEN-T), which makes SUMPs mandatory for more than 431 TEN-T urban nodes and requires implementation by 2027. They explicitly link them to the concept of Functional Urban Area. As a result, member states must institutionalise Functional Urban Areas within existing planning systems while complying with a binding European territorial requirement.
Despite its relevance today, the literature has paid little attention to the institutionalisation of Functional Urban Areas within national-level SUMP frameworks. To address this gap, this research develops a comparative analysis of how the concept of Functional Urban Area is interpreted and institutionalised across different European planning systems.
It addresses the following research questions:
1. How do the SUMP Guidelines define the ‘Functional Urban Area’, and what explains variations in its institutional organisation across European planning systems at the national level?
2. How do different EU Member States translate and operationalise the Functional Urban Area within their national SUMP governance frameworks through institutional responsibilities, planning instruments, and coordination mechanisms?
3. How has the mandatory TEN-T Regulation impacted the understanding of the Functional Urban Areas across EU Member States?
Theoretical Framework
This research is framed at the intersection of Europeanisation processes, planning systems, and sustainable urban mobility planning. It examines how a common European planning concept, the Functional Urban Area (FUA), within the SUMP framework is translated into different national governance frameworks through Member States' planning systems.
The study of different ‘Planning systems’ helps to understand Member States’ existing territorial governance structures, planning instruments, legal frameworks, institutional arrangements, etc. This allows a better understanding of how Member States translate the FUA institutionally. Key studies on Europeanisation in Planning Processes also provide a critical framework for analysing variation between European policy prescriptions and national governance arrangements without assuming convergence across Member States.
Overall, this structure creates an analytical framework for the research. The study distinguishes between the European guidelines of the Functional Urban Area within the SUMP framework and its national institutional translation across Member States. It provides a framework for a systematic comparative analysis of how a common European territorial requirement is interpreted, institutionalised, and governed within diverse planning systems across Europe.
Methods
This research uses comparative qualitative policy analysis as its methodological approach. To investigate how the Functional Urban Area (FUA) is institutionally translated within the national Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning (SUMP) frameworks of the 27 European Union Member States, the study uses each Member State's national SUMP policy framework as the unit of analysis.
The research is organised into two analytical stages. In the first stage, the study conducts a qualitative content analysis of the evolution of SUMP policy between 2013 and 2026. The documentary corpus includes the Urban Mobility Package (2013), the SUMP Guidelines (2019 and 2026), Commission Recommendation (EU) 2023/550 on National SUMP Support Programmes, and Regulation (EU) 2024/1679 (TEN-T). In the second stage, the national SUMP frameworks of all 27 EU Member States are compared. This includes national-level SUMP legislation, guidelines or methodological manuals, SUMP Support Programmes, and official TEN-T implementation documents. This step compares how each Member State defines the SUMP planning territory, allocates institutional responsibility, and translates the European Functional Urban Area requirement within its own planning system.
To conduct this research, the following structured coding framework is applied to the documents of every Member State:
1. Territorial translation – terminology used for the planning territory (Functional Urban Area, functional city, metropolitan area, transport region, urban agglomeration, etc.) and the geographical scope assigned to SUMP.
2. Institutional Competencies – the authority responsible for preparing, coordinating or approving SUMPs within the national framework.
3. Governance arrangements – mechanisms prescribed for multilevel coordination, inter-municipal cooperation, stakeholder participation and monitoring.
4. TEN-T adaptation – changes introduced within national frameworks following Commission Recommendation (EU) 2023/550 and Regulation (EU) 2024/1679.
Expected Results
The research is expected to produce both conceptual and empirical contributions. The initial analysis of the evolution of the Functional Urban Area within the European SUMP policy will clarify how the territorial concept has evolved at the European level. The results will show a shift from a recommendation to plan beyond administrative boundaries to a mandatory governance requirement linked to TEN-T urban nodes.
One of the primary goals of this research is to produce a systematic comparative overview of how different EU Member States have institutionalised the Functional Urban Area within their national SUMP frameworks. It also aims to develop a typology of governance arrangements through which Functional Urban Areas are organised, distinguishing municipal, metropolitan, regional, and inter-municipal governance models, as well as emerging governance configurations associated with TEN-T implementation.
Lastly, the findings are expected to pave the way for further comparative SUMP governance analysis of EU Member States. This would also contribute to the academic debate on the Europeanisation of territorial governance and the interdependent evolution of spatial planning systems by offering policy-relevant insights for Member States currently adapting their SUMP frameworks to new European requirements.
Key Words: Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP), Functional Urban Area (FUA), European Union, Territorial Governance, Mobility Planning.
References
Cotella, G. and Janin Rivolin, U. (2019) The Europeanisation of territorial governance and spatial planning: A tool for analysis. Luxembourg: ESPON EGTC.
European Commission (2013) Together towards competitive and resource-efficient urban mobility. Communication from the Commission, COM(2013) 913 final. Brussels: European Commission.
European Commission (2023) Commission Recommendation (EU) 2023/550 of 8 March 2023 on National Support Programmes for Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning. Official Journal of the European Union, L73, pp. 23–43.
European Union (2024) Regulation (EU) 2024/1679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 on Union guidelines for the development of the trans-European transport network (TEN-T)—Official Journal of the European Union.
May, A., Boehler-Baedeker, S., Delgado, L., Durlin, T., Enache, M. and van der Pas, J.-W. (2017) 'Appropriate national policy frameworks for Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans', European Transport Research Review, 9(7).
Rupprecht Consult (ed.) (2019) Guidelines for Developing and Implementing a Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan. 2nd ed. Cologne: Rupprecht Consult – Forschung & Beratung GmbH.