Creating partnerships to respond to economic decline in cities has become a popular way of implementing urban policies across Europe and has emerged ‘as one of the homogenising concepts within the EU, supporting the notion of European integration by emphasising the possibilities for collaboration between a number of different stakeholders with potentially competing or conflicting interests’ (Benington and Geddes, 2001: 2). The dialogue between governments to implement the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) adopted in 1999 has led to an increased cross-national policy mobility of approaches and experiences. A number of policy circuits through which ‘policy knowledge and policy models move from city to city’ (McCann, 2008: 2) as well as from country to country can be noted, for example, through:

• • The inception of an ‘Urban Decline Study Group’ in 1983 by the European Commission for Regional Policy (Cheshire et al, 1986; Kunzmann, 1989);

• • The series of reports connected to the European Commission's policy on regional development and planning framework ‘Europe 2000+’ (Boland, 1996);

• • The emergence of European City Networks (Benington and Harvey, 1998), such as EUROCITIES, with its former thematic exchange focus on ‘Quartiers en Crise’ (Le Galès, 2002), or the URBAN Network (Huttenloher, 2005); and

• • A number of European memoranda between national governments, such as the Lille Programme (2000), the Rotterdam Urban Acquis (2004) and the Bristol Accord (2005).

The Leipzig Charter on Sustainable Cities adopted under the German EU Council Presidency in 2007 marked the most recent document in this series and postulated that:

Whereas urban policies are usually considered to have very broad conceptual umbrellas for all public-sector interventions in cities, Area-Based Initiatives (ABIs), as area-targeted policies, offer much clearer characteristics.