Urban policy has historically been one of the biggest deficits within the construction of Europe. The initial slogans of a Europe without borders, and the Europe of cities and citizens was achieved in the first case and only partially in the latter: although there were verified advances in the rights of citizens, and the concept of European citizenship linked to the Europe without borders, the same did not happen in relation to the Europe of cities, especially in what concerns urban policies that allowed a consistent and balanced development of European big cities. The asymmetry between big and medium-sized cities, the different demographic and territorial scales, and the positive concept, more theoretical than real, of polycentrism, were not assembled in a common concept of urban policies until recent times, with the elaboration of the European Urban Agenda, which tries to provide the European Union with a coherent concept that orientates and promotes actions in this field. Over the years, there have been manifold instruments to finance urban regeneration, almost all of them with remarkable success, but there has not been, until now, a coherent political strategy that inspired and harmonized the access and the management of these funds. It is no coincidence that even today, there is not a specific office in the European Commission for the urban agenda, or for matters directly related to cities, and these policies get diluted in different commissioners. Some instruments for urban policies started to come up with Delors, first with urban pilot projects (UPP), funded on the basis of article 10 of the ERDF Regulation of the time, and later with the popular and successful URBAN initiative, which transformed our cities, especially their historic quarters, since from the very beginning in the Iberian Peninsula URBAN was more identified with the deteriorated neighbourhoods of historic quarters than with the deteriorated neighbourhoods in the outskirts. Successful national programmes emerged later on, such as the POLIS programme in Portugal; however, being limited to the national sphere, they did not have an European continuity or dimension, and they just travelled to other countries through the exchange of good practices. In Spain, the FEMP bolstered programmes related to urban infrastructures, mainly about sanitation, like the POL or the POMAL. These did not developed an urban strategy; they financed necessary works (sanitation, residual water treatment stations, etc), but without a political concept that developed it, making the success of the programme dependent on the level of intervention of each council. Afterwards came the EDUSI in Spain, with an excellent level of definition on paper, but a complex and difficult level of implementation that is jeopardising its effectiveness and development. All this provides a first picture of the situation with a very positive aspect, the involvement of the EU in the urban policy through funds for regeneration and modernization of services and neighbourhoods within cities, and a very negative aspect: the lack of a harmonizing and inspiring policy of intervention in European cities. There are not objective reasons for this to happen, but the best explanation points to a management vision, and not a political one, about the urban aspect in Brussels, which results in absurd paradoxes like the fact that such relevant aspects for cities like mobility and waste management are absent from urban policies. Even in member states like Spain, urban policy and cohesion are divergent and administered by different departments, and their coordination depends on the good will of politicians, or on the ability of the public officials in each ministry. In this way, urban policy is found within the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, and cohesion is in the Ministry of Treasury. In this sense, it is necessary to understand one of the main differences between Spain and Portugal that jeopardised the implementation of European policies in Spain. Portugal has a very coherent structure where the Ministry of Planning programmes the attribution of European funds, and the Agency for Development and Cohesion manages all European funds in Portugal (except for those related with Agriculture and Fisheries, which have their respective stewardships). However, Spain does not have a planification department for these funds, a former claim that the Eixo Atlántico made to the national government; and the management of funds, especially those with the greatest impact on urban policy, ERDF and the Social Fund, is divided between the Ministry of Treasury, which manages the ERDF, and which managed before the Cohesion Fund when Spain had access to it, and the Ministry of Labour, which has historically managed the European Social Fund. All this adds up to a complementary but different situation that helps to understand this complex picture: the European Union has no formal competences in Urban Policy. It gets involved in it at the behest of governments, but let us not delude ourselves: governments do not usually equip the European Commission with competences; it is not without reason that they invented the principle of subsidiarity. Then, what are governments demanding from the European Union in terms of urban policy? Obviously matters related to funding. In this way, a clear asymmetry is produced, on the one side, between funding and the lack of a community strategy, and, on the other side, between countries like Portugal where funds respond to a strategy, and countries like Spain where funds are distributed without a previous scheme, depending on the needs of each one and especially on the political weight of each government. This is also an existing reality in Portugal, although to a lesser extent, especially when there are government disruptions in the same framework of community support. However, in this arduous path full of difficulties like the one we are crossing, there were some very positive facts that determine the journey towards the creation of a European urban policy, which started to take shape with the approval of an European Urban Agenda. The most important fact and the best point of reference was the adoption of the Leipzig Charter about sustainable cities, which took place in this German city in 2007. This charter is the first solid document to draw a modern urban policy, and it established the principles of sustainability, comprehensiveness and citizen participation as the basis for the urban development of the future. With this, it was sought an approach focused on the design of urban solutions that surrounded both the different government levels -the so-called vertical integration and multi-level dialogue- and the social and economic agents outside the institutions -the so-called horizontal integration and participation. The subsequent revisions, and other documents, completed a conceptual body that, promoted by the German presidency in 2007, will be culminated by a revision process from July onwards during the German presidency in 2020. This is why, from our point of view, it will be one of the greatest ideas for the post-pandemic European reconstruction, and which can be bolstered by the Portuguese presidency in January 2021, lead by a Prime Minister who has experience as the Lisbon mayor, and as such, is a prominent connoisseur of the most urgent needs for local governments. For all this, we want to vindicate what has been one of our historical working axes, together with cooperation, along the 28 years of the Eixo Atlántico: urban policy. We are doing so through this publication that, together with referential documents that establish the conceptual framework of the European urban policy, is joined by a group of reflections by experts from Spain and Portugal, both from the Euroregion and from Lisbon and Madrid, which aims at strengthening the instruments for a debate in which all cities and mayors should get involved. The benignity of the process and the debate should not abstract ourselves from a series of problems hidden between its lines, and about which we should set our position because this means the defence and safeguarding of the interests of our cities, and an essential contribution to promote a quality debate, representative within the Union. In this sense, this document should not be just a commemoration of the Leipzig Charter, but rather the departure point to define what should be a new model of collaboration between administrations, based on co-responsibility and the clear distribution of competences, respecting the role of cities. One of the big questions raised by the diversity in the typology of European cities and the asymmetry that this implies is that the big metropolises, generating a bigger and more complex number of problems than medium-sized cities (and, consequently, a bigger urgency in their resolution), determined urban policy. This meant confusing the concept of the urban with the concept of big metropolises, establishing a dependency between them that was inadequate in form and exclusionary in substance. Cities are the space where contradictions appear, creating the so-called social pathologies. For example, problematic housing estates, consequence of a development that was not always conscious in the second half of the last century, related to populational rushes that abandoned rural areas to seek a better future in the cities, and the arrival of migrants to the most developed areas, coming in some cases from the inland and rural areas of the less developed countries in the Union, and, from the 70s onwards, from África, first due to the decolonization and war conflicts (Algeria in France, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique in Portugal, Equatorial Guinea in Spain, and the remains of the British Empire in the United Kingdom), and later due to hardship and war conflicts especially in Africa and some areas in Asia, which provoked an uncontrolled migration of people with cultures and religions that were not just different, but also very distant from the main cultural and religious traits in Europe. This provoked not just an overpopulation in big capital cities like London, Paris or Madrid, but also the creation of ghettos with limited living conditions and which, especially in the case of France, represented a wake-up call for the whole EU when they started to appear in a more visible way in the 90s. In fact, this can be compared with the scarce conflicts provoked by the Latin-American migration in Spain and Portugal at the beginning of the 21st century, due to economic reasons. This migration, on the one hand, affected the growth of cities, and on the other hand did not provoke the same kind of conflicts that happened, for example, in France. This was not just due to cultural and religious affinities, but also to the fact that there were incipient elements of a urban policy that helped to manage these situations. Social pathologies, especially the most serious ones (unemployment, drug addiction and alcoholism, gender and intrafamily violence, and crime), are situations that undermine cohabitation and deteriorate the urban structure to a large extent. Due to this, they are the ones that require a large amount of mitigating resources, instead of attributing them to medium-sized cities that aim for a harmonic and sustainable urbanism, but which at the same time have the capacities to create a preventive and limiting effect over these social pathologies. In this sense, and to conclude this introduction, we believe that there are two fundamental contributions that must be taken into account. The first is the need to develop, as a high priority, a coherent and coordinated territory planning among the three administration levels involved in it: the national government, the autonomous governments and the councils in Spain, and the national government and the councils in Portugal. These levels join in Portugal the Coordination Commissions in its new configuration, more representative of the territory and less governmental, although the territory planning in Portugal has historically had a more coherent development. The existence of ‘freguesias’ (parishes) with juridical character and of Intermunicipal Communities (CIMs) prevented one of the problems of the Galician inland: the impossibility that county-led places with less than 20,000 inhabitants, but which provide services to more than 50,000, compete for urban-related European funds due to the fact that the structure of counties does not have, at least in Galicia, legal personality, and this makes it impossible to meet the requirements stipulated by Brussels to access urban funds. We consider that the solution to this problem can progress defining and developing an urban policy with a larger territorial basis. This, on the other hand, implies a larger participation of social, economic and institutional agents of the territory. In this sense we believe it is necessary and essential to involve the volunteering associations of the cities, like the Eixo Atlántico, which can compensate one of the biggest deficits of a governance that is coherent on the paper, but not as efficient in practice. We are talking about the participation of the FEMP in the committees of programmation and accompaniment of both policies and funds which happen at a European level. We are definitely not calling into question this participation, but it should be complemented with the participation of the federations of municipalities and regional provinces, as well as the volunteering associations of municipalities, since the reality of Galicia is not just different from that of Catalonia or Andalucia, but also has a very specific circumstance, which is the relation with Portugal: this creates a cross-border urban system with 7 million inhabitants which constitutes in its own right the third one in the Iberian Peninsula, behind Madrid and Barcelona, and ahead of Lisbon. This is something that the FEMP alone can not provide, and, given that there is not a regional structure of municipalities in Portugal, the FEGAMP can just handle a partial view of it. This is why we consider it necessary to create a multi-level participation in this area, where no one is irrelevant and everyone is needed.