Local time policies in Europe

Urban temporal policies - policies intended to coordinate working times, public and private service times, and the urban time schedules to the needs of human beings, individuals, families, communities - seem to gain ground across Europe. They stem from new time compression experiences in everyday working, leisure and family life of citizens, but particularly among women. They focus on different local policy areas - like transport, school, child- and elderly-care, security, services, urban planning, work-life balance, etc. - and tend to restructure these areas in a humane, time-aware mode. Local time policies are necessarily participative policies including stakeholders as the subjects of change. Since the early 1990s this new type of policy has spread over West Europe starting from Italy ('tempi della citta') and extending to Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, and Finland. Now, time policies are becoming more influential in central and eastern Europe as well. Recently, on 28 October 2010, the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe adopted a recommendation (Rec 295(2010)) and a resolution (Res 313 (2010)) addressed to its 47 member states favouring local time policies. In 2009, the Congress's Committee for Social Cohesion had taken up the issue. The political reporter, Clotilde Tascon-Mennetrier, and the scientific commentator, Professor Ulrich Muckenberger, submitted a proposal of recommendations to the Committee. After two extensive deliberations, supported by both reporter and commentator, the Committee unanimously adopted these recommendations on 16 March 2010 (CPL/SOC(17)2). In October 2010, after a slight redraft, the document was passed by the Congress implementing large parts of the opinion of Professor Muckenberger. Now it is up to the Committee of Ministers to deliberate the resolution and to take measures accordingly. In the following, two texts from this process are documented. When taking up the subject of local time policies, the Committee of Social Cohesion asked Professor Muckenberger to be the general commentator for Europe and to submit a general report with policy recommendations for the Council of Europe. 1 The following article basically corresponds to this report; the policy recommendations are left aside because they have been mainly integrated into both the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities' recommendation 295(2010) (see Appendix 1 below) and the Congress resolution 313 (2010) (see Appendix 2 below).