Considering the increasing role of cities throughout the world and in Europe, the European Union regulations on cohesion policy that are binding in the 2014–2020 programme period have foreseen the need to introduce a separate intervention dedicated to cities and their functional areas. However, the implementation of these solutions did not come without certain problems. They referred both to the process of institutionalising co-operation and to the realisation of projects. Also in Poland, Integrated Territorial Investments have not gone beyond co-operation for the absorption of EU funding so far, which demonstrates doubtlessly that their potential still remains unexploited. Thus, a discussion on both the positive and negative aspects of the implementation of ITIs is necessary. Poland, as the largest beneficiary of the Cohesion Policy, has a wide experience, which might provide valuable information on that matter. The aim of the paper is to present these experiences and to provide conclusions for the regional policy.
Today’s cities tend to “pour out” beyond their administrative boundaries. This phenomenon is related to the settlement of people “from the city” in neighboring municipalities, or taking up jobs in cities by people living in neighboring municipalities. This has been recognized in the European Union, which has introduced appropriate legal instruments for cohesion policy. Integrated Territorial Investments were introduced to the EU cohesion policy for the fi rst time in the 2014-2020 fi nancial perspective. Their goal was to intensify cooperation between cities and their functional areas. Unfortunately, the emerging information about diffi culties in implementing ITIs often become the basis for considering this idea ineff ective. The purpose of the work is qualitative and quantitative verifi cation of the operation of ITU based on selected data, so that it is possible to answer the question about the validity of the existence of this instrument.