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.