Integrated Territorial Investments (ITI) is a territorial tool of the European Commission, which aims to address selected metropolitan issues that require an integrated approach. This is to be understood both as the concentration of activities and the concentration of resources with existing agreement among partners in the territory in order to make sure that the resulting effect of the supported interventions is as large as possible. The ITI is not just another operational programme; it is a tool for the territory of the Brno Metropolitan Area. It had a reserved allocation in selected specific objectives of the five ESIF operational programmes in 2014-2020 EU programming period. During this period, about 120 projects were co-funded in the Brno Metropolitan Area. The ITI tool in BMA continues in the 2021-2027 EU programming period and more projects await us.
Integration, as we understand it in the Brno Metropolitan Area, is envisaged in these aspects:
- territorial integration, where projects and activities will be implemented with a trans-local (agglomeration-wide) impact in the defined territory of the Brno Metropolitan Area;
- thematic integration, in which activities related to the subject matter, which are usually carried out separately also as a result of the fragmentation of resources, will be implemented in a coordinated manner;
- financial integration, where funding resources will be jointly provided from different specific objectives of a single operational programme, or from several different operational programmes; and
- organisational integration, meaning mutual consensus and joint coordinated procedure of individual entities in the territory based on the principle of partnership.
As opposed to individual projects, an integrated project must meet more demanding evaluation criteria and pass successfully through an approval process (discussions at the Working Group and the ITI Steering Committee), however, on the other hand it will compete for support only with projects of similar nature from the territory of the Brno Metropolitan Area, which will be actively coordinated for the purpose of the fulfilment of the vision of the territory.
