European institutions in Strasbourg

[1] The European Quarter is spread over an area covering the districts of Wacken, Orangerie and Robertsau in the north-west of the city and comprising the intersection of the River Ill and the Marne-Rhine Canal.

[4] November 2007 saw the extension of the Strasbourg tramway into the European Quarter, with the inauguration by European Parliament president Hans-Gert Pöttering, CoE Secretary general Terry Davis and Eurocorps Lieutenant General Pedro Pitarch of the Parlement européen, Droits de l'homme and Robertsau Boecklin tram stations.

Set up in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, it is the oldest international organisation in the world but has only been based in Strasbourg since 1920 (headquarters located in the Palais du Rhin).

[9] One of the main impulses of making Strasbourg into the seat of numerous European institutions came from British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, one of whose closest advisors had a daughter who had studied in the city.

[10] While Bevin publicly acknowledged that the multi-cultural, multi-confessionnal aspect of the city as well as its geographic situation in the heart of (western) Europe were the criteria on which it was chosen, he privately gave a completely different reason: "Strasbourg?

The Agora building has been voted "best international business center real estate project of 2007" (on 13 March 2008 at MIPIM 2008)[12] and marked the provisional end of new building by the Council of Europe (Agora was officially inaugurated on 17 April 2008 by French minister for Foreign Affairs Bernard Kouchner).

It is connected by a bridge to its older office buildings, Pierre Pflimlin, Winston Churchill and Salvador de Madariaga, which are spread out in a broad half circle around the Palace of Europe.

[18] The École nationale d'administration, founded in 1945 in Paris, was moved to Strasbourg by decree in 1991 and permanently established there in 2005 (although the headquarters had been transferred from the start, the students had to spend half of their annual curricula in either city until that date).

This school was founded in 1953 and was then called Centre universitaire des hautes études européennes (University Center for higher European Studies).

"[26] The association was created on the basis of work conducted since 1994 by the Council of Europe within the framework of the Program of European Artistic Exchanges.

In 2005, the urban area of Greater Strasbourg formed a small political community (known as the Strasbourg-Ortenau Eurodistrict) consisting of some common administration with its neighbouring German Ortenau district in Baden-Württemberg on the opposite side of the Rhine.