Socio-spatial segregation has been increasing in European cities as a result of major long-term structural processes such as a rolling back of state interventions, changing social housing policies and failures in urban planning regulations. This has been aggravated by the 2008-2009 global financial crisis (GFC) and ensuing austerity measures. This paper frames EU urban policies in relation to socio-spatial segregation and seeks to shed light on the limits and advantages of past EU urban policy with a view toward contributing to the current debate about the new instruments proposed in the Cohesion Policy 2014-2020, Community Led Local Development (CLLD) and Integrated Territorial Investments (ITI) in particular. Findings point to a number of underlying tensions that the new instruments need to address to be successful, namely, political tensions between agendas of actors at different administrative levels, semantic ambiguities in the use of key terms, and an under-developed evidence base to support policy. The article concludes by proposing a set of directions for further research in this field.