The Process Architecture of EU Territorial Cohesion Policy

When preparing the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), Member States were supported by the European Commission but denied the EU a competence in the matter. Currently, the Treaty of Lisbon identifies territorial cohesion as a competence shared between the Union and the Member States. This paper is about the process architecture of...

The Portugese, Slovenian and French presidencies 2007-2008: A sea change in European spatial planning?

This paper gives an account of the successive presidencies of Portugal, Slovenia and France. It asks whether European spatial planning is undergoing a sea change: a transformation caused by the unintentional cumulative impact of pragmatic organisational changes. The paper also invokes the notion of a ‘two-level game’ to characterise the...

Time: The 4th dimension. Spatial data - the final frontier: to boldly go into 3, 4 or more dimensions

Making Sense of the ‘Territorial Agenda of the European Union’

European planning has gone through a number of metamorphoses from the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) to an, albeit tentative, policy to achieve territorial cohesion. The first section of this paper discusses developments since the turn of the century. The second section focuses on the renewed Member State initiative to produce...

Closing the Gap: Territorial Cohesion through Polycentric Development

This article discusses and analyses national polycentric development policies aiming at cohesion. Due to its insertion in the 1999 European Spatial Development Perspective ‘polycentricity’ has become an important concept in discussions on Europe’s territorial and economic development. Its content remains however rather unclear. This paper...

The European Spatial Development Perspective Shaping the Agenda

The fact that they have created the European Union (EU) notwithstanding, Member States are suspicious of, and even hostile to it. This creates a dynamic that is often puzzling, and this is also true for spatial planning. The latter is not a competence of the European Community, but there is the inter-governmental European Spatial Development...