Territory: An Unknown Quantity in Debates on Territorial Cohesion

There are complaints about territorial cohesion being a vague concept, but in relevant debates territory, too, figures as an unknown quantity. Thus, is it the fixed property of any state, region or local administrative unit, or is it a malleable social construct; rather than being filled with bounded territories, does space overall contain a...

Cohesion Policy Contributing to Territorial Cohesion: Future Scenarios

The Barca Report advocates for developmental policies to be ‘place-based’: integrated as far as they affect ‘places’. The debate on territorial cohesion is equally concerned with integrating relevant policies and actions. This requires well-established democratic institutions and adequate responses to the demands of technical systems and of...

Cohesion policy contributing to territorial cohesion: Scenarios

This paper first discusses the present and uncertain future of EU Cohesion policy. The Barca Report argues for all developmental policies, including EU Cohesion policy, to be place-based. This makes for territorial cohesion becoming an important element in the equation. Territory is after all the arena in which households and businesses and...

Territorial cohesion post - 2013: To whomsoever it may concern

Conceived as a motion for resolution, the paper considers territorial cohesion now being on the statute book, the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion, Barca making the case for integrated, place-based strategies, the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region and the future of Cohesion policy. The recommendations reaffirm that ‘geography matters’,...

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...

European spatial planning: Past, present, future

Three stages have been identified in the development of the EU: the launch era; the doldrums era and the renaissance/boom era. Presently though, the EU is in a crisis. These stages serve as a framework for discussing the past, present and future for European spatial planning. Thus, during the launch era there were unsuccessful attempts to make...

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...

Reinventing spatial planning in a borderless Europe: Emergent themes

This paper is a follow-up to the Chicago Round Table ‘Emergent Research Themes on European Territorial Governance’ in 2008 questioning the view of EU territory as the sum of mutually exclusive territories under nation-state control and pointing out the existence of overlapping jurisdictions. Themes were: (1) the relationship between the EU and...

Cohesion, coherence, cooperation: EU policy beyond hard territoriality

Where is the local in local development

Territorial cohesion under the looking glass: Synthesis paper about the history of the concept and policy background to territorial cohesion

Concepts change depending on who uses them. First discussed by the Assembly of European Regions, Barnier invoked territorial cohesion in lieu of spatial planning for which Member States denied the Community a proper role. This against the backdrop of a European construct that casts Member States represented on the Council and the Commission into...

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...

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...