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...

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...

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...