Waving back: Reflections on the WaVE project and perspectives on the future of water-linked heritage

WaVE stands for Water-linked heritage Valorization by developing an Ecosystemic approach. This Interreg Europe project brought together five European locations that have in common a rich history of cultural heritage in which water plays an important role. WaVE’s main goal was to exchange knowledge and insight across those territories to promote...

Financial Instruments and Territorial Cohesion - Applied Research - Synthesis Report

The main objective of this research activity is to provide territorial analysis on the impacts of European Structural and Investment Funds’ financial instruments in the 2007-2013 programming period and where data allows in the 2014-2020 programming period. The main outcome should be evidence on what the increasing shift to using financial...

The development of strategic spatial planning in Central and Eastern Europe: between path dependence, European influence, and domestic politics

Focusing on three of the Central and Eastern European countries–Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary–the paper investigates the evolution of spatial planning systems and the introduction of strategic planning practices from the beginning of the post-communist transition in the early 1990s to the present. It sheds new light on this issue by...

A Historical Institutionalist Framework for European Spatial Planning

Sorensen invokes historical institutionalism as a theoretical framework. This paper does so revisiting the making of the European SpatialDevelopment Perspective of 1990s vintage and the subsequent Territorial Agenda of the European Union. The context is EU Cohesion policy. Firstthe paper presents the theoretical framework. Then it explains why...

'Doing more with less' or 'doing less with less'? Assessing EU cohesion policy's financial instruments for urban development

In the context of a severe economic crisis and austerity, new ideas were put forward to reform cohesion policy to enhance its effectiveness and the return on investment. Among them, financial engineering instruments, such as JESSICA, expected to offer a means to ‘do more with less’ in this difficult budgetary context. In the case of such...