Whether spatial planning systems are equipped to cope with contemporary regional and urban challenges is strongly dependent on their capacity to promote integration between policy sectors, to respond adaptively to changing societal and political conditions, and to involve and engage citizens in decision-making processes. This paper examines and compares how these capacities have evolved in European countries since the start of the 21st century. The findings indicate that many countries have made reforms to spatial planning with significant implications for their capacity to promote integrated, adaptive and collective planning decisions.

EU Cohesion Policy has arguably the most tangible impact on the citizens’ environment and livelihoods and can potentially boost their attachment to the European project. Beyond the cross-national transactionalist hypothesis, Cohesion Policy spending has a local impact and may affect the lives of citizens who do not benefit directly from cross-national transactions, like education, work, investment and travel in other European countries. One could thus expect that Cohesion Policy has a significant positive impact on the ways in which citizens perceive the EU. But what happens when a country is a net contributor to the EU’s budget receiving a relatively small amount of Cohesion Policy funding, the bulk of it being invested in poorer European territories? Building on the cases of two Dutch regions–Flevoland and Limburg–this paper investigates the extent to which the citizens are aware of Cohesion Policy interventions and how the features of communication on and implementation of Cohesion Policy affect this awareness.

Ciudad Guayana was born as an industrial new town in the early 1960s, as an ambitious national effort to stimulate the regional development of Venezuela. Its planning was the fruit of a unique partnership between the Venezuelan development agency (CVG) and the Joint Center for Urban Studies from Harvard University and the MIT. Looking for answers to the rapid urbanization issues, the academic planners were willing to test the latest planning and design approaches on the field, implementing several experimental projects. Ciudad Guayana became a useful urban laboratory that provided important urban lessons. Based on literature research, archival research at MIT and Harvard, and interviews with planners working on both teams, this paper presents how the two teams approached, debated and clashed about four significant challenges of building the new town. Ciudad Guayana provided important urban lessons, useful for similar kind of new towns and satellite cities, as the ones currently emerging in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

This paper reviews the social and professional embeddedness of planning, describes its legal framework, and reviews territorial governance and everyday planning transactions. The findings suggest that the social embeddedness of planning is constrained by Peru’s persistent inequality challenges. Its planning approach has hardly evolved from modernist models centred in zoning and building codes. Its fragmented and profuse legal framework constitutes a black box for planners and citizens, while territorial governance is subject to the state’s low interest and capacity to plan, manage and steer spatial development. These results demand a fundamental revision of the planning system, its approach and governance.

High-tech development has been broadly accepted as a prominent matter of regional development policies and plans at the global level. Strategies to enhance it have evident implications for spatial planning policies, plans and visions. Consequently, careful attention should be paid to the role that spatial planning policies play in the national and regional efforts to advance high-tech development in a particular place. This study addresses the relationship between the spatial planning system and high-tech development, searching to explain the spatial implications resulting from this relationship. It approaches the topic by comparing high-tech development experiences in the Netherlands and Taiwan from an institutional perspective. Although both countries have used a range of spatial strategies for economic growth through high-tech development, the results show that their different institutional settings, power relations between different levels of government and conceptions of science park have led to the implementation of two very distinct spatial strategies, shaping different spatial patterns of high-tech development clustering in these two regions. The findings demonstrate the potential of the institutional approach to study international planning issues, and contribute to theories of high-tech development and spatial planning.