Reinventing spatial planning in a borderless Europe

Abstract

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 its members; (2) what space and territory means under Europeanisation; and (3) the role of spatial planning wedded to the idea of an integrated vision. This paper points out that rescaling and the emergence of ‘soft’ spaces beyond jurisdictional boundaries are general phenomena (Allmendinger, Haughton 2009), and so are the responses in terms of borderless strategic planning. This gives the concept of multi-level governance, originally developed in the EU context, more general relevance. It also relates to poststructuralist views of spatiality and territorialisation as seen from a relational perspective putting emphasis on fluidity, reflexivity, connectivity, multiplicity and polyvocality as documented by Davoudi and Strange (2009). This comes down to rethinking the role of strategic, as against statutory spatial planning, drawing on examples from EU (where it goes under the flag of territorial cohesion policy) and from various member states. So the paper comes in three parts: 1) Relational space and place and the search for meaningful spatial concepts, 2) Multi-level governance: the question of scale, 3) Strategic spatial planning. The conclusions give directions for future research.