From smart growth to European spatial planning: a new paradigm for EU cohesion policy post-2020

Formally initiated in 1989, European Union (EU) cohesion policy (ECP) has since passed through a series of metamorphoses, along its five programming periods, while becoming the most financed EU policy. As its name indicates, its initial goals were earmarked for promoting economic and social cohesion, following the intentions expressed in the Single European Act. Since then, from a policy strategy intervention point of view, ECP has shifted into a financial tool to promote investment for growth and jobs. In the meantime, European spatial planning (ESP), which had its debating pinnacle with the release of the European Spatial Development Perspective, by 1999, has declined in interest and narrowed into a novel notion of Territorial Cohesion. In this challenging context, this article analyses the implementation and main impacts of ECP and proposes a new strategic paradigm, built around a novel ‘ESP’ vision, backed by the main pillars and dimensions of territorial development and cohesion. More particularly, we suggest that the current rationale for a smart, sustainable and inclusive growth could instead fuel an alternative strategic design based on a cohesive and sustainable development vision: green economy, balanced territory, good governance and social cohesion.     

Communicative and participatory paradigm in the European territorial policies. A discourse analysis

Communicative planning has been widely criticized for having little to do with the official legal procedures and for low-quality spatial solutions. It has also been blamed to be an empty concept, referring to an action that in itself has no content. This critique gives ground to the question: what is actually the role of the communicative and participatory paradigm in contemporary territorial policies? In this paper, we adopt discourse analysis methods to study the European documents on spatial planning in their three characteristic strands: smart city, integrated planning and multilevel governance. By extracting eight core principles (governance, sustainability, communication, participation, resilience, innovation, cooperation and coordination), we measure the importance of the communicative and participatory paradigm in the current planning discourse in Europe. We find that despite critique it remains one of the fundamental building-blocks of the European territorial policy. Communicative planning principles are visibly present in all the analysed strands of spatial planning in Europe.     

Spatial Units for EU Territorial Governance: Findings From a Study on North-Western Italy

This article explores the possibility of identifying spatial units that are more suitable to manage the European Union territorial governance process than the traditional administrative districts or crude statistical partitions. To this purpose, the article presents a study on North-Western Italy, which the author has developed recently in the framework of a research project promoted by the Italian Ministry of Infrastructures to prepare a spatial vision for the Italian National Strategic Reference Framework under the EU cohesion policy 2007–2013. While updating the reader on the Italian approach to EU cohesion policy and on developments in this area, the article particularly draws the attention of European planners to the concept of “Interdependent Territorial Systems” as spatial units contributing to combine the relevant dimensions of EU territorial governance in a proactive planning process.     

Policy governance from an autopoietic perspective: revisiting Hungary’s regionalization experience

This perspective on Hungary’s post-socialist regional policy governance is informed by an approach that relates region-building and regional governance to social autopoiesis and the self-referential and self-(re)producing nature of social systems such as states. Following debates in regional studies that reflect tensions between the local constitution and external determination of regional governance, we will demonstrate how Hungary has incorporated European Union (EU) policy frameworks through specific appropriations of territorial politics and regional ideas. These appropriations reflect Hungary’s post-socialist transformation not only in terms of responses to global forces, but also as specific spatial practices and regionalization experiences. As we argue, this has in effect resulted in a regionalism without regions – a strategy of Europeanizing territorial politics without creating institutional structures that directly challenge existing power relations. Autopoiesis thus helps explain the resilience of social systems, not only their resistance to institutional change but also their capability to ‘domesticate’ external influences. While criticisms of Hungary’s technocratic and post-political regionalization projects cannot be ignored, our analysis indicates why externally driven intervention in self-organizing governance processes, for example through EU conditionality, has had less impact than expected.     

The Engagement of Territorial Knowledge Communities with European Spatial Planning and the Territorial Cohesion Debate: A Baltic Perspective

Abstract

Recent, dramatic spatial development trends have contributed to the consolidation of a unique territorial governance landscape in the Baltic States. The paper examines the transformation of this evolving institutional landscape for planning practice and knowledge, which has been marked by the disintegration of Soviet institutions and networks, the transition to a market-based economy and the process of accession to the EU. It explores the evolution of territorial knowledge channels in the Baltic States, and the extent and nature of the engagement of actors' communities with the main knowledge arenas and resources of European spatial planning (ESP). The paper concludes that recent shifts in the evolution of these channels suggest the engagement of ESP has concentrated among epistemic communities at State and trans-national levels of territorial governance. The limited policy coordination across a broader spectrum of diverse actors is compounded by institutionally weak and fragmented professional communities of practice, fragmented government structures and marginalized advocacy coalitions.     

EUROPEAN BRIEFING: Polycentricity in European spatial planning: from an analytical tool to a normative agenda

The notion of polycentricity is gaining widespread currency in both academic and professional debates. It has opened its way in the spatial policy documents of the European Union and member states alike, and has become one of the key components of the integrated spatial development strategy promoted by the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP). Whilst polycentricity is increasingly shaping the spatial policy discourses both in the Commission and in member states, the precise meaning of the term has remained elusive. The first two sections of this article aim to unpack the concept of polycentricity, trace its origin and its development and clarify the confusion over its multiple interpretations at various spatial scales. The third section of the article explains how the concept of polycentricity which has traditionally been used as an analytical tool to explain an existing or emerging reality is now increasingly being used to determine that reality. This is based on the analyses of the use of polycentricity within the European spatial planning framework and in particular the ESDP. Here, the article raises a number of questions regarding the promotion of the polycentric urban regions as one of the ESDP's key policy options for a balanced territorial development across Europe.     

Planning Small Regions in a Larger Europe: Spatial Planning as a Learning Process for Sustainable Local Development

An enlarged Europe is addressing the challenge of territorial cohesion on the basis of a disciplinary and operative framework formed by a number of evolving documents and provisions to be applied and developed at different administrative and planning levels. Rapid and profound changes have occurred in previous decades as far as institutional framework, the role of actors and issues to be tackled are concerned, within a re-scaling process of territorial governance. In this context, small territories can take advantage of European funds, but experience a hard confrontation with the market economy and supra-local visions, use of resources and infrastructure projects. A decisive role, in many countries, has been gained by regional authorities, which must mediate among various territorial levels, institutions and actors involved in a multilevel governance process. The paper focuses on spatial and regional/territorial planning processes among the European dimension, Member States and regions, on the basis of a case study conducted in Northern Italy. The aim is to determine the role of European spatial planning as a “learning machine” [Faludi, A. (2008) European Territorial Cooperation and Learning, disP 172, (1/2008), pp. 3–10.] able to support processes of mutual learning and cooperation, overcoming the attitude of compliance to upper level schemes and financial programmes rather than innovating usual procedures and territorial planning.     

Identity of non‐self‐evident nation: Czech national identity after the break‐up of Czechoslovakia and before accession to the European Union*

ABSTRACT. In this study the authors analyse Czech national identity after the break‐up of Czechoslovakia and before accession to the European Union. National identity is understood here as a construct consisting of several elements, four of which the authors analyse: territorial identity (localism, regionalism, patriotism, and Europeanism), the image of the nation – the cultural nation (ethno‐nation) and the political nation (state‐nation), national pride (in general, and in cultural performance and in the performance of the state), and love for the nation – nationalism (or more precisely, chauvinism) and patriotism. To create a more complex picture of Czech national identity the authors compare it with national identities in eleven other European countries. To conclude, the authors analyse the attitudes of Czechs toward the European Union, and national identity is used as an important explanatory element of the support for EU governance.     

Investigating the partnership approach in the EU Urban Agenda from the perspective of soft planning

At the European level, several strategic documents concerned with spatial and urban development have been published during the last decades. While these documents are essential to communicate European ideas and objectives, they are often regarded least influential in practice due to their abstract nature, legally non-binding status and lack of allocated resources. Though these limitations apply to the EU Urban Agenda, this recently published policy paper introduces partnerships as a new implementation tool. The partnerships can be regarded as innovative in two respects: On the one hand, they involve new actors, most importantly cities, in European policy debates. On the other hand, they ensure the anchorage of the Urban Agenda with a broad range of actors at various spatial scales without challenging its legally non-binding status. The Urban Agenda can thus be understood as another example of the move towards soft European spatial planning and urban development. This article investigates the notion of partnership as a soft planning and governance tool within the Urban Agenda. Moreover, based on expert interviews, it presents early opinions and expectations of actors involved in the development of the Urban Agenda and the partnerships on affordable housing.     

Beyond the blind spot of knowledge-based territorial development: the mission of Metropolitan Food Clusters

The rise of knowledge-based territorial development has been fuelled primarily by aspirations of competitiveness and wealth creation. Another upcoming ambition is that of sustainability, not only as an accompanying goal but as a core mission driving territorial initiatives such as clusters development. This paper explores mission-driven territorial development along theoretical and empirical lines. The paper starts by discussing a basic heuristic model intersecting the three concepts of ‘mission’, ‘knowledge’ (distinguishing ‘substantive’ and ‘significant’ knowledge) and ‘governance’. This leads to an analytical framework for territorial development focusing on (1) mission formulation, (2) production and exchange of knowledge in supportive milieus, (3) embedding of substantive knowledge, (4) anchoring of significant knowledge, and (5) feeding of significant knowledge into the (re) design of institutions and strategies of policy design and implementation. This framework is applied to three cases of ‘Metropolitan Food Clusters’ to illustrate and test the framework. The paper shows how especially the continuous anchoring of significant knowledge poses major challenges to knowledge-based territorial development and should be a central issue in future research and policy.     

What “Is” Territorial Cohesion? What Does It “Do”?: Essentialist Versus Pragmatic Approaches to Using Concepts

The question, “what is territorial cohesion” has reverberated through European spatial policy since the publication of the European Spatial Development Perspective in 1999. Over the last 10 years, the European Spatial Policy Observation Network (ESPON) has made many efforts to define and measure the concept of “territorial cohesion”. Many such attempts assume that a policy concept must be defined in order to be “operationalized”. Or, in other words, that we must determine what the concept is before we can determine what it can or should do. This paper challenges this assumption in two parts. In the first, I review a number of ESPON projects to show how complex and uncertain these essentialist definitions have become. In the second, I analyse a number of national, regional and local government responses to the 2008 Green paper. I show that, whilst a clear and coherent definition has not been established, this concept is already operationalized in different policy frameworks. Bringing this together, I argue that users of such concepts ought to approach the issue differently, through a pragmatic line of enquiry: one that asks what territorial cohesion does, what it might do and how it might affect what other concepts, practices and materials do.     

Economic Governance and the Evolution of Industrial Districts Under Globalization: The Case of Two Mature European Industrial Districts

For many mature European industrial districts, the present decade has been one of trying (and often failing) to meet the difficult challenges posed by the rising tide of globalization. The future of these districts in the new global economy has become a key issue for regional and local development policy, and, in this respect, it has sparked a renewed interest in economic governance. Economic governance is important in that it underpins a region's long-term economic development path. This article is a contribution to the study of the economic governance of industrial districts and the related policy debate. The article does so by specifically exploring the economic governance issue by considering the experiences and challenges currently facing two mature European industrial districts in the global economy.     

From Cohesion to Territorial Policy Integration (TPI): Exploring the Governance Challenges in the European Union

The European Union (EU) is searching for new approaches to manage problems that span different policy sectors. In the regional policy field, incompatibilities between the EU's territorial development objectives and its transport, agricultural, competition and environmental policies, are well known. The need to integrate territorial policy concerns into these sectoral policies (territorial policy integration or “TPI”) has recently emerged as a key policy priority. This article examines the EU's capacity to implement TPI. It does so in relation to two member states (Germany and the Netherlands) and the European Commission. It finds that the administrative implications of implementing TPI are far more demanding than any of these actors are currently able to handle. Moreover, some EU-level networks are potentially relevant to TPI, but these are mostly focused on regional policy matters (i.e. they are relatively inward looking). If these administrative issues are not taken more seriously, “integration” will struggle to make headway in an EU which is notoriously sectorized.     

Territorial Impact Assessment of European Draft Directives—The Emergence of a New Policy Assessment Instrument

European Union directives, along with their transposing arrangements in EU member states, can have unanticipated and sometimes undesirable impacts on certain regions and places. These include impacts on the use of space (e.g. new infrastructure or sprawl), governance, and on wider social, economic or environmental dimensions. Although ex-ante assessment of the potential impacts of EU initiatives has been carried out since 2002 through the European Commission's Impact Assessment procedure and also through national equivalents in some member states, important impacts are still overlooked, frequently because of their territorially heterogeneous nature within and between EU member states. This paper presents the results of the ESPON EATIA research project, in which a new territorial impact assessment methodology was developed for national and regional administrations in EU member states in order to inform their national positions during the negotiation of European draft directives and potentially other policy proposals.     

Serbian Spatial Planning among Styles of Spatial Planning in Europe

The classification of spatial planning styles in Europe has been successively reviewed a few times. Most recently, it has been done in the framework of the European Spatial Planning Observatories Network (ESPON) 2.3.2 project dealing with the territorial governance. Based on national overviews for 29 European countries, this project uses the classification of spatial planning systems in four styles: comprehensive-integrated, regional-economic, land-use and urbanism. This study did not take into account the spatial planning system in Serbia since it is neither in the European Union nor a member of the ESPON similar to Norway and Switzerland. This article uses the form of national overviews elaborated for the ESPON project and puts Serbia in a comparative spatial planning perspective, classifying it between the comprehensive-integrated and land-use planning styles.     

Regional Innovation Systems and European Research Policy: Convergence or Misunderstanding?

In this article the question of interfacing, innovation policy and regional policy at the European level is addressed. Under which conditions will the new European research policy, relying on networks of centres of excellence, be compatible with 'cohesion' objectives? Since there will be no unique regional development scheme based on science and technology, how can policy-makers take into consideration the variety of local contexts? The analysis focuses on the fact that the concept of regional innovation system can be misleading for describing the territorial context. However, a cognitive approach seems possible, based on the notion of regional competence to innovate. The analyses are illustrated with empirical results concerning the French regions, and especially Alsace.     

European spatial planning reloaded: Considering EU enlargement in theory and practice

The territorial expansion of the European Union (EU) to the new central and eastern European member states raises difficult challenges for European spatial planning. In almost the same manner as structural policy, the conceptual side of European spatial planning has to acknowledge that with enlargement a quantum leap regarding its politics and policy is about to occur. While reflecting on discussions about EU's regional policy and spatial planning on the European level, and sketching a theoretical background, this paper proposes a new way of conceptualizing European spatial planning, taking central and eastern European spatial planning—perhaps as a new epistemic community—into consideration.     

Containment and territorial transnational actors: Israel,Hezbollah and Hamas

Containment has been salient in intellectual and policy debates for 60 years. It informed US foreign policy towards the USSR and, later, the so‐called rogue states. The endurance of containment beyond the Cold War suggests that it possesses the quality of transferability, the capacity of a grand strategy from the past to transcend the circumstances that gave rise to it, to suggest what should be emulated and what avoided in future policies. Drawing on the notion of transferability and on the method of structured, focused comparison, this article uses Israel's foreign policy towards Hezbollah and Hamas to argue that containment is transferable from the state level to a state/territorial transnational actor (TNA) relationship, albeit with permutations. This argument is examined in relation to four issues: the circumstances under which containment arises; its applicability to territorial TNA; the objectives sought by implementing containment; and the role of legitimacy as a component of containment. In so doing the article seeks to make a contribution to the debate on containment. While there is a rich literature on state containment, research on containing territorial TNA has been extremely limited.     

Towards an Integrated Spatial Planning?

The notion of “spatial planning” has emerged as something of a new planning orthodoxy. Underpinning it lie various notions of integration—of policy communities and agendas, for example. This paper considers the evolution of integrated spatial planning in the various UK territories, focusing particularly on the experiences of Scotland. It analyses horizontal and vertical forms of integration using the notion of “governance lines”. These help explore the interaction between policies and actions at various spatial levels to examine how governance action can be re-scaled. A focus on Scotland highlights both divergence from European experience and a number of long-standing, but often subtly different, concerns for planners. Notable among these are the power spatial planning has in other policy sectors to pursue integration, and the co-ordination of land-use issues and infrastructure delivery. These issues present challenges for agendas of integration and highlights their political nature, raising as they do questions such as: how far can integration be pursued in the contemporary governance landscape; and thus to whom and on what might focuses on integration be directed? Such an analysis suggests potentials and limitations for a spatial planning agenda in the future.     

European cross-scale spatial planning and territorial frames in the Italian Median Macroregion

This article describes the preliminary outcome of interdisciplinary research that arises from a study by the Italian Ministry of Infrastructures and Transport and the Abruzzo Region (IT) on local development processes in central Italy, and specifically in the Median Macroregion, whose results have been extended to European context. It concerns the European spatial planning, specifically the study of an original interpretative model of European space, called Territorial Frames – TFs, a particular multi-scale infrastructural mesh that connects the ‘local’ territories with ‘global’ ones and that can represent the activating element of processes and policies of spatial development of settlements, of processes of valorization of the productive, naturalistic and landscape sectors. This new model interfaces with the territorial reticular component through the concept of polycentrism, also projecting evolution, and with that of the governance of development projects, using the potential of European Macroregions. The main objective of the research is to feed the topic of spatial planning, oriented to the integration between territories through a cross-scale approach, and to the activation of new processes of sustainable territorial development, with reference to the economically disadvantaged inner areas in a context of Macroregional governance.