THE EUROPEANIZATION OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: LOCAL STRATEGIES AND EUROPEAN SPATIAL VISIONS IN NORTHERN FINLAND

By exploring the Europeanization of current practices of regional spatial planning, this article sets out to demonstrate the evolution of the European integration project. Specifically, by creating spaces of engagement to which the local and regional actors are “forced” to adapt, the emergence of European spatial planning has made planning practices at the regional level more complex and complicated. As such, the present study contributes to the current understandings of Europeanization by exploring the European integration process through the geographical conceptualizations of space and scale. These conceptualizations are used to illustrate the multidimensionality, complexity and subtlety of the geographies of Europeanization. The empirical investigations show that regional and local spatial policies are strongly engaged – both explicitly through the “technicalities” and implicitly through the “mentalities”– to the spaces of Europeanization. The engagement affects the effectiveness of sub‐regional spatial planning by promoting mismatches between the strategic frameworks and the material practices of the policy. Overall, the article illustrates that the geographies of Europeanization are continuous processes, which take place – often unrecognizably – in manifold discursive and material practices in various geographical contexts.     

A practice theoretical perspective on the Europeanization of spatial planning

This paper provides a practice theoretical approach for examining the processes of the Europeanization of spatial planning. While the supply of studies on the questions of how, where and when the Europeanization of spatial planning takes place is rich and diverse, the temporal and spatial aspects of the processes have been studied from a rather narrow perspective. In many of the studies, time and space have been examined as objective, pre-existing features of the processes, which has resulted in interpretations of Europeanization as a temporally successive and spatially scalar process. The paper has two main goals. First, it seeks to outline European spatial planning as a distinctive field of political and academic interaction whose central constitutive elements are interconnected policy and research practices. Second, as a more general theoretical goal, the paper develops a practice theoretical approach for examining the processes of Europeanization. In this paper, it is argued that the policy and research practices constitute a temporal–spatial infrastructure for Europeanization. This infrastructure consists of both objective configurations of the practices and the existential temporal–spatial dimensions opened in the practices.