Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation:

European Spatial Planning Coming

of Age?

Since its foundation the European Union has gradually developed policies that are
aimed at achieving increased economic and social cohesion. This book takes the
reader through the stages of the development of the EU and for each stage indicates
how spatial planners have articulated spatial or territorial issues inherent to European
integration, leading to the introduction of the concept of territorial cohesion.

In EU terms territorial cohesion is the pursuit of balanced development, competitive-

ness, sustainable development and good governance. These concerns are most
readily addressed by the formulation of spatial strategies, which brings together a
multitude of public and private actors in a process that requires cohesion, coher-
ence and cooperation.

Andreas Faludi traces the interplay between these concerns in this vivid account
of the struggle to establish spatial planning at the level of the EU, and argues that
spatial planning can become a vehicle, not only for territorial cohesion, but for EU
policy generally.

Bringing together years of research and expertise, this book is a definitive single
volume on spatial planning at the European level, discussing its controversial theory
and practice and its future.

Andreas Faludi is Professor of Spatial Policy Systems in Europe, Delft University of

Technology, Netherlands.
THE RTPI Library Series
Editors: Robert Upton, Infrastructure Planning Commission in England
and Patsy Healey, University of Newcastle, UK
Published by Routledge in conjunction with The Royal Town Planning Institute, this series
of leading-edge texts looks at all aspects of spatial planning theory and practice from a
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Planning in Postmodern Times Urban Complexity and Spatial

Philip Allmendinger Strategies
Towards a Relational Planning for our Times
The Making of the European Spatial
Patsy Healey
Development Perspective
Andreas Faludi and Bas Waterhout The Visual Language of Spatial Planning
Exploring Cartographic Representations for
Planning for Crime Prevention
Spatial Planning in Europe
Richard Schneider and Ted Kitchen
Stefanie Dühr
The Planning Polity
Planning and Transformation
Mark Tewdwr-Jones
Learning from the Post-Apartheid Experience
Shadows of Power Philip Harrison, Alison Todes and
An Allegory of Prudence in Land-Use Planning Vanessa Watson
Jean Hillier
Conceptions of Space and Place in
Urban Planning and Cultural Identity Strategic Spatial Planning
William JV Neill Edited by Simin Davoudi and Ian Strange
Place Identity, Participation and Regional Planning for Open Space
Planning Edited by Terry van Dijk and Arnold van
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Planning for Diversity Crossing Borders
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Indicators for Urban and Regional Angela Hull
Planning Implementing Sustainability
Cecilia Wong Caroline Miller
Planning at the Landscape Scale Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation:
Paul Selman European Spatial Planning Coming
Urban Structure Matters of Age?
Petter Naess Andreas Faludi
Cohesion, Coherence,
Cooperation: European
Spatial Planning Coming
of Age?

ANDREAS FALUDI
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2010 Andreas Faludi

The right of Andreas Faludi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faludi, Andreas.
Cohesion, coherence, co-operation : european spatial planning coming of age? / Andreas
Faludi.
p. cm. -- (RTPI library series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Regional planning--European Union countries. 2. European Union countries--Economic
policy. 3. Land use--European Union countries--Planning. I. Title.
HT395.E82F35 2010
307.1’2094--dc22
2010012702

ISBN 0-203-84232-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 978-0-415-56265-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-56266-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-84232-4 (ebk)
To the futures of Martijn, Joris, Arthur
and their father, Daan van Eijck
CONTENTS

List of figures viii

Preface ix
List of abbreviations xv

Introduction 1

PART I
The launch era 15
1 Planners going international 17
2 Dashed expectations: the Treaty of Rome 31

PART II
In the doldrums 43
3 Indirect approach 45
4 A European planning programme 62

PART III
The boom era 75
5 The trailblazers 77
6 Delors and the consequences 94
7 The ‘mother document’ 106
8 The learning machine 124

PART IV
Crisis 141
9 Renewed effort 143
10 At the crossroads 156

Conclusions: if European planning has a future, then it is soft 172

Epilogue 184
References 186
Index 196
FIGURES

0.1 The EU territory reaches well beyond the European continent 8

0.2 The Council of Europe covers a territory that stretches to
the Bering Strait 9
1.1 A German expert sent from the Reich to supervise Dutch national
planning had a vision of the position of the country 21
1.2 The Netherlands protected by a front garden on German soil 22
1.3 The ‘sea of houses’ threatening to swamp the Netherlands 26
1.4 The European ‘megalopolis’ 27
1.5 The second structural outline for the Benelux 29
2.1 A structural outline sketch of north-west Europe 40
5.1 The ‘Blue Banana’ 82
5.2 Dutch doctrine fragmenting 85
5.3 European metropolitan regions in Germany 92
7.1 Global economic integration zones in the US 112
7.2 The European Bunch of Grapes 113
7.3 The controversial map showing the core of Europe 115
7.4 The ‘20-40-50 Pentagon’ 116
8.1 The Spatial Vision for the North-West European Metropolitan Areas 131
10.1 The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region and the Danube Strategy 168
PREFACE

Writing about European spatial planning is like sailing into the wind: planning seems
anonymous and distant, and Europe the more so. I therefore attempt to show the
human side of planning and to share my excitement about Europe.
Am I proselytising? I hope not, but I admit that when starting in the early
1990s, I self evidently assumed that European integration was a good thing. So
I sympathised with Dick Williams where in the preface of ‘European Union Spatial
Policy and Planning’ he recounted answering challenges of being a Euro-federalist
unabashedly in the affirmative. I am no longer sure. A federal Europe smacks of more
of the same: new state institutions being superimposed upon existing ones. Europe
is rather something that, whilst busily giving shape to it, we are still at pains to under-
stand, but I am particularly sympathetic to those working at the coalface of European
spatial planning. I highlight some of their biographies. Insiders will have no difficulties
identifying who they are, but I have not asked for authentification, so I give no names.
I merely want to give an idea of the kind of people they are.
There was the English student coming to the Netherlands for his masters. By that
time already fluent in Dutch, his thesis was on Dutch–German cooperation. He married
in the Netherlands and went into national planning from where he became a National
Detached Expert – odd translation, because they are not supposed to be unattached,
for the French Expert national détaché – at the European Commission. With a French
colleague he put European planning on the rails. Our polyglot – a native English speaker,
he speaks not only Dutch and French but also German – rejoined Brussels to work on
key Commission planning initiatives. After finishing his tour, he became the Dutch point
man for European planning and later secretary-general of an international association.
His French colleague had been in developing countries before working on the
effects in France of the Iberian enlargement: Spain and Portugal joining in 1986.
Between them the pair got their ministers to see eye to eye on the need for European
spatial planning in 1988. The Frenchman joined the political cabinet of the plan-
ning minister who chaired the first meeting with his colleagues from the European
Community. Soon our French expert joined the Commission services. Having made
room for the influx in the 2000s from the new Member States, he continues to live at
Brussels, travelling and pursuing his academic interests.
At the Commission, he worked under a fellow Frenchman, a career Eurocrat. A
graduate of Bordeaux, the latter had passed the French-style entrance examination to the
Commission services, the concours, in 1970 and worked in various capacities including a
x Preface

leading position in the cabinet of President Jacques Delors, preparing the latter’s cohesion
policy. Back at the Commission services he became the brains behind the thinking about
its future. A Cartesian mind, he could be impatient with Member State representatives.
Upon his early retirement, once again to make room for new entrants – his successor as
Deputy Director-General is from Slovakia – he, too, continues to live in Brussels.
Another old hand, now retired, was the German point man in matters of
European planning. Having worked in South America, he is a Spanish speaker and
naturally conversant also in English, the working language of European spatial plan-
ners. He defended the position that, rather than a Community policy, European
planning was a matter for intergovernmental cooperation. With his ministry, he
moved from Bonn to Berlin from where until his retirement he put emphasis on coop-
eration with the new Member States and the Russian Federation.
The Germans, but also the Council of Europe, the European Commission
and many others availed themselves of the services of the perhaps most trusted
European planning consultant, a Frenchman with a German degree and spouse.
He held down research jobs in the Netherlands and at Strasbourg before becom-
ing freelance. Another polyglot, he recently moved his one-man enterprise from
Strasbourg across the German border.
There is also a new generation of European planners, like the graduate from
Dortmund University who for his master thesis went to Sweden. After graduating,
he went to Nordregio, a research institute of the Nordic Council and a breeding
ground of European planners. With access to most Nordic languages, he wrote
a PhD in the Netherlands on Nordic and European planning, in English. With his
tour at Nordregio over, he went to the Coordination Unit of the European Spatial
Planning Observation Network (ESPON). He continues to roam through Europe,
now from a base in Luxembourg.
At ESPON, he had worked under a former Danish national planner involved in
European work. Subsequently, the Danish planner had become a National Detached
Expert at Brussels. He had continued as a consultant before becoming head of the
ESPON Coordination Unit. Our man is its face, representing ESPON at conferences
and lately also at meetings of the ministers of the Member States responsible for
spatial planning and/or territorial cohesion.
Having been the member of a national team working on European planning
and then becoming a National Detached Expert at Brussels, only to return to work
on European issues in their home country seems a feature of the careers of sev-
eral European planners. Both co-directors of the Austrian Conference on Spatial
Planning, the anchor point in this country of European planning, share this expe-
rience. The at that time quite junior planner working for the government of the
Walloon Region of Belgium who was instrumental in putting the European Spatial
Development Perspective (ESDP) on the agenda of the planning ministers of the
Preface xi

Member States in 1993 is another example. He subsequently joined the Commission

and then became head of the INTERREG IIC North-West Metropolitan Area facil-
itating transnational planning from London. He continued in this capacity for the
refashioned INTERREG IIIB North-West Europe Area at Lille. A polyglot, too, he is
now a consultant.
There are others who have moved in and out from national posts to Brussels
and back, and at the Commission a new generation of officials, many of them from
the new Member States, has started. There are also those working for international
consultants, such as my former Dutch student who during her studies honed her
language skills, completed her master thesis on the German role in European plan-
ning, spent an additional year studying abroad, to be followed by the highly regarded
six-month internship at the European Commission. She is now a senior consultant
mobile throughout Europe to give advice on planning issues.
Are there any common characteristics? Speaking their languages, the people
I am describing have moved from country to country. They are part of a ‘roving band
of planners’, a term which I have coined and still like.
I myself am an academic. A born Hungarian with an Austrian upbringing and
university education followed by teaching planning theory in the UK, my wife, daugh-
ter and I became citizens of the Netherlands, a founder member of the EU. Since
the Treaty of Maastricht, my passport vouches to my being a European. This I share
with, give and take, 500 million others, not all as conscious of this privilege as I am.
Moving around as we have done is no longer exceptional. So what, then, made me
turn to European planning?
The switch from being a planning theorist and a student of Dutch planning
took place in the mid-1990s. Upon completing a study, with Arnold van der Valk,
‘Rule and Order: Dutch Planning Doctrine in the Twentieth Century’, I could have
continued to pursue the twists and turns of Dutch planning. Now, Dutch national
planners had always positioned themselves in Europe and with the prospect of the
Single Market – at the time code-named ‘Europe 1992’ – their European outlook
became even stronger. I drifted towards exploring the issues involved, initially in the
expectation that, as a German speaker, I could act as a liaison with a country that,
though important, for English speakers was difficult to fathom. Little did I know that
to get at the bottom of it, you had better also know French.
With Wil Zonneveld, now my colleague at Delft University of Technology, I
looked into the Dutch role in European planning. However, when, inspired by the
example of my distinguished friend Klaus Kunzmann of Dortmund University, I asked
my university to apply on my behalf for an EU Jean Monnet Professorship, the recep-
tion was cool. So I moved to a chair of spatial policy systems in Europe at Radboud
University Nijmegen. With Bas Waterhout, I wrote ‘The Making of the European
Spatial Development Perspective: No Masterplan’. Since 2005, I have been at Delft
xii Preface

University of Technology where, as at Nijmegen, I am free to pursue my research and

to accept visiting professorships.
On one such occasion, at Harvard, I met Armando Carbonell of the Lincoln
Institute of Land Policy at Cambridge, MA. On its behalf, I brought together scholars
and practitioners at venues on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in three edited vol-
umes: ‘European Spatial Planning’, ‘Territorial Cohesion and the European Model of
Society’ and ‘European Spatial Research and Planning’, all published by the Lincoln
Institute. The intention was to stimulate debate in the US. The equivalent of European
spatial planning in the US would be national planning. National planning, though, is
‘widely believed to be an un-American activity, an exercise in bureaucratic hubris best
left to the French’, says Robert Fishman in the opening sentence of a paper on its his-
tory. Thereafter, he sets out to demonstrate that it is in fact ‘as American as the family
farm, the transcontinental railroads, the great hydro-electric dams of the South and
West, and the interstate highway system (Fishman 2007). In Europe there have been
attempts, discussed in this book, to develop an overall vision integrating such policies,
and I suppose this is what the Lincoln Institute wished for the US.
Gauging the success of this transatlantic transfer of ideas would require
a research effort of its own. Early ideas of an ‘American Spatial Development
Perspective’ (Carbonell and Yaro 2005), such as the European Spatial Development
Perspective (ESDP), turned into an exercise, ‘America 2050’,1 sponsored by the
Lincoln Institute, the Regional Plan Association and others. By mid-century, the US
population is estimated to reach 440 million, more or less on a par with the EU’s
by that time shrinking numbers. Growth will concentrate in a few ‘super cities’ or
‘mega-regions’. Studies have explored what this might mean, for instance the one by
the University of Pennsylvania School of Design on the archetypical ‘megalopolis’ on
the East Coast that has been the object of a work by Jean Gottman coining the very
term. One of the experts involved, Catherine Ross from Georgia Tech, is currently
advising President Obama on transport policy, so maybe something will come out of
the exchanges.
My main field of activity is of course Europe and not the US. I am regularly
co-chairing a European track at the congresses of the Association of European
Schools of Planning (AESOP). This gives me the privilege of meeting academics in
the field. I am also publishing material on developments in the field, the attitudes and
achievements of Member States and on EU presidencies respectively the planning
documents they produce. This book represents a synthesis within a new framework.
The framework I tested out in a paper offered at the twenty-third AESOP congress at

1 www.america2050.org.
Preface xiii

Liverpool in 2009, subsequently published in Town Planning Review (Faludi 2010).

All texts have been rewritten, whether to good avail is for others to say.
My ideas, including drafts of this book, were discussed at my home institu-
tion, the OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment at Delft University of
Technology. Bas Waterhout, Dominic Stead, Jody Milder, Vincent Nadin and Wil
Zonneveld deserve to be thanked for providing a stimulating environment and for
commenting on chapters. I extend my thanks to David Evers, Jean Peyrony, Jenno
Witsen and Patrick Salez who likewise commented on drafts. Wil Zonneveld and
Dirk Dubbeling and towards the end also Karl-Peter Schön were extremely helpful
with the selection of figures. The editor of the RTPI Library Series, Robert Upton, has
been consistently encouraging.
Synthesising my thoughts was no sinecure at the end of the 2000s when a
rapid succession of changes hit the EU: the reappointment of José Manuel Barroso
as Commission President; the cliff hanger over the ratification of the Treaty of
Lisbon; the appointment of the new President of the European Council and the
High Representative of the Union on Foreign Affairs and Security Policy as well as
of the other members of the Commission, including Johannes Hahn from Austria
as Commissioner for Regional Policy. Above all, the Commission was starting a
review of its policies, a process that will set the parameters for the 2010s. In so
doing, it seemed to support ideas floating around that according to some enraged
commentators would pull the rug away from under EU cohesion policy. Rather
than guessing the outcome of all this based on the most up-to-date intelligence –
sure to be outdated when the book appears in print – I decided in the concluding
chapter to go back to basics. The propositions there are intended to be robust.
In this book I converse with the reader in the first person singular and I am
trying to strike a balance between quoting sources and readability. So the refer-
ences are selective and mostly to books. I also quote official sources with a focus
on those not in general known. Thus, unless I quote verbatim, ‘Second Cohesion
Report’, or ‘Treaty of Lisbon’ which the reader can find easily are not referenced, but
for example the Spaak Report is. My aim has been to write good prose, not to prove
my scholarship. Articles I quote only where absolutely necessary. References are
grouped at the end of the book.
Unfortunately, for whoever deals with the EU, there is no way of avoiding acro-
nyms. EU, US and UK are so common that one no longer thinks of them as such.
Others, such as ESDP for European Spatial Development Perspective, are good
currency amongst planners. When first using an acronym, which I do sparingly, I
spell it out. There is a list at the start of the book.
EU documents capitalise ‘Member State’ and so I do the same. As regards the
translations from Dutch, French and German I take responsibility, but in each case I
have included the original text in a footnote.
xiv Preface

The reader may be surprised to find relatively few maps. This is a reflection of the
state of the art: most documents I discuss do not contain what I call policy maps. Such
maps express strategies or visions essential in the kind of strategic planning which, at
this level anyhow, is more appropriate than masterplans. There is of course a profusion of
colourful analytical maps, but for my argument about the development of the approach to
planning they are less essential. As far as their hard core, most documents in European
spatial planning restrict themselves to statements of general principles.
Finally, with all our moving from place to place, there are also fixed points in our
lives. We have been living in Delft for close to forty years where four wonderful Dutch
men have made their appearance. With their roots solidly in Dutch ground, our grand-
sons are growing up in a world different from that in which we got our bearings. For
their company that we so greatly enjoy and the privilege of helping them to understand
this, their world, I dedicate this book to the futures of the boys and their father.

Andreas Faludi
Delft
March 2010
ABBREVIATIONS

AESOP Association of European Schools of Planning

ARL Akademie für Raumforschung und Landesplanung (Academy of
Spatial Research and Spatial Planning)
ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations
BBR Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung (Federal Office for
Building and Regional Planning)
BBSR Bundesamt for Bau-, Stadt- und Raumforschung (Federal Institute for
Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development)
CEMAT Conférence Européenne des Ministres à l’Aménagement du Territoire
(European Conference of Ministers responsible for Regional Planning)
CIAM Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne
COREPER Comité des représentants permanents (Permanent Representatives
Committee)
CSD Committee on Spatial Development
DATAR Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale; since
December 2009: Délégation interministérielle à l’aménagement du
territoire et à l’attractivité des regions
DG REGIO Directorate General for Regional Policy (once also known as DG XVI)
DIACT Délégation interministérielle à l’aménagement et à la compétitivité
des territories; the name of DATAR from 2006 to 2009
EC European Community
ECSC European Coal and Steel Community
EEC European Economic Community
EGTC European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation
ERDF European Regional Development Fund
ESDP European Spatial Development Perspective
ESPON European Spatial Planning Observation Network (previously European
Spatial Planning Observatory Network)
EU European Union
GDP Gross domestic product
INTERREG One of the Community Initiatives; presently operating under the
European Territorial Objective of cohesion policy
MERCOSUR Mercado Común del Sur (Common Market of the South)
xvi Abbreviations

MKRO Ministerkonferenz für Raumordnung (Standing Conference of

Ministers responsible for Regional Planning)
NAFTA North American Free Trade Association
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
NTCCP Network of Territorial Cohesion Contact Points
NUTS Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics
RTPI Royal Town Planning Institute
TENs Trans-European Networks
UK United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
US United States of America
VASAB Visions and Strategies around the Baltic Sea
INTRODUCTION

Is spatial planning for the EU? The answer depends on one’s view of planning and
the EU. To avoid any association with regulative land-use planning, the EU now
invokes the concept of territorial cohesion. However, the spatial planning I have
in mind is about formulating spatial or territorial frameworks, strategies or visions
framing, rather than regulating, spatial development. Framing gives points of view
to consider when contemplating action; regulation means insisting on specific out-
comes, or at least – success is not assured – attempting to do so.
Because of my view of strategic planning as framing, I persist in referring to
the EU practice I am discussing as spatial planning. Speaking to ministers of spatial
planning at Madrid in 1995, the then Commissioner for Regional Policy, Monika
Wulf-Mathies, did likewise. She argued for spatial planning as a way of integrat-
ing EU spatial policies. The ministers turned a deaf ear. They worked on an, as the
saying goes, intergovernmental document of their own, the ESDP. Under the next
French Commissioner Michel Barnier, now back as Commissioner for the Internal
Market and Services, the switch from spatial planning to territorial cohesion took
place. Materially, though, nothing has changed. Like spatial planning, territorial cohe-
sion policy is about integrating policies with a spatial impact.
The use of words thus depends on context and intentions. In opting for territo-
rial cohesion, the Commission wanted to break an impasse over its planning role.
My intention is to retain the link between EU territorial cohesion policy and planning
thought. To remind the reader of this my predilection to see European spatial plan-
ning and territorial cohesion policy properly conceived as one and the same, in this
book I sometimes say ‘European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy’.
The arena for discussing it is the EU policy to promote what, since Commission
President Jacques Delors, is called cohesion. That was when the Single European Act of
the mid-1980s stipulated a twin Community objective of economic and social cohesion.
Cohesion policy is central to the European project because of the emphasis,
ever since the European Community (EC) absorbed more Mediterranean Member
States than just Italy, on solidarity in the face of growing disparities. It is central also
because it invokes a form of governance involving subnational administrations and
other stakeholders.
Defending cohesion policy, Delors invoked a ‘European model of society’.
Many concepts, not only in European discourse, but in politics and planning in
general, are similarly broad and thus subject to multiple interpretations. Territorial
2 Introduction

cohesion may thus mean the pursuit of balanced development – the original concern
– but also of competitiveness, sustainability and good governance. Bas Waterhout
(2008) identifies these as storylines: Europe in balance; competitive Europe; green
and clean Europe and coherent European policy. There may be trade-offs and the
exact mix can be a bone of contention. To me the unique selling point of territorial
cohesion is the governance dimension, the aim being to ensure the coherence of
policies affecting territories, what Wulf-Mathies meant by spatial planning.
Like cohesion, coherence is French transposed into Euro-English. Where
Article 13(1) of the French text of the Treaty of Lisbon says cohérence, the English
one says ‘consistent’. The talk there is about the institutional framework of the EU
assuring the ‘consistency, effectiveness and continuity of its policies and actions’.
‘Coherence, effectiveness and continuity’ may have sounded more ambitious but
perhaps also vague to the English translator, so he or she opted for consistent, but
to my mind something got lost.
To illustrate the point, a look at Le Monde of 24 April 2009 is instructive.
There a commentator discussed strikers so angry about lay-offs that they were
locking up their managers. Their sequestrations made managers feel ‘the objective
solidarity of a firm, evident to the workers, which the managers in question evade …
They manifest a demand for coherence’.1 Conceived in this way, coherence stands
for solidarity, be it of the inhabitants of the planet or the members of a firm, was the
comment. Clearly, in French there is thus a world of thought behind coherence. It
connotes a holistic view. French planning schemes based on integrated surveys
of several communes are for instance called Schéma de cohérence territoriale.
‘Scheme of territorial consistency’, or rather its French equivalent consistance,
would not have worked.
In territorial cohesion policy, too, coherence seems to mean that policies must
be integrated and based on an appreciation of the territory and its potentials. Here
ambiguity creeps in. Territorial cohesion policy in the sense of promoting balanced
development is squarely in the realm of cohesion policy and under the Commissioner
for Regional Policy and the Directorate-General for Regional Policy (DG REGIO).
Where the emphasis within the composite rationale of territorial cohesion policy
shifts towards coherence, all EU policies with a spatial impact enter the picture. The
reach of territorial cohesion policy may thus be wider than cohesion policy alone.
It cuts across all EU policies. Such cross-cutting issues are also called ‘facets’.
They are difficult to deal with. Service providers, the developers of infrastructure, the
promoters of economic development, what in planning jargon is described as the

1 ‘la solidarité objective d’une enterprise, évident pour les ouvriers, mais à laquelle les dirigeants
en cause se dérobent … Elles manifestent une exigence de cohérence’.
Introduction 3

‘sectors’, have success criteria of their own: numbers of places at schools, reduction
of travel time and so forth. They dislike being interfered with. This raises the issue of
power within bureaucracies. The European Commission is no exception. DG REGIO
cannot meddle with those responsible for EU policies with a huge spatial impact,
such as the Common Agricultural Policy or the Trans-European Networks (TENs). If
policy coherence across the board were to be pursued in earnest, then new institu-
tional provisions would be needed.
Outcomes and effects of sector policies are more visible than the outcomes of
territorial cohesion policy knocking sense into them by making them more coherent.
This imbalance at the expense of planning pursuing policy coherence is made worse
by the otherwise understandable insistence on ex-ante, mid-term and ex-post evalua-
tion of EU policies where the cards are stacked against ‘soft’ in favour or ‘hard’ results.
Be all that as it may, coherence has always been the aim of spatial planning,
but the leopard is changing its spots. Where in the past planners have sought coher-
ence by insisting on land-use plans for every jurisdiction, presently the emphasis is
on strategies. Strategies cannot be imposed but want to be internalised. A common
approach is to elicit the cooperation of the multitude of actors concerned. Whereas
previously planners were under the illusion that sector policy makers would auto-
matically abide by their plans, now they enlist them and others as ‘stakeholders’.
So much for the title of this book: Cohesion stands for the policy arena where
the struggle over European spatial planning takes place and seeking coherence of
policies as they impact upon territory by means of cooperation for its mode of opera-
tion. The subtitle suggests that, if only under the territorial cohesion flag, European
spatial planning may be reaching maturity. The question mark signals awareness of
its uncertain future, dependent as it is on where European integration is heading.
In particular, the book traces the development of European spatial planning since
the early days of the EU. Conceived as the formulation, through mutual cooperation,
of spatial strategies, spatial planning could become a vehicle for achieving EU policy
coherence even beyond cohesion policy as such. Indeed, it could move to the core of
the European project.
Having thus identified my theme, I position the book in the literature; state my
assumptions; discuss European integration and explain the structure of the book.
First, though, I elaborate upon the distinction between regulatory and strategic spa-
tial planning.

Spatial planning modes

I start with regulatory planning. Like strategic planning, it is an ideal type. The
Schuster Report in the UK (Committee on Qualifications of Planners 1950) formu-
lated it, saying that for nearly all its activities the community depended on land, a
4 Introduction

limited resource, and that the location of development could have a profound effect
on social, economic and strategic goals. In preparing the plan, planning authorities
should thus integrate all policies, those of the government in addition to their own.
Note that Schuster equated community with planning authority, making it seem
self-evident that its statutory land-use plan should be the vehicle for safeguarding the
coherence between all policies relevant to its well-being. Usually there are additional
provisions also for overseeing the various plans to ensure their mutual compatibility
by way of higher-order plans or at least some broad guidelines and/or ex-post super-
vision of local planning. Local jurisdictions are thus conceived of as the containers of
human activity and these containers fill a larger national container.
Naturally land-use planning relies on legislation and planners are public serv-
ants. Land-use planning therefore suffers from any idiosyncrasies of government
systems, arbitrary boundaries between jurisdictions amongst them. Nor are bounda-
ries, other than the container view implies, insurmountable. So people vote with their
feet and firms play competing authorities off against each other and, anyhow, getting
projects off the ground may require more resources than any one jurisdiction can
muster, quite apart from their external effects. In the UK all these issues have led to
the promotion of the concept of spatial as an alternative to land-use, or what has
traditionally been termed town and country planning. There, spatial planning stands
for a strategic approach.
Before elaborating, a brief glance at the chequered history of this concept
seems appropriate. Coming from the German Raumplanung and the Dutch ruimtel-
ijke planning, its progressive connotation in UK English as described is something of
a puzzle. Ten years ago, in the European context the UK objected to spatial planning
championed by the Dutch as an umbrella term. This is how spatial development, as
in European Spatial Development Perspective, became a term of good currency.
Dutch and German planners, too, now prefer to talk about spatial development.
In giving spatial planning its present progressive meaning, UK planners are thus
the exception. Referring to the Royal Town Planning Institute’s ‘A New Vision for
Planning’ (RTPI 2001), Phil Allmendinger and Graham Haughton (2009) equate it
with a focus on the qualities and management of space and place.
For me, spatial planning as an ideal type is the opposite of regulatory plan-
ning. Its conception is different, but its advocates do not, of course, oppose land
use regulation. The mode of operation in strategic spatial planning is appreciating
a territory relevant to solving one or more issues and formulating appropriate joint
spatial strategies or visions. This is of course not a phenomenon only to be found
at European level. Scholars have identified ‘The New Spatial Planning’ at the level
of the devolved nations of the UK and in Ireland (Haughton et al. 2010; see also
Davoudi and Strange 2009). In fact strategic planning can apply at all levels. It
has everything to do with the shift from government to governance. According to
Introduction 5

Bob Jessop (2004), governance stands for developing mechanisms and strategies
of coordination in situations where there is complex reciprocal interdependence of
autonomous actors. Regulatory planning, too, has brought cooperation into practice
even before governance has become a term of good currency. This has been a way
of coping with arbitrary boundaries and the fact that planners have limited power
to actually shape development. By embracing cooperation, planning has thus been
ahead of its time, but it has remained within the context of government dealing with
fixed jurisdictions or hard spaces. Being problem-driven, spatial strategies or visions
relate to soft spaces. At the other end of the scale from statutory land-use planning
– hard planning for hard spaces – we thus find soft planning for soft spaces. One of
my conclusions will be that this is what territorial cohesion policy is about.

Positioning the book

The literature on European planning is rich yet also limited. Thus, there are published
PhDs and also occasional works by practitioners such as Michael Krautzberger
and Welf Selke (1996) on the German view and the former Commission official
Jean-François Drevet (2008) discussing EU regional policy. Planning academics,
though, do not in general write full-size books. There is the requirement of engag-
ing in contract research and of regular reporting of output, preferably in the form
of articles, special issues, conference proceedings and readers. The exception to
academics not writing full-size books on European planning are Ole Jensen and
Tim Richardson (2004). Writing about the exclusionary effects of the pursuit of a
‘frictionless Europe’ they strike a critical note but their language may not reach the
soldiers in the trenches.
The recent textbook by Stefanie Dühr, Claire Colomb and Vincent Nadin (2010)
on ‘European Spatial Planning and Territorial Cooperation’ destined to become a
standard text is in a category of its own for giving a much-needed overview of spatial
development and policies with a focus on the EU. Ernst-Hasso Ritter (2009) has
done a similar job for German readers. Not to forget, there is of course the seminal
work by Dick Williams (1996) on ‘European Union Spatial Policy and Planning’. Dick
has opened up this field of intellectual inquiry for which all concerned with European
spatial planning owe him gratitude.
My own previous European book, co-authored with Bas Waterhout (Faludi
and Waterhout 2002) was a case study of the ESDP. We avoided invoking plan-
ning theory. For better or for worse, I had dealt with theory before. Bringing it to
bear on European planning would have required reviewing the integration litera-
ture. I am an avid reader of the literature but it does not seem to play much of a
role in the minds of European planners. Where my understanding is that we need
to think about the EU outside the box of the nation-state, European planners seem
6 Introduction

stuck within it. This is true also for those such as Dick Williams invoking a suprana-
tional ideal. They also think in terms of an, albeit federal state, as if state formation
was the path towards integration.
Rather than grand theories on such lines, it is middle-range theories such as net-
working and learning that help me understand European planning. They explain the
persistence of experts in pursuing their course. Actors can make a difference but their
choices need to be understood against the backdrop of their respective opportunity
structures shaped by, amongst others, institutions. This is like ‘actor-centred institutional-
ism’, an approach associated with the name of Fritz Scharpf (1997). It means going back
and forth between portraying actors and their aspirations, including their bureaucratic
politics and the institutional context. It also means looking at how these actors sustain
or change, as the case may be, that context. Institutional context here is not the same
as organisations and procedures but includes structures of thought and action, like dis-
courses that bind organisations, procedures and actors together (Hajer 1995).
There is of course also politics involved in European planning, but not ‘high’ poli-
tics. Spatial planning has never reached the agenda of the College of Commissioners
nor of the Council of Ministers. The informal meetings of the relevant national ministers
that punctuate the development of European planning are no occasions for political
debates either. The interaction takes place between the often second-echelon experts
preparing them. This is ‘low’ politics in which interests and values are to some extent
open to redefinition. In my previous work I therefore focused, certainly not as the only
one, on the learning that goes on in European planning.
In this book there are two storylines. One is about how integration has raised
spatial or territorial issues and the second about the formulation of a body of ideas,
call it a programme, to meet these challenges. As the question mark behind the
subtitle of the book indicates, the future remains open. My message is that, as the
formulation of strategies or visions, European spatial planning needs to be soft, as
the spaces are to which it relates. Hard planning for hard spaces should be left to
national and subnational governments and/or sector policy makers who have the
means and authority to do so. European spatial planning cannot do any more than
formulate strategies, offering them to others to avail themselves of as they see fit.
Spatial planning at this level can never do more than formulating a discourse – a
programme – letting others get on with identifying whatever actions may flow from
it. This is where my assumptions about planning come in.

Assumptions about planning

A planning programme or discourse relates to what I have once described as my
planning theory ‘mark 3’, the sequel to mark 1 and 2 theories focusing on rational
decision making (Faludi 1998a). Rationality is not the issue here. The issue is that
Introduction 7

rational decision making presupposes a definition of the decision situation. Just as

actor-centred institutionalism, mark 3 theory sees defining decision situations as an
interactive process in settings that are themselves subject to change. In so doing,
it takes the communicative planning theory of the 1990s on board. The focus is on
the formulation and maintenance by the community of planning experts of something
I described as a ‘planning doctrine’ shaping the definitions of decision situations.
The occasion for talking about doctrine was the study of twentieth century
Dutch planning mentioned in the preface (Faludi and Van der Valk 1994). Doctrine
results from the application of a more general programme of thought and action to
a specific area. It comprises a spatial organisation principle – an appreciation of the
area concerned in terms of that programme – together with planning principles. In
the Dutch case the spatial organisation principle features the power house of the
country called the Randstad, or rim city, enveloping a ‘Green Heart’, a variant of
the Green Belt concept. Preserving this Green Heart is the key to preserving the
Randstad as a polycentric metropolis. The planning principles lead to the formation
of institutions, formal or otherwise, of planning.
Doctrine exists only where there is long-term continuity and consensus, commodi-
ties in short supply, but in the Netherlands of the latter parts of the twentieth century still
available. From this vantage point, Dutch planners took an interest in European planning.
As indicated, for me this formed the occasion for exploring this emerging art. Now, a
European doctrine comparable to the Dutch seemed a ‘bridge too far’ (Faludi 1996), but
this made me search for something like the same common outlook as in the Netherlands
in the European planning community. My focus became the formation of this community
and, if not of a doctrine, then at least a set of planning principles – a programme.
Another outcome of my previous planning-theoretical endeavours had been
the view that strategic plans should be assessed for whether they shape thinking
about subsequent decisions. With a sentence that has received some acclaim I said
once that they were about shaping minds, not places. Shaping places is for others.
Altogether, my view of planning is thus one of an interactive, multi-scalar commu-
nicative process embedded in institutional settings providing arenas for mutual
exchanges that are themselves subject to change.
Without invoking communicative planning as a concept, my work on ‘Planning
Theory’ (Faludi 1984) was already imbued with such ideas. Rational decision making
was a central issue but I also explored overall guidance in what I boldly described as
the planning society. At the same time I was trying to be realistic by emphasising the
difficulties. My conclusion was that meta-planning based on continuous monitoring
of the performance of the system overall was the solution. I never returned to these
ideas but they seem relevant for European spatial planning. This cannot mean a grand
design emanating from a grand Brussels office but the EU can help planning through-
out Europe to at least address some common issues, using common approaches. ‘It’s
8 Introduction

the economy, stupid’, was the slogan of Bill Clinton’s campaign against the incumbent,
President George H.W. Bush, in 1992. So I conclude: ‘It’s planning theory, stupid!’

European integration: basics

European integration is about initially no more than six states joining what was called
the Common Market. The number has increased since and may continue to do so
in future. The ‘Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion’ (CEC 2008) opens with a lyric
description of the territory concerned as reaching from the frozen tundra to the rain
forests of Guiana in South America! Indeed, France has declared some of its overseas
possessions to be part of the motherland and thus of Europe. So are the Spanish
enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on African soil (Figure 0.1). The Canary Islands, Madeira
and the Azores, the latter the venue of a 2007 meeting of EU planning ministers, joined
the group of ‘ultra-peripheral areas’ receiving special attention. For a while, Danish
Greenland, too, was inside but opted out no sooner than the opportunity presented
itself. A motley group of islands strewn around the British Isles is also outside. The EU

Figure 0.1 The EU territory reaches well beyond the European continent, as illustrated by this
map showing the EU as including the French department d’outre mer, or overseas
department, Guiana, one of Europe’s ‘ultra-peripheral regions’. As a curiosity, the map
also shows the only two EU territories in mainland Africa, the Spanish enclaves of
Ceuta and Melilla. (Source: OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment)
Introduction 9

territory is thus not coextensive with anything like the European continent, a difficult
geographic category in itself. Rather the territory is the outcome of political decisions.
National territories we recognise by their shapes because their images have
been imprinted in our collective memories. So far, the EU territory has not become
‘naturalised’. Also, the image is disturbing. Switzerland, Kaliningrad and the Western
Balkans form gaping holes and its territorial imprint is unstable to boot. Had the EU
not expanded, who knows, the shape might have taken root in our minds. As things
are, there is disquiet about where the outer border is – where Europe ends.
By way of contrast, the Council of Europe includes all states of Europe,
forty-seven in number, the only exception at present being Belarus with doubtful
credentials. So the Council of Europe covers the European continent comprehen-
sively, more so than the EU, but once again ambiguity creeps in. Turkey is a member,
and the territory thus includes Anatolia, by all reckonings in Asia. It also includes the
whole of the Russian Federation, making Europe so defined the next-door neighbour
of the US across the Baring Street (Figure 0.2).
European integration started with the European Coal and Steel Community
(ECSC) in 1951. Consisting of Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries,
it subjected basic industries constituting a potential for armaments production to an
international regime. This way, Germany could be admitted back into the fold. The
doomsday scenario which this should help avoiding was an isolated and impover-
ished Germany falling prey to Soviet domination. Later the ECSC had to deal, rather
than with the development of these basic industries, with phasing out some of them
adversely affected by global competition. Regional policy in the European Economic
Community (EEC), too, would deal with industrial conversion.

Figure 0.2 The Council of Europe covers a territory that stretches to the Bering Strait.
(Source: OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment)
10 Introduction

With the very same membership as the ECSC, the EEC started operating
in 1958. It assumed new tasks, accepted new members and restyled itself as the
European Community (EC) incorporating the ECSC and also Euratom set up to
develop the peaceful use of nuclear energy. In 1993, the EU came into existence as
the roof over three so-called ‘pillars’, of which the EC was the first. The two others
were: ‘Common foreign and security policy’ and ‘Police and judicial cooperation in
criminal matters’. Most of the action took place in the first pillar. Simply talking about
the ‘Union’, in the Treaty of Lisbon the pillars have disappeared. Whether Union will
become common usage remains to be seen. In this book, EU will do.
This EU may seem like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Association,
MERCOSUR, comprising of Argentine, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, or ASEAN,
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. They are all based on international trea-
ties between sovereign states. However, the EU features ‘supra-national’ elements:
decisions agreed following set rules becoming mandatory for the members to imple-
ment. Also, within the framework of the treaties, the Commission has the exclusive
right to make proposals for the consideration of the Council of Ministers represent-
ing the Member States and the European Parliament the citizens. The shorthand for
this is ‘Community Method,’ a treasured possession, but note that under the Lisbon
Treaty it is being eroded. Anyhow, European law adopted in this way takes prec-
edence over national law.
As indicated, both those for and against integration often think of the EU as an
embryonic state, but the American EU-watcher Jeremy Rifkin (2004) describes it as
the first postmodern governing institution. In it, formal powers, called competences,
are important. A shared competence under the Lisbon Treaty, territorial cohesion is
an example. Under the Community Method as described the Commission may make
proposals for it to become the subject of EU policy. For as long as it does not, it
remains a matter for the Member States, hence ‘shared’ competence.
In principle, therefore, the Commission can start the legislative process leading
to the adoption of either regulations or directives. Regulations have an immediate
impact. Directives need to be transposed into national law, keeping the legislative
machines of Member States extremely busy. However, this gives Member States
leeway for softening, adapting to national priorities and in the process modifying
Commission intentions, which is why Europeanisation does not lead to the uniformity
that people dread.
The Commission itself is the closest thing to a European government. However,
the way the Commission comes into being is unlike that applying to national gov-
ernments. The European Council of Heads of State and Governments elects the
President of the Commission by means of so-called Qualified Majority Voting, a sys-
tem by which the number of votes per Member State reflects its size – but not quite,
because the system is skewed in favour of the small ones – and in which decisions are
Introduction 11

carried only if a set percentage of the votes cast representing a set percentage of the
EU population – in each case more than 50 per cent – are in favour.
Once elected in this way, the European Parliament has to approve of the
President nominate, which is also true for the whole team of Commissioners, for
which all Member States, small or large, put forward one candidate each. Having
equal representation on the Commission is a bonus for the small Member States.
The definition of responsibilities of Commissioners is the privilege of the President,
with Member States lobbying for their candidates to be given a coveted portfolio. The
Commissioners are then sworn to serve the EU and not their countries of origin.
Thus formed, the College of Commissioners decides by majority voting on the
issues before them. With each Commissioner having his or her own portfolio reflecting
sectoral and, although less overtly, national concerns, Commissioners sometimes form
alliances. A former member of the political cabinet of one of the Commissioners, Derk-
Jan Eppink (2007) gives an insider view of the behind-the-scene processes going on.
Confusingly, next to the College of Commissioners, the Commission services are
also referred to as ‘the Commission’. In the literature on European spatial planning, this
work included, when speaking about the Commission, the reference is in fact to the
Directorate General for Regional Policy: DG REGIO. When it was still known as DG
XVI, DG REGIO was responsible for the Commission input into the ESDP and it will
be involved in any future territorial cohesion policy. Its chief responsibility is, however,
administering the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Cohesion
Fund. For this there are ‘country desks’. Hundreds of officials sit at such desks from
where they keep tabs on ‘their’ countries and regions, the focus naturally being the
spending of EU funds. There are also ‘horizontal units’. The unit ‘Urban Development,
Territorial Cohesion’ is responsible for, amongst others, territorial cohesion policy. It
is dwarfed by the magnitude of the task. Being short of personnel is endemic at the
Commission. Refusing to increase the establishment in proportion to the accretion of
responsibilities, Member States see to it that this remains so.
The Commission services are not homogenous. Each directorate general has
its own frame of reference. Some form coalitions with relevant national administra-
tions and/or outside interests. Coordination of all this is for the Secretary General
but one directorate general may also be given the lead. Thus, DG REGIO coordi-
nated the preparation of the ‘EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region’ adopted in
October 2009, an unusual and promising example of barriers in the way of formulat-
ing coherent strategy being overcome.
Arguing as always that, as a polity, the EU can be analysed as any other one, Simon
Hix (2008) points out that, with the European Parliament obtaining more and more pow-
ers and the party political make-up of the Commission more and more noticeable, there
are opportunities for achieving more coherence. The way he sees this is through the
majority in the European Parliament agreeing with the majority of Commissioners on
12 Introduction

policy directions. As a consequence he anticipates voters to become more involved in

European elections. The election of the first and second Barroso Commissions provided
evidence of party politics entering the scene but voter interest has yet to materialise.
Also, whether politicisation will help planning is open to doubt.
European integration as such is contested. The struggle is between advocates
of more Europe and defenders of national sovereignty. It is taking place, not only when
Member States negotiate over treaties, but also within and between EU institutions.
The Council of Ministers represents national governments, which is why an EU com-
petence does not mean Member States losing control. True, one or more members
may have to accept a disagreeable policy, but under unanimity, the smallest Member
State, smaller than the largest by a factor of two hundred, can block proposals. Thus,
proponents of more integration favour the extension of Qualified Majority Voting. The
Treaty of Lisbon has done precisely that, implying the danger of small Member States
losing to the larger ones because the latter carry more weight. In fact though, the small
ones are over-represented. In this respect the EU does resemble federations charac-
terised by territorial representation, but it has no ‘competence-competence’, or the
ability to adapt itself to changing circumstances. For this it depends on the Member
States revising the treaties, a process that requires unanimity and depends on the
vagaries of the procedures by which Member States ratify them.
The European Parliament, but above all the Commission and not to forget the
European Court of Justice and the consultative committees, the European Economic
and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions are pro-integration. The
position of the European Parliament is vexing. Essentially, the right of initiative
remains with the Commission. A common reflex is to give the European Parliament
more say. However, is this democratic? The composition of the European Parliament,
too, is skewed in favour of small Member States. It takes ten times as many votes
to become a Member of the European Parliament in a larger country than in the
smallest one, Malta. Of course, if each vote cast were to carry equal weight, then
Malta would hardly be represented. Still, where does this leave the principle that
citizens are equal? Also, although there are party-political line-ups in the European
Parliament, there are no European parties, no European newspapers and there is
no European public. Members of the European Parliament are elected by national
constituencies and not by a European-wide vote. Under such circumstances, how
can representative democracy function? European planners should reflect on these
issues and on whether the precepts of planning in a national context apply.

Structure of the book

It is convenient to organise historical narratives according to the stages of the devel-
opments described. The three stages identified in the development of the EU by
Introduction 13

John Keeler (2005) are: the launch era when the Treaty of Rome was coming into
operation, the doldrums entered into after a crisis provoked by French President
Charles de Gaulle and the boom era under Commission President Jacques Delors.
Invoking this threefold distinction, Liesbeth Hooghe and Gary Marks (2008) treat the
present crisis of confidence as yet another phase. Indeed, national governments and
their constituencies are now weary. The crisis led to a rupture in the development of
European spatial planning.
Taking the reader through these four stages: the launch era, the doldrums,
the boom era and the crisis I document the albeit halting development of an implicit
spatial or territorial policy long before the concept of territorial cohesion was even
invented. Ever since the early 1960s, the Commission has been seeking to render
this implicit policy more explicit and effective. Often Member States have either
ignored its arguments or, where there has been agreement in principle, sought to
weaken the policy during implementation. This tug-of-war is a reflection of the ambi-
guity of the European construct. Being their brainchild, Member States nonetheless
regard the EU with suspicion.
In all this, admittedly, European spatial planning is a side show, but by formu-
lating spatial strategies, it could become a vehicle, potentially not only for cohesion,
but for EU policy generally becoming more coherent. If so, then, maybe under the
guise of the ‘place-based approach’ propagated by Barca (2009) in his report on
the future of cohesion policy, spatial planning might flourish.
PART I

THE LAUNCH ERA1

This part is about the run-up to the Treaty of Rome establishing the EEC. By that
time, north-west European planners were already looking at the national and even
international scale and, as part of the welfare state, regional policy, often conceived
as industrialisation policy, had become a matter of national concern. The ECSC pur-
sued such a policy in a common framework. Its founding fathers, Jean Monnet and
the French foreign minister of Luxembourg origin who had grown up at Metz whilst it
was still German, Robert Schuman, saw this as the basis for peace in Europe – and
right they were! As the deputy head of the Dutch delegation negotiating the relevant
treaty, the former inmate of a German camp, Max Kohnstamm, became the Secretary-
General and Jean Monnet the President of the High Authority of the ECSC.
Dutch planners wanted to factor their concern, urban growth management,
into the equation, and they positioned their country situated in the Rhine Estuary in a
European context. Such ‘spatial positioning’ – the term having been coined by Dick
Williams – is an important element of strategic spatial planning. In line with Dutch
policies towards European integration – the Dutch were amongst its most ardent
proponents – the planning elite engaged foreign colleagues in discussions. This is
what Chapter 1 ‘Planners going international’ is about.
The Spaak Report, named after the Belgian foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak,
laid the foundations for the Treaty of Rome. There was recognition that the removal
of customs barriers, one of the main aims of what was quickly dubbed the Common
Market, would change geography to the detriment of some and the advantage of oth-
ers. Putting what we now call cohesion on the wish list, Spaak proposed a regional
fund and, so as to ensure coherence between national regional policies and the
policies of the future EEC, he advocated their coordination.
The Treaty of Rome paid no more than lip service to cohesion and to the coher-
ence of national and Community policies. Participation of subnational authorities
and other stakeholders in Common Market policy making was not even considered.

1 In this part I draw on work with Wil Zonneveld and also on a master thesis we supervised by
Erwin Klerkx (1998) Planning met Europa: Nederlandse pleidooiën voor een bovennationaal
ruimtelijk beleid, at the University of Njmegen. Part of the work has been published in Dutch:
Zonneveld, W. (2010) Grenzeluse ambities: Nederlandse pleidooien voor internationale
ruimtelijke plannen (1929–1957). Stadsgeschiedenis 5, pp. 39–55.
North-west European planners continued to pursue their ideal of supranational
planning. A new impetus came from the Parliamentary Assembly, as the European
Parliament was then called. Obliging the Assembly, the European Commission
made far-reaching, but in the end ineffective proposals for the EEC to pursue a
regional policy. Chapter 2 ‘Dashed expectations: the Treaty of Rome’ is about this
period which led to European integration entering the doldrums.
CHAPTER 1

PLANNERS GOING INTERNATIONAL

It is a fortunate phenomenon that town planning and, closely related to it as it is,

social housing, have become the subject of international cooperation.
This book is clear proof that there are no tariff barriers between town
planners all over the entire world seeking earnestly to create an acceptable
basis for the life of humankind.1

Joël M. de Casseres, whom Patrick Abercrombie obliged by writing these words

into his first book was an exemplar of an international planner. Having studied at Dresden,
this Dutchman passed the external examination of the Town Planning Institute, proudly
calling himself Associate Member of the Town Planning Institute, only to continue to
study and work in Paris. Upon his return to the Netherlands, he published not only this
book, but also a barrage of papers. He would claim in 1929: ‘Planning cannot be con-
strained within spatial boundaries; its area of responsibility is the entire world’.2
The roots of this internationalism go back some way. Already before the Great
War, albeit on a more modest scale than now, there had been international con-
ferences. This continued in the 1920s and 1930s. After World War II, planners
resumed their contacts, by which time the situation was much more propitious for
international cooperation. Protectionism was deemed to have been responsible for
the depression of the 1930s and indirectly for World War II, and the geopolitical
situation demanded western European cooperation. In a celebrated speech, the
wartime UK leader then out of power, Winston Churchill, held out the prospect of
a United States of Europe and the US made cooperation a condition of assistance
under the Marshall Plan. This led to the formation of the Organisation for European
Economic Cooperation, what we now know as the much respected Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development with a worldwide remit. There will

1 ‘Het is een gelukkig verschijnsel, dat de stedebouw en de daarmede zoo nauw verbonden
volkshuisvesting, onderwerp van internationale samenwerking zijn geworden.
Dit boek is een duidelijk bewijs, dat er geen tariefmuren bestaan tusschen de stebouwers, die
over de geheele wereld ernstig arbeiden om een redelijke basis te scheppen voor het leven
der mensheid’. (Patrick Abercrombie, Foreword in Joël M. de Casseres. 1926. Stedebouw.
Amsterdam: A.L. van Looy. p. xvi.)
2 ‘Aan de planologie kunnen geen ruimtelijke grenzen gesteld worden, de geheele aarde is haar
arbeitsveld’. (J.M. Casseres. 1929. Grondslagen der Planologie. De Gids. 93, pp. 371–372.)
18 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

be occasion to refer to its first President, the Frenchman Robert Marjolin, later to
become Vice-President of the European Commission.
In this chapter I discuss the emergent ideas and describe the arenas for dis-
cussion. In them, planners identified problems requiring joint responses. Already
during the Great War, the reconstruction of Belgium drew international attention,
amongst others from Patrick Geddes. Reims had been at the front line and the
city and its cathedral where French kings had been anointed had suffered griev-
ously. German war indemnities and American foundations paid for an international
reconstruction effort. The League of Nations was expected to form an arena for
international planning. After World War II, more widespread destruction once more
demanded vigorous responses including rebuilding the industrial base.
In this chapter, the reader may sense a Dutch bias. For this there are two
reasons. First, there is documentation on the role of Dutch planners. I also have
information on early German planning ambitions, but these were more about the
geopolitical ideology of German Lebensraum (space for living) than about inter-
national cooperation (Mäding and Strubelt 2009). Fortunately, the Nazis were
defeated, so, even though a World-War-II history buff, I do not discuss their planning
ideas. Second, it is a fact that, pursuing a cooperative approach, the Dutch were at
the core of the European planning lobby. I discuss the roots of their internationalism
first. Then I sketch out the emergent European planning programme. The last sec-
tion, ‘Outlook’, gives a preview of where things were headed.

Dutch internationalism
Widely travelled as he was, Patrick Geddes had connections in the Francophone
world, eventually setting up his private planning school at Montpellier. Raymond
Unwin was what today one might call a peace campaigner. That Dutch planners, too,
should have been active on the international scene is not surprising. Because of the
Boer War pitting the British Empire against Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, sympathies
for the UK were mooted. Anyway, the country had strong social, cultural and eco-
nomic ties with Germany. Other than with Belgium, its neutrality had been respected
during the Great War, so the country was well-placed for promoting international
exchanges. The Dutch were also good at languages – at that time not only English,
but also German and French. The one and only Dutch planning journal faithfully
reported on international developments. The Netherlands became the venue also for
international conferences.
That exemplar of an international planner, De Casseres, was thus a young
speaker at a 1924 International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association
conference at Amsterdam, with planners from the US, the UK, his mentor Patrick
Abercrombie and Raymond Unwin amongst them, participating. The German
Planners going international 19

pioneer of regional planning, Kurt Schuhmacher, was also in attendance. Through

such channels, planning initiatives in the US – metropolitan park systems, but also
Thomas Adams’ work on New York – and in the UK – garden cities and garden
suburbs – became sources of inspiration. The Dutch pioneer Theo van Lohuizen
presented a map showing the emergent pattern of urban development at the scale
of the western Netherlands and ideas of a national plan for the preservation of open
space were floated. This was to be translated into the virulent planning concepts
Randstad and Green Heart mentioned for shaping perceptions and actions of
Dutch planners. Planners would thus put national planning and in some cases – De
Casseres was not the only one – international planning on the agenda. Under its
present name of International Federation for Housing and Planning and benefiting
from a grant from the Dutch National Spatial Planning Agency, this international
arm of the garden cities movement would eventually find a home at The Hague.
The International New Towns Association and the International Society of City and
Regional Planners would follow suit, making the seat of the Dutch government a
focal point of international planning.
On a different tack, in 1930 the International Industrial Relations Association
held a World Economic Planning Congress at Amsterdam, where amongst oth-
ers it discussed Soviet economic planning. This was the time of fervent debates.
Architects and planners – Le Corbusier, Ernst May from Germany, Max Stam from
the Netherlands and his German wife Lotte and also Otto Neurath from Austria
were under contract by the Soviet authorities. A member of the Vienna Circle of
Philosophers, Neurath was also a theorist of central economic planning. He came to
the Netherlands as a refugee from an Austrian regime persecuting Social-Democrats
like himself, to be followed by Karl Mannheim fleeing from Nazi persecution of Jews
and leftist intellectuals alike. The first German edition of the foundational planning
theory text, ‘Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction’ was published in the
Netherlands (Mannheim 1935), the temporary home to many exiles. From there,
Mannheim, like Neurath, would flee to England, Neurath in a crowded life boat req-
uisitioned under the noses of the German invaders by three students from Delft
University of Technology.
Dutch urban designers were of course involved in the Congrès Internationaux
d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Since 1930, the author of the Amsterdam General
Extension Plan, Cornelis van Eesteren, was its president. One of the CIAM activities
was an international comparison of cities. The idea was to compile an encyclopaedia.
The German Ernst Neuffert had conceived of such an encyclopaedia, still in use, for
architecture. Nowadays, collections of norms and standards are common in planning.
A 1936 International Planning Congress in Paris specifically discussed
national planning. Participants took note of the New Deal and the Tennessee Valley
Authority. By that time, Hitler had taken over, centralised administration and set up
20 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

the Reichsstelle für Raumordnung (Reich Office for Spatial Ordering) as a national
agency with a minister responsible. Whilst keeping their distance from Nazi ideol-
ogy, Dutch planners were favourably impressed by the Germans bringing something
into practice that they themselves had advocated. They had no idea that in 1940
Germany would occupy their country.
Large-scale planning was thus topical in the 1930s. Its scope went beyond
land use and urban development. Van Lohuizen, already mentioned, had identified
industrial development as the engine of growth. In 1935, under the impression of
the same crisis to which the New Deal was a response, the future Nobel Laureate
Jan Tinbergen published proposals on behalf of the Social Democrats for a plan to
refloat the economy. In the UK, the Barlow Report put gross regional disparities on
the agenda and recommended a central authority making a plan for dispersal away
from congested urban areas. Returning from a visit in the US, De Casseres (1939)
wrote another book, this time on the New Deal, surely not the only accolade of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt from a planner.
In the Netherlands a Commission of State proposed a national survey and
land-use plan but this was to be regulatory without provisions for actively interven-
ing in development. In May 1940, one of the members, later to become the second
and longest-serving national planning director, received its report in the field ready
to defend the country against German aggression, but within days the Netherlands
was overrun and set to suffer five years less five days of occupation.
As pernicious German war aims of a Europe dominated by the Reich seemed
to come within reach, German planners were swarming out to harness resources
in the occupied countries, including the Netherlands. This was an exploitative and
in central and eastern Europe nothing short of murderous kind of planning. The
Generalplan Ost (General Plan East) was counting on whole populations to evapo-
rate, one now knows how, making room for a Blutwall – a wall of settlers of German
blood – against the Slavs.
The twists and turns of Dutch planning under German occupation are of no con-
cern here. Suffice it to say that the Germans became the midwives of Dutch national
planning. The intention was to pre-empt the Germans planning the country with its ports
as outlets of a Nazi-dominated continent. Such plans existed but were more figments
of the imagination of German experts than expressions of official policy (Figure 1.1).
Without much ado and with approval of the German overlords wanting to minimise
interference with Dutch administration, a Dutch national planning agency was set up by
the very advocates of national planning on the Commission of State that had published
its report on the eve of the war. The planning community welcomed this windfall profit
of the occupation, the fulfilment of ambitions that would otherwise have been unreal-
istic. The agency came under suspicion after the war. Finding himself in the liberated
south of the country in 1944, its chief administrator Claas Albertus van Gorcum sent a
Planners going international 21

Figure 1.1 A German expert sent from the Reich to supervise Dutch national planning had a
vision of the position of the country in a continent dominated by Germany. (Source:
Roloff, H. (1941) Die Niederlande im Umbruch der Zeit. Würzburg: Konrad Tritsch)

memorandum to the government in exile in London. In it, he pleaded the case of national
planning, pointing out its essential role in preparing the expected peace conference
with possible territorial alignments at the expense of Germany in its wake.
This was not fanciful. The Dutch government in exile had already considered
the postwar context. One consideration was that, as would eventually happen,
Germany would have to be brought back into the fold whilst bringing its potential for
armaments production under an international regime. The outlook was thus interna-
tional, the opposite of prewar Dutch neutrality. The other, somewhat contradictory
consideration was the demand for German territory, perhaps even after removing the
population in parts or as a whole, as retribution for the unprovoked German attack
and occupation (Lademacher 1990).
Indeed, in the Netherlands there was a groundswell of support for annexation
(Figure 1.2). As the secretary general of a pressure group, the national planning direc-
tor became involved. The lobby invoked arguments similar to those employed by the
Germans to justify their conquests: pressure of population growth, but also national
defence and grandeur. However, the Dutch realised that reconstructing their economy
depended on relations with the German hinterland: the cool consideration of what
the postwar world would look like already evident in the first position taken by the
22 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Figure 1.2 An evocative cartoon showing the Netherlands protected by a front garden on German
soil. (Source: Spier, J. (1945) Onze schulden zijn hun schulden. The Hague: Elsevier)

government in exile. Anyhow, the territory under consideration belonged to the British
zone of Germany. In the end the transfer amounted to no more than a few scores of
square kilometres to be returned only years later to a Germany that had become part
of the western European alliance. The second planning director, Jasper Vink, became
an ardent proponent of international cooperation including Germany.

An emergent programme
A decade after the end of the war Dutch internationalism had thus reasserted itself.
This was not simply a matter of idealism. National planners saw tangible reasons
for advocating an international upper layer of the planning hierarchy. Higher popula-
tion density and more international exchanges were intensifying spatial interaction,
requiring planning to operate on a larger scale.
I first discuss the conceptualisations of Dutch planners of their national terri-
tory which they eventually also applied in a European context. Their relevant work
Planners going international 23

was the object of international admiration. In Germany national planning had been
discredited. It would take a weighty expert report before a weak form of planning at
the federal level would get off the ground two decades after the end of World War II.
By that time the federal states, or Länder, formed at the behest of the Western allies
after the war had become going concerns. They were each operating a planning
system of their own. To the present day, federal planning remains weak, a point to
which I shall return. As regards economic development, the aversion against plan-
ning was pronounced, especially under the Minister of Economic Affairs, later the
second Federal Chancellor, Ludwig Erhard.
Among other north-west European partners, the Dutch had no equals either.
Other than in the Netherlands, accused of collaboration, the Belgian planning elite
had been replaced. France was of course engaged in its innovative postwar pro-
gramme of indicative economic planning, but the emphasis was on investments.
Powerful arguments for looking at spatial imbalances already existed but it would
take until the early-1960s before they would be acted upon.
What follows is an account of the thinking underlying Dutch national planning
since the 1920s. As elsewhere, the beginnings of planning were modest and the main
emphasis on regulating development. Planners intended to check suburban develop-
ment and protect open space, especially in the western Netherlands. In 1921, Marinus
Jan Granpré Molière, otherwise not my favourite because of his view of planning as
an extension of architecture, made an eloquent statement of what planning in this
situation was about. ‘Town planning’, he said, ‘is about cohesion, cohesion of town
and country, of culture and nature; it is about cohesion between the individual and the
community, town planning is the product of society, the product of successive genera-
tions. Town planning is a linchpin between the past and the future’.3
Thus, the scope of planning needed to exceed local jurisdictions, but the areas
concerned were smaller than the Dutch provinces. They formed ‘regional gaps’ in
planning and administration. The planners proposed special purpose authorities run
by experts to fill them. Their second-best option was planning under the provincial
executives. There they were hoping to be able to do what they thought right: allocate
land to its optimal use. Planning was, after all, not for short-sighted local politicians
but required surveys by experts. Planners should then adjudicate between claims
on land, a scarce resource in the Netherlands. The rationale for land-use planning
discussed in the Introduction seemed evident to Dutch planners.

3 ‘Stedebouw is samenhang, samenhang van stad en land, van cultuur en natuur; het is de samen-
hang van enkeling en gemeenschap, aan den stedebouw bouwt de samenleving, bouwen de
achtereenvolgende geslachten. Stedebouw is een schakel van verleden en toekomst’ (Granpré
Molière, M.J. 1921. Ter Inleiding. Tijdschrift voor Volkshuisvesting. p. 4.)
24 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Nonetheless, planning above the local scale became a matter of voluntary

cooperation between the very local councils whom the planners considered short-
sighted and prone to give in to pressure from speculators. Under the relevant
provisions, only one regional plan ever reached the statute book but there were
many informal studies allowing planners to hone their skills.
The next, more far-reaching proposal – the one the future second planning
director received in the field – was for an expert committee charged with surveying
the whole country and producing a national plan. Regional and local plans falling into
line should form a seamless hierarchy of statutory land-use plans, each articulated in
terms fitting to its scale.
After World War II, planners extended this logic to the international scale.
Indeed, De Casseres had already said in 1929: ‘From the national to the interna-
tional plan it is only one step. Much as the regional plan arises from the municipal
plan, from the national plan will most assuredly spring the international cooperation
in the planning field’.4 As far as wishing planning on the international scale and
without acknowledging the pioneering work of this, admittedly controversial author,
national planners concurred with him.
Dutch practice, however, was different from the ideal of a plan hierarchy.
Although on the statute book, a national plan was never a viable proposition, but there
was a national planning agency, as indicated set up under the occupation regime in
1941. It shifted gear away from insisting on a national plan towards its impressive tra-
dition of indicative national planning documents based on research and wide-ranging
discussions with stakeholders for which the Netherlands would get acclaim.
Planning was however no longer a matter exclusively of regulating land use.
To aid postwar recovery, regional policy became common in Europe (Vanhove and
Klaassen 1980; Drevet 2008). Coal and steel were of course basic to reconstruc-
tion. As indicated, they came under the regime of the ECSC. Issues of urban growth
management were expected to arise in the hotspots of production, so planners
wanted to be involved. Similarly, after the Great War, the need to increase coal pro-
duction in the Ruhr Area to pay war indemnities in kind had required new housing
with attendant facilities for mine workers, the reason for setting up the first German
regional planning agency in 1920.
There was thus recognition of the interrelation between industrial and urban
and regional development already identified by Van Lohuizen in the 1930s. For this

4 ‘Van het nationale naar het internationale plan is slechts een stap. Evenals uit het beperkte
gemeentelijke plan het streekplan groeit; met even grote zekerheid zal uit het national plan
de internationale samenwerking op planologisch gebied geboren worden’. (J.M. de Casseres.
1929. Grondslagen der planologie. De Gids. 93. p. 384.)
Planners going international 25

reason, Dutch planners would have liked to bring industrial development under their
control. They argued that a form of planning with say over investments should come
under the Prime Minister, but planning remained marginal. From their position of
underdogs, the planners then sought to demonstrate that unbridled development,
especially in the west where the ports made for the best conditions for locating
heavy industry, would result in overcrowding and loss of open space.
Whilst industrial development eluded their control, managing urban growth
in this densely populated corner of Europe did become the planners’ province.
Exceptionally, the Dutch population had grown during the war and growth con-
tinued, raising concerns about overpopulation and the loss of open space. The
doomsday scenario was one of a sea of houses, an example of persuasive storytell-
ing (Figure 1.3). The Central Statistical Bureau even expected twenty million or more
inhabitants by the year 2000, thus exacerbating the felt need for growth control
through planning. In fact, by 2000 the population reached sixteen million but this
miscalculation is not the issue here.
Because of the pressure on land, planners wanted industry to be diverted
away from the hotspots towards less developed areas. Exceptionally, in a docu-
ment published jointly with the Dutch economic think tank in 1956 spatial planners
and economic policy makers agreed on this. As indicated, the west of the country
benefited from the sea ports, but these locations should be reserved for industries
that need access to them. The position of the world-class port of Rotterdam was,
and still is, a national concern. It is considered a ‘mainport’, with Schiphol Airport
another example. Naturally, connections to the hinterland are an issue, above all the
Rhine, once described as Europe’s ‘main street’. Already operational, the Rhine-
Main-Danube Canal may one day extend it to the Black Sea.
Viewing Europe as their hinterland, Dutch planners reached out to their col-
leagues, including planners from the German Federal Republic. In their minds, they
supplemented the Dutch planning hierarchy with one more, supranational level,
essentially to pursue the same programme of controlling urban growth. International
examples provided the ammunition. With an eye on the Atlantic Seaboard of the US
(Gottman 1961), and inspired by work by Imre Kormoss of the Collège de l’Europe
at Bruges – a creation of the European Movement – planners painted the sce-
nario of a future megalopolis stretching from the Netherlands to the Ruhr Area and
the Belgian urban agglomeration. The south east of the UK and the north of Italy
were included to form a shape much like what in the late-1980s would be dubbed
the ‘Blue Banana’ (Figure 1.4). According to the first national planning report of
1960, within 600 kilometres of the mouth of the River Rhine lived 40 per cent of the
Europeans, give and take 150 million people. The strategy was the same as in the
Dutch context: to demonstrate that unchecked urban growth would create problems
and thus require a planning response.
26 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Figure 1.3 The ‘sea of houses’ threatening to swamp the Netherlands. (Source: Nederlandsche
Maatschappij voor Nijverheid en Handel (1964) De stedelijke ontwikkeling in
Nederland. Pre-adviezen voor de 181ste Algemene Vergadering te Nijmegen op
10 juni. The Hague: Elsevier)

Indeed, planners everywhere had argued that growth needed to be checked.

As is well known, the growth of London had stimulated Ebenezer Howard to propose
garden cities. It was only after the best science at the time showed that Amsterdam
would not exceed the one-million mark – Amsterdam’s population never came close
– that the idea of a garden city which had been the occasion for holding the 1924 con-
gress discussed above was shelved. The idea resurfaced in the 1960s when new and
Planners going international 27

Figure 1.4 The European ‘megalopolis’ based on population density. Each dot represents
5,000 inhabitants. The three shades of grey represent 10, 50 and 200 inhabitants
respectively per square kilometre. (Source: Nota inzake de Ruimtelijke Ordening van
Nederland (1960) The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij; circle added)

extended towns were developed to stem suburban growth. In France, too, the growth
of Paris was deemed to be sapping the rest of the country of its energy and creating in
the provinces le desert français, the French desert (Gravier 1947). This would become
the generative metaphor of aménagement du territoire, the French form of planning,
its chief instrument being, not growth control but state support for developing coun-
terweights to Paris. On the scale of the Paris metropolis and other metropolitan areas,
large-scale urban development took place, creating amongst others the now infamous
banlieus where the immigrant population is congregating. There are also French new
towns but they are less well-known than those under the New Towns Act in the UK.
The European strategy proposed by the Dutch, too, included the idea of redi-
recting growth away from the core to the periphery. For this purpose, a broad-brush
European spatial plan was needed (Steigenga 1964). Another idea was that of pro-
tecting what the Dutch identified as a ‘Green Heart’, like their own but on a larger
scale, within the triangle formed by the Randstad Holland, the Ruhr Area and the
28 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

agglomerations in Belgium and Northern France. Controlling urban growth by means

of preserving green corridors and the like was a Dutch article of faith.
There was an added incentive to argue for planning on the international scale.
As indicated, the Dutch national planning agency had a hard time. Reconstruction
was top priority and so was the development of industry badly needed to generate
foreign cash. The national planning agency was dwarfed by the spending depart-
ments. European institutions embracing planning would improve its standing, or so
planners thought. What they and their international colleagues had in mind was for
Europe to create some supranational planning institution or other.

The international context

Before World War II, the League of Nations had been the planners’ obvious choice
of an international agency to assume a planning role. As the war drew to a close, in
an effort to legitimise national planning with its doubtful pedigree, as indicated Dutch
national planners argued that an international plan of sorts was needed to prepare
for the expected peace conference. Each country should thus have delegated its
key experts to some inter-European institutions. As the post-war division of Europe
settled in and western European integration came on the horizon, planners directed
their attention, first to the ECSC and soon to the EEC, forerunner of the EU.
Recognition of the need for cooperation, in the first instance not in planning
but in economic policy in general, had come early. Already in 1944, the respective
governments in exile in London had set up the Benelux Economic Union, in many
respects an experimental field in European integration. In the 1950s, spatial planning
became one of the areas in which the Benelux operated. In the 1980s, the planners
would produce an outline sketch of the three countries, the first transnational plan-
ning document ever to be adopted. At around the turn of the millennium, the exercise
was to be repeated (Figure 1.5).
In 1949, the Dutch hosted a conference at The Hague, with Winston Churchill
in attendance, leading to the formation of the Council of Europe with initially ten
Member States and not to be confused with the EEC. The idea of turning it into a
stronger institution than it actually was, and still is, foundered on British objections.
The Council of Europe would, however, provide channels for planning cooperation.
A leading figure in all this was the Dutch foreign minister Johan Willem Beyen, an
unsung father of European integration. He had taken the initiative for the 1949 confer-
ence and was the one to propose the EEC. Turning to planning more in particular, the role
of a leading member of the Dutch planning elite, Johannes Linthorst Homan, in high-level
negotiations on European integration will be discussed soon. This is merely to sketch
the background shaped by the positive attitude of the Dutch elite towards international
cooperation. The Dutch people were still trustful of whatever the elites came up with.
Planners going international 29

Figure 1.5 The second structural outline for the Benelux. The map shows the chain of urban
networks and the main cities as well as the capitals of the Benelux countries.
(Source: Sécretariat general Union économique Benelux (1996) Espace de
coopération: Deuzième Esquisse de Structure Benelux. Brussels)

Outlook
As far as Dutch planners were concerned, the situation was thus ripe for interna-
tional cooperation. In the terms of Granpré Molière, they pursued ‘cohesion between
30 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

town and country’ wherever it took them, in the first instance into the ‘regional gap’,
the soft space between municipal and provincial jurisdictions. In this gap, they would
have preferred to establish a technocratic regime, with regional planning under pro-
vincial authority the second-best option. When their worst-case scenario, voluntary
inter-municipal planning came out of the box, they started looking to the national level.
Their preference was for expert-driven planning under the highest authority in the land.
This apparently inexorable movement up the plan hierarchy continued after the
war, driven by the belief that the higher up you go, the more of a chance you have
that (a) the spatial or territorial stretch of problems is contained within the area of
jurisdiction; (b) there will be funds for the necessary work surveying and analysing
problems; (c) there will be the political support needed to give expert planning teeth.
It was at the European level also that planners hoped to be able to attain coherence
of sector policies. Compensating for a weak national position would continue to be a
motivation for going into Europe. The next chapter shows that Dutch planners tried,
but often to no avail.
CHAPTER 2

DASHED EXPECTATIONS
THE TREATY OF ROME

The restriction to purely economic matters is, however, insufficient. Man’s life is
… determined and influenced by many more factors than solely by economic
ones … . Economic planning must therefore be part of a comprehensive form of
spatial planning of Europe and in particular north-west Europe.1

These lines by the chief planner of North Rhine-Westphalia, Norbert Ley, in the
Festschrift for Jasper Vink at the occasion of his retirement express the widely held
view amongst European top planners that the EEC should engage in spatial planning.
This reflected the internationalism to which the Dutch and the Benelux countries more
generally subscribed. As indicated, an international architecture had always been a
dream of planners seeing themselves as playing a key role in creating the new Europe.
There have been attempts to inject such considerations into the proceedings lead-
ing to the Treaty of Rome. The Netherlands may have been the only country to have one
of its planners, Linthorst Homan, attending the Messina Conference laying its founda-
tions. He was in the end a co-signatory, on behalf of the Dutch government, of the Treaty
of Rome, but his arguments for giving the EEC a planning role were to no avail. Through
an international network, planners continued to explore the options. Eventually, this was
to crystallise in a European planning programme, the topic of Part II.
There was a parallel line of reasoning to the effect that, aiming to create a
Common Market, the EEC should engage, if not in spatial planning then at least in a
regional policy giving support to areas negatively affected. This did find its way into
the Spaak Report. Spaak chaired the group entrusted by the Messina Conference
with preparing the Treaty of Rome. Before discussing his report and its, as far as
regional policy is concerned, meagre effects, I elaborate on the international force
field in which the Dutch operated. Then I relate the continuing planning initiatives
in the framework of the Conference of the Regions of North-West Europe, a pri-
vate association incorporated under Belgian law and sponsored by various planning

1 ‘Die Beschränkung auf rein wirtschaftliche Aspekte ist jedoch nicht ausreichend. Das Leben
des Menschen wird … von viel mehr Faktoren bestimmt und beeinflusst als nur von wirtschaftli-
chen. … Die ökonomische Planung muss daher in eine umfassende Raumplanung Europas
und vordringlich Nordwesteuropas einbezogen werden’. (Norbert Ley. 1967. ‘Die Zukunft der
Raumordnung in Nordwesteuropa’, in Wegwijzers naar een goed bewoonbaar Nederland.
Alphen aan den Rijn: Samsom. pp. 145–157.)
32 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

agencies; the Dutch National Spatial Planning Agency prominent amongst them.
Attention then shifts to the Parliamentary Assembly, forerunner of the European
Parliament, underlining the need, previously having been given short shrift by the sig-
natories of the Treaty of Rome, for regional policy. As usual, in the Outlook section I
briefly take this story further by pointing out the recurring initiatives of the European
Parliament on the one hand and of Dutch planners on the other.

Opposing visions of Europe

Dutch views were often the opposite of those of Charles de Gaulle. Had he remained
in office after the war, Europe would have taken a different shape. During the war, de
Gaulle had of course been the leader of the Free French operating from London and
from parts of the French Empire taking his, rather than the side of the Vichy Regime in
mainland France collaborating with the Germans. De Gaulle held party politics responsi-
ble for the demise of France in 1940. Next to the Germans and Vichy, his enemies were
the likes of Jean Monnet whom he suspected to be the fifth column of the Americans
and the British in their alleged plot to subjugate the rest of the world and to dismantle
the French Empire in the process (Gallo 1998). As the head of the provisional govern-
ment, de Gaulle therefore as soon as possible sent troops into battle in Germany and
fought tooth and nail for a French occupation zone and a seat at the negotiating table
discussing the postwar settlement. When prewar French political habits re-established
themselves, he left for the wilderness setting up his own political movement.
On basis of his strong views on sovereignty, de Gaulle was not enamoured with
the ECSC. Monnet was after all its President. Still a moral force, his strictures against
the European Defence Community contributed to its rejection by the French parlia-
ment. European integration was thrown off course, which is when the Dutch Foreign
Minister Beyen stepped in with a plan, named after him, for economic integration. The
Dutch always wanted the UK on board, but still fixated on their Commonwealth and
what they saw as their privileged partnership with the US, the UK pulled out.
The Dutch, seconded by their Benelux partners, always saw economic integra-
tion as an indirect route to political integration. Weakened by its failure to get the
European Defence Treaty through parliament and harassed by colonial wars the
French government was not in top form in the mid-1950s. Germany wanted to be
rehabilitated, seeing integration as the way to achieve this aim. The scene was set
for the negotiations leading to the EEC. Ironically, in the same year when it started
operating, de Gaulle came back into power. After a transition period the Treaty of
Rome foresaw in Qualified Majority Voting, a procedure explained in the Introduction
as implying that countries could be overruled. De Gaulle considered this an affront
to sovereignty. This is the background to the dashed expectations and of Europe
entering the doldrums, a period discussed in Part II, but at this point it is convenient
Dashed expectations 33

to already take the story of opposing visions of Europe forward. This is because,
having opposed the activist Hallstein Commission, de Gaulle would subsequently
promote German-French reconciliation, attending mass together with the post-war
German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer at Reims Cathedral, symbol-ridden because,
as mentioned, it had been bombarded by German artillery during the Great War. De
Gaulle was thus not against European cooperation but his avowed idea was that of
a continental Europe of sovereign fatherlands counteracting the Anglo-Saxons and
this is where he encountered the Dutch Anglophiles.
In albeit milder form, the issue of sovereignty which Charles de Gaulle articulated
so urgently is still with us. Later it will be evident, though, that rather than as a force to
be opposed, the French under President François Mitterand would regard Europe as an
instrument to protect French interests and to promote French grandeur globally.
The Dutch, as against this, were of a different alloy. Like their Benelux partners,
once more, they had no qualms about the Common Market leading to political integra-
tion. When the Treaty of Maastricht was being negotiated under a Dutch Presidency
of the European Council, they thought that the time was ripe for a much more supra-
national construct. With Belgium their only supporter, they got a bloody nose on what
Dutch diplomatic circles called ‘Black Monday’. The Treaty of Maastricht establishing
the EU was thus less ambitious, keeping foreign policy and home affairs outside the
policy areas where the Community Method applied. The Dutch have turned much less
enthusiastic since and this is discussed later.

A planner in high politics

Returning to the decisive mid-1950s when Johannes Linthorst Homan was involved
in the negotiations concerning European integration, I discuss his efforts to include
planning in the Treaty of Rome.
Like many members of the planning elite, Johannes Linthorst Homan was not
a professional planner. The elite rather consisted mostly of administrators, many
of them coming from the class of Dutch civic leaders. There were also architects
and socially concerned civil engineers from Delft University of Technology, later to
be joined by geographers. They formed a pressure group rather than a profession
which did not yet exist. Although some dreamed of one, there was no specialised
planning education either.
Linthorst Homan himself had been Queen’s Commissioner in the province
of Groningen before the war. The chairman of the postwar National Planning
Commission, he became a top civil servant in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and
as such represented the Netherlands at the Conference of Messina and at further
meetings leading to the signing of the Treaty of Rome. Whilst fulfilling this role, he
never ceased to argue the case of European planning.
34 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

His companion on the campaign trail was Jasper Vink, a man with a legal training.
I have introduced him already as a member of the Commission of State proposing a
national plan in 1940. In 1949 he had become the second national planning director.
Based on modest beginnings with international planning work in the Benelux, he pro-
posed to enter into discussions with European colleagues as early as 1951.
Between them, Linthorst Homan and Vink succeeded in gaining the ear of the
Dutch minister responsible for, amongst others, planning. The minister received the
first of several successive versions of a memorandum authored by Linthorst Homan
proposing to take planning onto the European stage so as to prevent the wasting
of ‘territorial assets’, in current jargon we would say territorial capital. Another argu-
ment was for a European and even global redistribution of functions to counteract
the concentration of economic activity in a relatively small area, a typically Dutch
concern. In an effort to deal with the pressure of a growing population on its small
area of land, the Dutch government at the time even went as far as promoting emi-
gration. As a result, Dutch immigrants from the postwar era and their descendants
are now to be found in Australia, Canada and the US. This puts the following sen-
tence in the Linthorst Homan memorandum into context:

It is untenable to see countries with a labour shortage with their needs unsatisfied
situated next to countries with an ever-growing surplus, much as it would be un-
tenable in the long run to see an excess potential in Europe whereas large parts
of the world are still crying out for new development thanks to an influx of labour.2

At the outset, there were no immediate proposals for a European agency. A

liaison office at the Council of Europe or the ‘Europe of six’ – code name for the EEC
– would suffice, with a preference for the former. Because of the gaping hole left by
Switzerland, the territory of the Europe of six was considered incomplete. Nevertheless,
for pragmatic reasons, a start should be made with the EEC. At that time, the EEC and
the Council of Europe were seen as alternative paths towards integration.
The minister asked pointedly for concrete issues to tackle. His chief planner
Vink sensed his scepticism and replied that the point was not so much to deal with
concrete issues but rather to anticipate future problems. Neither Vink nor Linthorst
Homan could convince the minister, only too aware what an uphill struggle it was to

2 ‘Het is zowel onhoudbaar dat landen met tekort aan arbeidskracht onbevredigd liggen naast
landen met een steeeds sterker groeiend teveel, als het op den duur Europees onhoudbaar zou
zijn, een teveel aan krachten te hebben waar grote delen van de wereld nog zozeer om nieuwe
ontwikkeling door toevloeiing van arbeidskrachten roepen’. (J. Linthorst Homan. 1955, quoted
after the master thesis by Klerkx, E. 1998. Plannen met Europa: Nederlandse pleidooien voor
een bovennational ruimtelijk beleid. Radbout University Nijmegen. p. 65.)
Dashed expectations 35

get planning accepted in the Netherlands, let alone Europe. Anyhow, as the Minister
of Reconstruction and Housing, he was not on the European negotiating team.
Not to be discouraged, the National Spatial Planning Agency translated the
Linthorst Homan note into English, French and German – Italy was behind the hori-
zon – and sought to approach Spaak. The Spaak Report would however not touch
upon planning but, as indicated, regional policy was on the agenda. As one of the
Dutch negotiators, Linthorst Homan was of course in the midst of all this. On the
Benelux planning commission he exclaimed exasperatedly: ‘Presently, a treaty is
being prepared on west European cooperation covering all conceivable areas. Why
can such a treaty not contain one paragraph or one article saying that the six coun-
tries should cooperate in the area of spatial planning?’3

The Spaak Report and the Treaty of Rome

As against the containment of urban growth, the other view of planning as promot-
ing regional development did play a role in preparing for the Common Market. Thus,
the Spaak Report (1956) advocated support for regional development. The Treaty
on the ECSC had already foreseen in positive measures co-financed by national
governments in regions experiencing industrial decline. So, as Husson (2002: 25)
recounts, the High Authority gave support to the Hainaut Region of Belgium years
before the EC embarked on similar policies. It also supported the preparation of the
Treaty of Rome. The unofficial English translation of the Spaak Report from which I
quote has been provided by the High Authority.
The Spaak Report itself is a document prepared by the Intergovernmental
Committee on European Integration chaired by Spaak. It formed the basis for a
treaty-drafting convention in Brussels in late-1956. Basic features of the institutional
architecture of the EEC – and with it of the EU – were already clear. Thus, there
was already mention of the Commission, the Council of Ministers and of Qualified
Majority Voting. Presumably, the architecture of the ECSC served as a blueprint.
The report comes in four parts, called titles. Title I immediately starts with the
customs union as being at the heart of the project. Title II is about rules and com-
mon actions, more in particular competition rules – the rules about state aid that to
the present day are the concern of Member States and subnational authorities pre-
vented from favouring domestic enterprises. There are provisions for a joint transport

3 ‘Er wordt thans een verdrag opgesteld over Westeuropese samenwerking op alle denkbare
gebieden. Waarom kan in zulk een verdrag niet een alinea of een artikel worden opgenomen
waarin bepaald wordt dat de zes landen ook zullen samenwerken op het gebied van ruimtelijke
ordening’. (Quoted after Klerkx 1998. p. 68.)
36 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

policy and the harmonisation of various other regimes. Title III is about the develop-
ment and full utilisation of European resources. Here comes the proposal for an
investment fund at which I look in more detail.
The objective was to participate, in cooperation with other financial institutions, in
the financing, firstly of projects – the text gave no examples – of a European character:

whose magnitude and nature do not lend themselves to the financing in each
State separately. ‘The European interest’ will be determined by the number of
States interested or participating in a project and by the favourable comment of
the competent European institutions. The extent of the fund’s participation will
be in proportion to ‘the European interest’ which is recognized in the project.
(Unofficial English version. p. 17)

Finance for ‘less favoured regions’, and notably for development plans in rural
areas, came only in second place. This is remarkable since this type of assistance
is the mainstay of present cohesion policy. The financing of projects on lines as
described is far less common. Even the TENs, certainly those in the European core,
are financed largely by the Member States and, where they are not, there European
funding comes largely from cohesion policy and not from dedicated funds.
The third and last category is the reconversion of enterprises by providing credit
facilities. There are provisions also for regulating the contributions of Member States.
Other items under this title relate to what would become the European Social
Fund. Also, under this title two out of what have become known since as the ‘four
freedoms’ are identified: the free movement of labour and of capital. The Spaak
Report also advocates coordination between existing and future regional plans of
the Member States and future plans of the Common Market institutions. Clearly,
there should be coherence between them.
The example of the ECSC where funds for conversion had been made avail-
able notwithstanding, the signatories of the Treaty of Rome went no further than
declaring in the preamble that they were ‘[a]nxious to strengthen the unity of their
economies and to ensure their harmonious development by reducing the differences
existing between the various regions and the backwardness of the less favoured
regions’ (EEC Treaty 1957) and in Article 2 giving the Community the task of ‘reduc-
ing the differences existing in various regions and by mitigating the backwardness
of the less favoured’. There was no following this through and in particular no fund
other than the European Investment Bank offering credit facilities. The assump-
tion prevailed that the benefits resulting from integration would trickle-down to all
parts of Europe. Note that there was really only one truly peripheral area, the Italian
Mezzogiorno. On a national scale, of course, each country had areas that it consid-
ered more or less remote and to which since World War II it gave assistance.
Dashed expectations 37

The only exception to this unwillingness to the deal with disparities was that
under discretionary powers the Commission was allowed to grant temporary relief
from implementing measures to complete the Common Market, which it did, mainly
in the Mezzogiorno. Italian calls for a more proactive regional policy were ignored.
It was only after Greece (1980) and Spain and Portugal (1986) joined that the EC
as such acquired its ‘Mezzogiorno’ which it was forced to recognise as a European
problem (Drevet 2008).
The idea in the Spaak Report of coordinating regional policies of the Member
States and of the EEC so as to make them form a coherent whole was not followed
through either. The Single European Act of 1986 would eventually include an arti-
cle to this effect but as I shall show without much effect. A recommendation of the
Spaak Report that did find its way into the Treaty of Rome was that of a common
transport policy but Member States refused to implement it. Eventually the European
Court of Justice intervened leading amongst others to the TENs as we know them.

An initiative from the wing

Soon after the EEC began to operate in 1958, the Parliamentary Assembly reopened
the debate on regional policy and planning. It adopted a resolution stipulating three
aims: to help less developed regions; to arrive at a reasonable division of labour
between the territories of the Community; and to counteract the tendency towards
over-concentration in almost all Member States. The last item could be interpreted
as having something to do with controlling urban growth. The first two were about
establishing a balance – cohesion – and about coherence and cooperation as the
rationales for European spatial planning.
The resolution also invited the Commission to organise a conference, to be dis-
cussed shortly. There were more initiatives by a French member of the Assembly in
1960 and a German one in 1963 (Husson 2002: 19–23). Twenty years later, in 1983,
the Belgian Member of the European Parliament, Paul-Henry Gendebien, would intro-
duce a more far-reaching resolution advocating a Schéma européen d’aménagement
du territoire or European planning perspective. This is discussed in Chapter 4. The
successor of the Assembly, the European Parliament has always been and continues
to be supportive of planning but of course has had so far no right of initiative.
In 1963, the Commission obliged the Assembly by holding a ‘Conference on the
Regional Economies’. With both representing forces of integration, the Commission
is often in cahoots with Parliament. The First Vice-President of the Commission,
the Frenchman Robert Marjolin was in the chair. Marjolin was a graduate of Yale
impressed by the New Deal and thus a proponent of economic planning. His cre-
dentials, of course, included having been President of the European Commission of
Economic Cooperation and Development administering the Marshall Plan.
38 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Commission President Walter Hallstein gave an opening speech. The

Rapporteur, Georges Pierret from Brittany, recalls in one of his books Marjolin as
the second speaker putting his finger on the key issue: the highly developed core
benefiting more from the Common Market than peripheral regions, a key concern
up to the present. He describes the follow-up, with the Commission under its right
of initiative making far-reaching proposals (Pierret 1984: 36; see also Vanhove and
Klaassen 1980) to the Council of Ministers in 1965. As Husson (2002) reports (see
also Drevet 2008: 47) there was even talk of asking the Commission to study the
proposition of an aménagement du territoire européen – European spatial planning.
Clearly what was meant was not land-use planning.
A French influence seems evident, but Adenauer’s successor as German
Chancellor, the market liberal Ludwig Erhard mistrusted the Commission. However, the
main problem was Charles de Gaulle and his suspicious attitude. As will be remembered,
he aimed to re-establish France as a great power. Having given Algeria its independ-
ence, he had his hands free to deal with the proactive Europeans. Presumably, had he
been in power at the time of the Treaty of Rome, integration would not have happened,
not in its emergent form anyhow. Now he was back to counteract the EEC ostensibly
over a refusal to vote agricultural funds for France, de Gaulle instigated the ‘policy of the
empty chair’. Under it, for months on end, France left its seats in European institutions
vacant. The crisis ended with the ‘Luxembourg Compromise’ giving Member States a
veto where they considered a proposal a threat to their vital interests. De Gaulle’s aim to
curtail the Commission had been achieved. European integration became less dynamic.
Within France itself, the same year that the Conference on the Regional Economies
took place, the French Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale
(DATAR) was set up to deal with regional development in France so there may also have
been an element of competition involved.
The Commission proposal for the Community to become active in regional pol-
icy could thus not have come at a worse moment in time and seems even to have
contributed to neither Hallstein nor Marjolin receiving a further term of office (Pierret
1984: 39). Proactive Commission Presidents always have the same effect on Member
States: they make sure that apparently more pliable candidates are appointed.

The arena for further discussions

Any movement requires a platform, an arena for formulating and propagating ideas.
In 1955 planners from various countries came together for the first time at Liège in
the Walloon Region of Belgium, the heart of a coal and steel region stretching into
the north of France. By that time, the ECSC was fully operational, giving rise to the
idea that this transnational area of heavy industrial activity required joint planning.
Geographically isolated, Italy was not part of this.
Dashed expectations 39

The participants were high-ranking planning officials and some scholars setting up
what they described as a study group, the Conference of Regional Planning in North-
West Europe. Only one month later, the Conference of Messina took place and the
planners’ attention shifted to whether the EEC could and would engage in planning.
A few years later, this study group became a standing conference with annual
meetings based on research conducted by its members respectively by the organi-
sations from where they came, in particular, but not exclusively, the Dutch National
Planning Agency. Until his retirement a decade later Vink was its president. The
Secretary General was Kormoss from the Collège de l’Europe. This permanent
conference became a stamping ground for international planners, importantly also
including the Germans beginning to escape their pariah status. Norbert Ley, whose
article in the Festschrift for Jasper Vink I quoted at the beginning of this chapter as
reflecting the consensus of the standing conference towards European planning
was a prominent member. Like the Netherlands, North Rhine-Westphalia contrib-
uted financially. Soon the Dutch and German governments would conclude a treaty,
still operative, on cross-border planning.
The standing conference was what nowadays one would describe as an NGO
raising awareness as regards cross-border and transnational issues and solutions.
Initially, participation was great: two hundred participants from Germany, France and
the Benelux alongside with representatives of European institutions who one assumes
were sympathetic. The standing conference continued to operate until the 1990s by
which time the founding fathers had left the scene and the functions had been taken
over by a host of other initiatives. However, its importance as a seedbed of innovation
in international planning is hard to overestimate. The standing conference pioneered
European-wide research, publishing for example the map plotting population density
in Europe that was to be included in a Dutch national planning report and has been
reproduced in Chapter 1. The conference concerned itself also with the impact of a
major European infrastructure project then on the drawing board, the Channel Tunnel
and it produced an informal structural outline sketch of north-west Europe, including a
policy map (Figure 2.1). When the Dutch included the sketch in their Second National
Spatial Planning Report, rather than limiting themselves to the Continent of Europe,
they included much of the UK. As mentioned, the Dutch always wished the UK to be
on board, an attitude which earned them de Gaulle’s opprobrium.
However, the European planners meeting at these and other occasions dis-
covered that they were pursuing different approaches. The Dutch and the Germans
came from a land-use planning tradition which evolved, in the Dutch case towards
using strategic national documents as vehicles for squaring the imperatives of eco-
nomic development with the preservation of open space. France pursued top-down
regional economic development. The planning vehicle of choice was not a statutory
plan. Rather, the French state formulated projects designed to smooth out spatial
40 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Figure 2.1 A structural outline sketch of north-west Europe. (Source: Ley, N. (1967) Die
Zukunft der Raumordnung in Nordwesteuropa. Wegwijzers naar een goed
bewoonbaar Nederland: Beschouwingen aangeboden aan Mr. J. Vink bij zijn
afscheid als directeur-generaal van de Rijksplanologische Dienst. Alphen aan
den Rijn: N. Samsom nv, pp. 145–157; English texts added)

imbalances, with DATAR negotiating with sector ministries over finance and subse-
quently simply conveying government intentions to those in the field. It will become
clear later on that in European spatial planning the French view, suitably modified to
reflect decentralisation and the desire to involve stakeholders would prevail. To this
present day, France is sympathetic towards European spatial planning, but the latter
has never been intended to, nor will it ever be, regulatory.
Dashed expectations 41

Outlook
Funding for European regional policy asked for by Spaak became only available in
the mid-1970s after the UK, together with Denmark and Ireland had joined. This was
the first enlargement from six to nine members, bringing an entirely new group into
the family. The UK in particular could not benefit in proportion to its contribution to
the budget from the Common Agricultural Policy instituted in the early-1960s; at the
time the major item on the Community budget. The new regional policy was thus
designed to let the UK derive benefits from its membership. Drevet (2008: 51–84)
characterises it pointedly as hardly ‘communautarian’ — jargon for policies conceived
in the Community spirit — and not very regional. The policy was merely one of finan-
cial transfers to Member States to support their national policies. The stipulation was
that the funds should not replace but come on top of national funding for regional
development called ‘own resources’. As will become evident, this provision, what
would be called additionality, would be flouted. It would take until the 1980s before
the situation really changed under Commission President Jacques Delors.
The arena for discussing European planning since then is regional or, as it
is presently called, cohesion policy. As indicated it reflects a view of planning as
promoting, in the name of harmonious development, growth where it is lagging
behind. At the EU level, the other view of planning as managing urban growth is
not prominent. Theoretically, there was an alternative. In the mid-1970s, alongside
with regional policy, European environmental policy got off the ground. Controlling
urban growth could have become part of it but emissions control and the introduc-
tion throughout Europe of Environmental Impact Assessment took centre stage. A
study by the European Environmental Agency (2006) in Copenhagen pointing out
the effects of suburban growth on the environment was perhaps an attempt to make
the obvious link between urban growth and environmental concerns but so far no
follow up in terms of policy recommendations has been proposed.
Planners shifted their attention in the 1960s to where their arguments were
received more sympathetically than in Brussels, the Council of Europe (Chapter 3).
In the late-1970s, the Dutch National Spatial Planning Agency yet again argued the
case for planning becoming part of the operations of the EC. This happened in a
prominent place, the first chapter of its 1978 annual report. Illustrated with maps, the
chapter was translated into English, French and German. Although the agency top
made strenuous efforts to propagate its ideas, sending two top officials to European
capitals and the Brussels headquarters, this proposal was cold-shouldered. At least
the report had the effect of priming Dutch planners for their next enthusiastic contri-
bution. Before discussing it, I turn to European spatial planning in the doldrums.
PART II

IN THE DOLDRUMS
The doldrums refers to the era of stagnation caused by the crisis discussed in
Chapter 2 leading to ‘Eurosclerosis’ as it did. There I related how that crisis had
dashed all expectations for the EEC to engage in regional policy, let alone spatial
planning. Looking back one can conclude, though, that in the doldrums European
planning entered a period of gestation. Set up in 1949, the Council of Europe pro-
vided the opportunity for taking an indirect approach but without losing sight of the
goal of promoting European spatial planning. Chapter 3 is about its initiatives, in par-
ticular its report ‘Regional Planning a European Problem’, culminating fifteen years
later in the ‘Torremolinos Charter’, the early bible of European spatial planning. Other
than the EEC, the Council of Europe does not, however, have any kind of executive
authority. The Torremolinos Charter and its follow-ups – the latest seeing the light of
day in 2000 – are recommendations of the Assembly to the members of the Council
of Europe and no more.
The European Parliament at the time had a similar status of a talking shop. In
the Introduction I pointed out that it now assumes an increasingly important role
under what used to be called co-decision-making and under the Lisbon Treaty
enhancing its role is presently described as the ‘ordinary legislative procedure’.
Chapter 4 is about the renewed campaign, after its unsuccessful attempt when still
operating as the Parliamentary Assembly, to coax what, after absorbing the ECSC
and EURATOM had become the EC to accept the need for a form of regional plan-
ning. This culminated in the acceptance by the European Parliament of the so-called
Gendebien Report named after the Rapporteur. It presented another fully-fledged
European planning programme and is the topic of Chapter 4. Adopted as a reso-
lution in 1983, well after the EC had embarked on a form of regional and also an
increasingly proactive environmental policy, Gedebien pointed out that the same
legal provisions in the Treaty of Rome as had been used for this purpose could
provide the basis for European planning. In fact, whether or not the EC could do so
has never been a legal issue. Rather, it has always been one of the political will – or
rather the lack thereof – for entering the planning field.
Thus, the doldrums era has seen the articulation of the rationale for European
spatial planning as a response to issues inherent to European integration. The
Commission, with the European Parliament and the Council of Europe in the wings,
took initiatives which the Member States either ignored or – as with the ERDF –
tried to bring back into the national fold, like when moneys from the Community
coffers were used to subsidise state budgets rather than to pursue agreed common
objectives. The ambiguities of the European construct – Member States agreeing to
give Community institutions a role, only to judiciously curtail the pursuit of common
objectives afterwards – were only too apparent.
Meanwhile, this part will show that ideas about European spatial planning,
what it should be about and how the problems should be tackled, have been
shaped decades ago. When planners settled down in earnest to carry out European
planning in the late-1980s and early 1990s they had a veritable European planning
programme to draw on.
CHAPTER 3

INDIRECT APPROACH

On the one hand, there is the keen political fear that regional planning, as
an overpowering, inflexible, centralistic system will ignore the needs of the
population in particular regions in Europe, such as the conurbations of Central
Europe or the underdeveloped areas of Northern Ireland and Greece. On the
other hand, there is the justified suspicion of the specialists, who are afraid
that knowledge of the geographical consequences of regional development
processes and the natural laws governing them is far too slight for any regional
planning strategy at all to be evolved for Europe.
(Kunzmann 1982)

The above reflects Klaus Kunzmann’s critical assessment as somebody who,

having been actively involved in European planning, to the present day reminds
us of its pitfalls and shortcomings. This statement came after preparatory work on
the so-called Torremolinos Charter had been completed and before its adoption.
Torremolinos Charter is the name commonly given to the ‘Regional/Spatial Planning
Charter’ adopted at Torremolinos by the European Conference of Ministers respon-
sible for Regional Planning, better known as CEMAT for Conférence Européenne
des Ministres responsable à l’Aménagement du Territoire. The framework was that
of the Council of Europe and not the EC and the date was May 1983.
This Charter, a crisp statement of principles, is the first European planning
document agreed by ministers. It was preceded by a more elaborate report of a
‘Working Party on Regional Planning’ followed by studies and reports published
by the Council of Europe on behalf of CEMAT. The Charter is a statement presag-
ing much of what has been said and done since in terms of a European planning
programme.
This chapter has five sections. The first introduces the Working Party. The
second summarises the first chapter of its report identifying the problem of ‘regional’
planning. I put regional in inverted commas because the concept will be shown to be
ambiguous. The third section is about the European dimension of ‘regional’ planning.
The next one is about the Torremolinos Charter in which the work of the Working
Party and the subsequent research and deliberations crystallised. In the last sec-
tion I relate Klaus Kunzmann’s assessment at a time when everybody anticipated
a follow-up to the Charter in the form of a ‘European Spatial Planning Concept’,
46 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

sometimes also named a ‘European Spatial Planning Strategy’. Under ‘Outlook’ I

briefly describe the role of CEMAT since.

The working party on regional planning

Having been rebuffed by the EEC, or rather by the Member States represented
on the Council of Ministers, European planners focused on the Council of Europe
with the European Convention of Human Rights its most important achievement
offering an alternative avenue for arguing their case. The Assembly passed a reso-
lution in 1961 pointing to the existing overconcentration of population – the issue
that Dutch planners amongst others were shown to have been concerned about
in Chapter 2 – and to regional disparities. It stated that ‘harmonious geographi-
cal development’ – cohesion – was a task for all European institutions and not
necessarily only the Council of Europe. Maybe this was meant to criticise the
Community’s abstinence in the matter.
The Working Party on Regional Planning provided a fully-fledged analysis of,
and the requisite programme for, planning at all levels, including that of the EEC. The
title of the report was fittingly: ‘Regional Planning a European Problem’ (CoE 1968).
As I shall explain, ‘region’ was a generic term meaning area or, indeed, space. The
title could thus just as well have been: ‘Spatial Planning a European Problem’.
The Working Party was set up jointly by the Council of Europe and the European
Conference of Local Authorities, later to become the European Conference of
Regional and Local Authorities. This is a consultative body of the Council of Europe,
an arena for subnational authorities to make their voice heard. In the EC as it then
still was, subnational authorities were not yet represented. The Committee of the
Regions would only come into existence much later. European integration was seen
as a national foreign policy matter. Even in Germany at the time, the Länder, one of
them, North Rhine-Westphalia, larger than the Benelux founder members, had no
business in European integration. The Council of Europe provided an opportunity for
articulating the concerns of such subnational authorities.
The Working Party produced its report, ‘Regional Planning a European
Problem’, with four parts and two appendices. The first part identifies regional
planning as ‘a problem of our time’ and will be discussed next. The second is
about regional planning in the Member States. It shows that planning meant differ-
ent things in different countries. Although its message still holds, the information
on which it is based is outdated and will not be discussed. The positions of key
Member States will, however, form the topic of one separate chapter below. The
third part of the report is about European policy and the last programmatic one
about European cooperation. They will be discussed together.
Indirect approach 47

Professors from France and Germany were credited with having given expert
advice to the Working Party. Nicolaus Sombart, a German Council of Europe offi-
cial headed the secretarial team. Having written his PhD on Auguste Comte and
Claude-Henri de Saint Simon, Sombart had a rich literary production to his credit. In
a subsequent work inspired by Saint Simon and maybe a reflection of his experience
with the Working Party Sombart (1965) discussed planetary planning theory, as well
as a theory of international organisations. The report emanating from the Working
Party as such offers a rationale for European spatial planning. To give a flavour of the
enthusiasm it exudes and the far-sightedness of the authors, I discuss this report, dif-
ficult to access as it is, at some length quoting more extensively than usual.

‘A problem of our time’

To start with, the report points to excessive urbanisation and over-population, issues
that had been identified by the Council of Europe as reasons for getting involved
in the first instance. Tackling them required systematic regional planning to coordi-
nate ‘… all measures capable of affecting, directly or indirectly, the use and general
management of the country’s living space’. This, what I am describing as coherence,
continues to be a key rationale for spatial planning. The report then identifies seminal
trends, such as the population explosion, urbanisation, the crisis in rural areas and
the evolution of life styles. There is a discussion of mobility and its effects, remark-
ably even anticipating the on-line revolution.
What follows is a statement of that other planning rationale, unbalanced
development. The report points out that at regional level ‘the disparity between
levels of economic development in different parts of the same country first became
apparent, together with the need to formulate an overall planning policy’. There is
praise for regional diversity:

The problem facing us is a European one, in the sense that different combinations
of natural, human, geographical, historical, racial and linguistic factors have divided
the territory known as Europe into a variety of separate regions, the existence of
which constitutes one of its richest possessions and salient characteristics.
(CoE 1968)

After these preliminaries, the report discusses the concept of a region. It is here
where ambiguity creeps in but this is not unique to this report. The concept of a region
is notoriously difficult. Thus, for what the report calls practical reasons, administrative
regions should be doing the planning. Although ‘their frontiers may, on occasion, appear
to be drawn somewhat arbitrarily, they at least have the immense advantage of offering a
clearly defined framework for planning activities’. The size of these regions varies though,
48 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

which points to a further complication, the emergence of trans-frontier regions. Later,

however, the term region is used in a more generic sense. So ‘regional planning’ as a
term is not restricted to planning of and by administrative regions. There is even talk of
European-wide ‘regional planning’. Since Europe is obviously not a region the only thing
that could have been meant is ‘spatial planning’.
Regional disparities are ‘the price we are paying for the great restructuring of
our society triggered off by the industrial revolution’. Presently, the culprit would be
globalisation. The text evaluates options for managing economic growth, assuming it
as given. These were ‘Les Trentes Glorieuses’ – the Glorious Thirty Years – a term
coined by Jean Fourastié (1979) who had also identified the service sector as an eco-
nomic driver. The prospect of growth ‘offers regional planning its best opportunities,
since inequalities are more easily corrected in an atmosphere of expansion’. The report
warns at the same time that uncontrolled growth can create disequilibrium. What is
required is coordination: coherence! The text concludes: ‘One of the main objectives
of regional planning is to promote a fair balance between regions … whilst at the same
time preserving their geographical and natural features and taking due account of their
economic, social and cultural infrastructure requirements’.
There is mention also of ‘town-country polarity’ making room for a ‘new eco-
logical polarity’. Presently, the talk is about urban-rural relations. Couched in these
terms, the ideas seem remarkably modern.
Moving to the European scale, the report states:

Rapidly expanding industrial production, developments in transport which make

that natural frontiers become blurred or even eliminated, the expansion of
mobility throughout Europe as more and more people seek work or recreation
in other countries, and growing trade and financial transactions have all helped
in the break-up of small economic and social areas demarcated by political and
economic frontiers.
It is not some years since the countries of Western Europe turned their backs
on protectionism in favour of an increasingly tightly-knit system of economic, social,
cultural and human exchanges, thereby deriving immeasurable advantage.

Quoting the former French Planning Commissioner Pierre Massé, the report
claims that ‘national regional planning policies’ misapprehend the impact of borders
disappearing. Here there is reference to the 1963 Brussels Conference on Regional
Economies having drawn attention to market integration accentuating geographical
disparities. The report points out that 30 per cent of Europe’s population in the core
account for 60 per cent of its output. Similar easy-to-remember figures demonstrat-
ing the need for dispersed or polycentric development play a role throughout the
Indirect approach 49

history of European spatial planning. In an allusion to what would be dubbed the

‘Blue Banana’, the report points out ‘a tendency towards concentration in the most
highly industrialised regions … along both sides of the Rhine’. This is referred to as
‘Lotharingia’, an allusion to a ninth-century kingdom emerging after one of the suc-
cessive partitions of the former Carolingian empire, benefiting from a vast consumer
market and thus having scope for specialisation due to low transport costs. There is
also hope, though, for peripheral regions:

[T]he expansion of European and international trade can make some of these
regions into complementary poles of the European nucleus. This applies, for in-
stance, to the Atlantic coastal areas and certain parts of southern Italy which are
apparently once more becoming centres for communicating with South-Eastern
Europe and the Mediterranean basin.
Immense scope for tourist development is within grasp of extensive areas,
provided that facilities are designed on a European scale. Special mention
should me made in this connection of the Languedoc-Roussillon region.

Indeed, the French Mediterranean coast had benefited from economic stimuli,
including tourist developments initiated by the French government. Twenty years later
the study by Roger Brunet and his team identifying the ‘Blue Banana’ – coinciding
more or less with Lotharingia – would also find a promising ‘nord du sud’, the north of
the south along the Mediterranean coast, with Languedoc-Roussillon as its anchor.
The first chapter ends by identifying the steps in regional planning. A prelimi-
nary stage consists of ‘physical planning’ implying ‘measures designed to produce
better utilisation of land, control and plan urban expansion, provide for a suitable pro-
portion of open spaces, attract factories to specially equipped industrial zones, and
promote the development of tourism’. The second stage is ‘identical with or, more
exactly, complementary to the programme for the region (planification régionale)’
(emphasis in the original). There follows the clarification that this implies promoting
economic growth by providing infrastructure equipment and employment, modernis-
ing agriculture and encouraging industrialisation, urbanisation and decentralisation.
In this context, regional planning represents an effort to coordinate various measures
based on an appreciation of the territory concerned. Thus:

it is realised today that the first step must be to plan the general development
of the area and consider the numerous factors by which it may be affected.
Regional planning thus brings to the fore new relationships and forms of inter-
dependence which are harder to assess but which permit a wider view to be
taken of economic growth, and a more humane view of development.
50 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Another effect of regional planning should be to promote a coordinated

policy with regard to nature conservation, water and air pollution control, water
supplies, noise abatement, the preservation of historic and artistic sites and
monuments, coastal protection etc.

This reminds once more of cohesion and coherence as rationales of European

spatial planning. It is also obvious that the authors wanted to link land use concerns
with the promotion of development. At the third stage of development, regional plan-
ning becomes worth its calling by effectuating ‘a re-organisation of space and man’s
habitat which will give an optimum environment in which he and the community to
which he belongs will find the best possible conditions, both material and spiritual’
(emphasis in the original). So conceived regional planning is not negative; not merely
about controlling urban growth. It must rather ‘be thought of as a policy designed
to establish new structures whereby man will be given a free choice as to how he
arranges his existence: in other words, freedom to select his own training, way of life,
place of residence and of work’. For this reason, regional planning is no longer a mat-
ter for experts. It paves the way for the, in the flamboyant words of the Report, ‘New
Society’ and as such is a responsibility of the whole community and of every citizen.
Here comes public participation, at that time a novelty. Thus, ‘regional plan-
ning policy can be fully successful only if carried out with the agreement and
understanding of the populations directly concerned’. So it is basically a political
question: ‘Effective participation in the formulation and implementation of planning
programmes is one of the primary rights and duties of every member of a democratic
society’. This having been said, citizens and politicians need to be educated in basic
concepts of regional planning and ‘modern urbanism’:

Here we are touching on a crucial issue … At a time when modern civilisation

is offering man new and powerful means of equipping and organising his
living spaces and adapting it so as to permit his personality to develop more
successfully, he needs some preparation before he can play the part demanded
of him in planning the framework of his life or his new ‘city’.

In the Saint-Simonian tradition the authors thus argue for expert leadership in
educating people to live up to the challenges they postulate.

The European dimension

In the last two parts, the third one under the title ‘A European policy for regional
planning’ and the forth recounting relevant efforts, the report articulates a robust
rationale for European planning. It starts by asserting that it ‘seems obvious that
Indirect approach 51

regional planning has already ceased to be a strictly national problem’. The reasons
lie in the geo-political situation. ‘The fact that political frontiers stride across the
great natural regions or main communication routes leads town and country plan-
ning schemes to be conceived from a general angle, even if their achievements
must be the subject of long-term planning’. Invoking the concept of a ‘natural region’
inspired by French geography, the text continues:

Very frequently … natural regions spread into two or even three states; the main
relief features, the great valleys, the rivers, the rich agricultural plains cross from
one state to another and develop regardless of frontier lines.
These frontiers have artificially … cut across … such homogenous fea-
tures: their situation as frontier regions has resulted in a peculiar organisation of
their territory: sparseness or irregularity of road and rail systems, low industrial
development because of their strategic position, specialised urban development.

Next to natural ones, the report also discusses ‘polarised’ regions experiencing
much the same difficulty, the mismatch between problem areas and jurisdictions:
‘The zones of influence of cities stretch beyond frontiers, not disregarding them
but very often hampered and handicapped by them. We need only to think of …
Maastricht and Basle’. Maastricht is the southernmost town of the Netherlands close
to Aachen and Liège marking a cross-border region which would become the object
of close cooperation known as MHAL: Maastricht-Hasselt-Aachen-Liège. Basle was
and is another example of cooperation, with the airport at Mulhouse serving the
entire cross-border region. The report discusses the dynamics of such cross-border
cooperation, saying that ‘it would be absurd to engage in regional planning while
completely disregarding identical situations or solutions adopted on the other side
of the frontier’. In the 1990s, cross-border cooperation would of course become the
object of a Community Initiative.
There is a discussion also of the planning consequences of European integra-
tion. The report first describes the past when regional development was a matter
for national governments. However, European economic integration will ‘bring into
play factors that passed unnoticed in national settings’. Relations with the rest of
the world are also changing, with coal and steel already in the 1960s providing
examples of industries suffering from foreign competition. Invoking, as is often done
in planning, an organic metaphor, the report claims that a ‘declining region, a region
where the population is aging or disappearing, raises a problem that is a matter of
concern for the whole European community, each region of which is an organ whose
proper function and balance are essential to the good health of the body of Europe’.
The report explores a future situation in which Europe would be really united
and mobility increasingly easy, ‘mobility not only of men but of capital and of industrial
52 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

firms. It is often started by tourist movements, but will be extended by the settlement
of factory workers, farmers, students’. However, ‘are we not likely to find migratory
movements inspired by the search for the sun and by leisure?’ Anticipating second
homes and the movement of pensionados to the Mediterranean, the report seems to
expect veritable colonies emerging.
Moving to the greater picture, ‘Regional Planning a European Problem’ insists
that ‘the processes of European unification and integration are creating and will con-
tinue to create solidarity and interdependence between all the states and regions
involved’. From this it concludes that planning tasks will be increasingly ‘defined in a
European context and less and less in a national framework’.
This programmatic chapter then posits a series of aims for regional planning pol-
icy. It is once again clear that the term is not confined to the planning of and by regions.
Thus, a ‘European regional planning policy should result in an organisation of space that
expresses, in its distribution of men and their activities and in the quality of the Human
environment … the values of the European civilisation’. It should coordinate national
regional planning policies, something that the Spaak Report and the Parliamentary
Assembly have already been shown to have demanded. After all, growing solidarity ‘is an
irreversible phenomenon. It as a feature of our continent’s dimensions and geography,
even if centuries of political division and thousands of miles of frontiers still tend to veil
the truth from some eyes’. The text points out that ‘the size of most European states …
makes it ludicrous to have a strictly national policy for motorways’, the role of which is as
much international as national, so that the construction of a motorway on the territory of
one state can meet the needs of Europe as a whole. From this it once again concludes
that it is important to coordinate planning policies.
Under ‘urbanisation’, the text says that the European urban pattern ‘must be
revised in such a way as to establish a European urban hierarchy, avoiding vain
competition and imbalances between overdeveloped urban centres and urban
deserts’. It adds that several countries ‘have already studied ways of re-shaping their
urban networks, with the intention of restoring healthier living conditions to densely
populated urban areas, and of achieving a better distribution of urban installations
throughout their territory’. This leads to a reaffirmation of the recommendation to
eliminate any overlaps.
Another theme is rural planning. There is reference to Agricultural Commissioner
Sicco Mansholt’s 1967 proposals for restructuring agriculture, implying an increase
in farm sizes, the reform of land-ownership, redistribution of holdings and better
housing. As a result, the countryside

is becoming less and less an agricultural preserve; farming will be concentrated

in the areas of best land, and the worst-situated holdings where mechanisation
of large acreages is difficult will gradually disappear.
Indirect approach 53

Rural areas will become … playgrounds for city-dwellers and the homes
of the retired; what is more important, they will also be the scene of ‘ex-urban-
ised’ installations and activities … Proper planning of such areas is therefore
necessary’.

Yet another aim relates to ‘ecological policies’. These too ‘largely transcend
frontiers if we take stock of the factors involved: floods, banks of sand and shingle,
torrent beds, winds and ocean currents pay no heed to frontiers. It seems logical,
therefore, that national policies and basic research should be coordinated’.
There is also discussion of infrastructure networks, the establishment of which
‘is one of the most important tasks in Europe. There are the problems of linking the
Nordic countries with central Europe and of linking central Europe across the Alpine
passes with southern Europe or across the Massif Central with south-west Europe’.
This anticipates the creation in the 1990s of TENs with some of the ‘missing links’
at the very hotspots mentioned here receiving priority treatment.
The report addresses a whole string of other issues, such as policies as
regards land-ownership, pointing to differences between countries and raising the
issue of their harmonisation. Another item is the conservation of historic sites, build-
ings and groups of buildings. In common with the ESDP, the report seems to have
been used to draw attention to issues of a more local nature. After all, the European
Conference of Local Authorities was part of the equation. Maybe for the same rea-
son, there is a section on the adaptation of administrative structures.
Another section is about cross-border cooperation. It puts the case for harmonis-
ing town and country planning policies said to presuppose an international plan taking
precedence over regional plans. The report also argues for cooperation in studying
peripheral, medium-altitude uplands, coalfields, islands, valley enclaves and mountain
areas. Some of these categories would later be labelled as areas with specific geo-
graphical features.
The next section advocates the development of information, education and
exchanges of documentation, including comparative studies, leading to the ‘employ-
ment if not of the same language, at least of similar and comparable terms in all
countries’. There are indeed bilateral and multi-lateral efforts, including international
encyclopaedias, to clarify planning terminology, not the least of which is a series of
bilingual handbooks comparing German planning with planning in other countries
by the Academy of Spatial Research and Spatial Planning (ARL) with its seat at
Hanover.
The last section of this programmatic chapter states that European unification
‘has already posed, and will continue to pose, problems which can only be resolved
at European level’. It claims optimistically that countries realise that regional planning
has European implications. Indeed, it is said to be:
54 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

essential for the governments to compare the major objectives of their national
regional planning policies and to try to outline, jointly, long-term aims and the
main options when it comes to planning a Europe of the future.
This vital task, together with the necessary drive for coordination of the
sectors … should be a preliminary stage in the move to achieve a full-scale
European policy for regional planning – now one of the most valuable means of
preparing future European society’.

As indicated, the last chapter is about existing forms of cooperation in regional

planning, also and in particular by non-governmental organisations. It also dis-
cusses intergovernmental cooperation, starting with the permanent commission
for German–Dutch regional planning, cooperation in the framework of the Nordic
Council and the Benelux Committee on Physical Planning. Naturally, the report goes
into depth as regards cooperation within the framework of the Council of Europe
itself. It cites previous reviews on specific themes and issues by various commit-
tees, working parties and conferences. There is special mention of the European
Conference of Local Authorities bringing together local elected representatives to
deal with regional planning and making claims for their participation.
There is also discussion of cooperation in European and other international
organisations. Much is said about the EC, pointing to the Treaty of Rome and its,
as discussed meagre, follow-up. There is once again reference to the Conference
on Regional Economies, including the Marjolin initiative and its demise, leading to a
stern warning against the danger of the harmonious development of the EC being
compromised unless the Council of Ministers asked the Commission to present
proposals for a balanced European regional development plan. Indeed, the working
party did not confine itself to what the Council of Europe could and should do but
acted as the conscience of European planners generally.

The Torremolinos Charter

The report ‘Regional Planning a European Problem’ recommended that the Council
of Europe should fill the gap setting up a European Council of Ministers respon-
sible for regional planning. Proposal to this effect had already been made by the
German Minister of the Interior at a conference of European Municipalities in 1964.
Other than the Dutch who preferred the EC, the Germans had a predilection for the
Council of Europe as the arena for their preferred form of intergovernmental planning
cooperation. Beyond the failure of the EC to live up to the challenge of planning, the
report of 1968 gave the rationale for the Council of Europe with its more compre-
hensive coverage of the European continent getting involved:
Indirect approach 55

Everybody is aware how serious it would be if cooperation in the field of

regional planning, like cooperation in other fields, were to split Europe in two
or be left to ‘Smaller Europe’. How could one leave out ‘strategically’ countries
such as Switzerland, which ‘guards’ the Alpine passes, Austria, which is the
crossroads of relations with Eastern European countries, Denmark, which links
us with the Scandinavian countries, or indeed the United Kingdom at a time
when the Channel tunnel is no longer a utopian dream.
It would seem therefore that, in the present state of European
cooperation, the Council of Europe might provide the framework –
geographically the most appropriate – for a European Conference of Ministers
responsible for regional planning.

The report thus included recommendations to the effect of setting up what

would become CEMAT as a technical conference of the Council of Europe, like that
of the Ministers of Transport, of Justice, Education and Science, with secretarial
services provided. Germany hosted the first meeting of CEMAT in 1970. This coun-
try would remain a sponsor of CEMAT and its activities.
Having defined planning as one of the main axis of its work, the Council of
Europe invested energy and resources in promoting it. CEMAT meetings, more
or less once every three years were, and still are, prepared by a Committee
of Senior Officials. Before the sixth CEMAT adopted the ‘European Regional/
Spatial Planning Charter’, these experts had of course already discussed various
drafts. As to the Charter itself, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe
proudly described it in the preface as a pioneering venture in the sphere of
European spatial planning.
As always, terminology is difficult. I already pointed out the existence of vari-
ous planning traditions. Maybe this was the reason why the English title of the
Torremolinos Charter roles two concepts into one: ‘European Regional/Spatial
Planning Charter’. The authors of ‘Regional Planning a European Problem’ grappled
with the same problem of relating what it sometimes called town and country plan-
ning to French-inspired regional planning. The French version of the Torremolinos
Charter is called simply ‘Charte européenne de l’aménagement du territoire’. No
need for spatial/regional in French!
With French and English being the Council of Europe’s official languages,
the Germans, Austrians and Swiss between them provided an unofficial German
translation. There is also a Dutch version. All have been published together with illus-
trative maps by a North Rhine-Westphalian research institute (European Regional/
Spatial Planning Charter 1985). Given its geography, North Rhine-Westphalia is
ideally placed for planning cooperation in a north-west European context.
56 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

The German version, however, talks about Raumordnungscharta. Raumordnung

in German refers to statutory planning at a scale above that of municipalities, prima-
rily the Länder and in the second instance the federal government. It excludes local
planning. Invoking the equivalent Dutch notion ruimtelijke ordening, the Dutch ver-
sion, as against this, does not. Ruimtelijke ordening refers to spatial planning on
whatever scale. Even though using the same language, German, the Austrian mean-
ing, like the Dutch, is also broader than the German.
As regards the English text, the question is whether it was really neces-
sary to use the awkward formula regional/spatial. The name of the conference in
English was, and still is, European Conference of Ministers of Regional Planning.
Regional here cannot mean administrative regions. Rather, like in ‘Regional Planning
a European Problem’, it must be meant to refer to the generic term region, rather
like ‘area’ or, indeed, ‘space’. To repeat, for ‘regional’ one could thus read ‘spatial’
planning. ‘European Spatial Planning Charter’ would have been an elegant name,
the more so since occasionally the charter does invoke this concept.
There are other permutations in the text, like ‘regional policy’, maybe because
there was unease about whether the vehicle for formulating strategy should be a
plan. In any case, strategy was what the charter was about, so Raumordnungscharta
in German was not a good translation. Once again, Raumordnung refers to statutory
planning, albeit on a higher scale. Indeed, the German translators are apologetic
about the use of this term, saying in a footnote that it should convey a sense of what
the Charter means, which it does not. In the same footnote there is mention of the
Swiss equivalent of Raumordnung being Raumplanung – spatial planning! Since
spatial planning does not have the same legal connotation in the Federal Republic as
Raumordnung, Raumplanungscharta – Spatial Planning Charter – would have been
better, but there is often reluctance in Germany to see beyond the legal framework.
There will be more opportunity to refer to linguistic problems in European planning.
Unlike many documents preceding it, the Charter is short. As is common for
documents of the Council of Europe and also the European Parliament, it starts
with – this being a French practice – a series of considerations in the preamble,
followed by a discussion of the concept of regional/spatial planning, a statement of
the fundamental objectives, a discussion of implementation, a section on strength-
ening European cooperation and an appendix with seven specific objectives. The
considerations are:

• that regional/spatial planning is an important instrument in the evolution of

European society and that cooperation in this field contributes to the formation
of a stronger European identity;
• that it calls for an analysis of existing development concepts with a view to
formulating common principles;
Indirect approach 57

• that the social and economic changes in Europe require a review of the prin-
ciples underlying the organisation of space to make sure that short-term
economic objectives do not put them into question;
• that there is a need for new criteria for managing technical progress, in con-
formity with economic and social requirements;
• that citizens should be encouraged to participate.

Discussing regional/spatial planning, the next section confirms that, other than
what its German title suggests, it does not refer to land-use planning. Rather, it is said
to give expression to the economic, social, cultural and ecological policies of society.
So planning is a scientific discipline, an administrative technique and a policy ‘directed
towards balanced regional development and the physical organisation of space
according to an overall strategy’. It contributes ‘to a better spatial (sic!) organisation in
Europe and to the finding of solutions for problems that go beyond the national frame-
work and thus aims to create a feeling of common identity’.
The characteristics of European spatial planning so conceived are that it is demo-
cratic, comprehensive and functional and oriented towards the long term. What is meant
by ‘functional’ deserves discussion. It means that planning ‘needs to take account of the
existence of regional consciousnesses based on common values, culture and interests
sometimes crossing administrative and territorial boundaries, while taking account of the
institutional arrangements of the different countries’. This makes it once more evident
that the planning envisaged does not relate to a level of administration called region.
Rather, it relates to what in the Conclusions I describe as soft spaces.
As regards the objectives of regional/spatial planning, the Charter specifies
the following four:

• balanced social-economic development;

• quality of life;
• responsible management of nature and the environment;
• rational use of land.

The ESDP will be shown to postulate similar objectives. Beyond this, in the
section on implementation, the Charter reiterates the right of citizens to participate
and the importance of horizontal and vertical coordination. The themes of cohe-
sion, coherence and cooperation are implied. The Charter was duly adopted by the
Council of Europe one year later, in 1984.

No follow-up
In the paper from which I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the old hand in
European spatial planning Klaus Kunzmann describes the position reached in the
58 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

early-1980s. His title, ‘The European regional planning concept’, reflects the shared
expectation at that time of the process continuing beyond the Torremolinos Charter.
Indeed, ‘there are many reasons why such an approach is both meaningful and nec-
essary’, says the opening sentence. Kunzmann continues by saying that concerted
regional planning on a European scale should serve the environment and social jus-
tice, thereby going beyond the meagre efforts undertaken at the time by the EC.
Kunzmann gives a pragmatic assessment of the options, leading him to rec-
ommend, rather than a comprehensive strategy, a focus on regions that, because
of their situation and function, are of European significance. Elaborating, he points
out – this being a recurring theme in his work – that planning carries little weight, the
less so since the situation at the beginning of the 1980s – the time of the second oil
crisis – challenges the welfare state. This is where Kunzmann comes to identify the
sources of scepticism and outright suspicion of planning to which the quote at the
beginning of this chapter refers: the ‘odium of technocratic planning as well as the
reproach of centralized planning’. In the face of this, he seeks to reaffirm the rationale
of, and the approach to be taken in, European regional planning, it being evident
that in invoking the term, he does not limit himself to planning at the regional level.
Rather, where Kunzmann talks about European regional planning and also about
regional development policy, it is clear that he means what I describe as European
spatial planning: the framing of spatial interventions by means of spatial visions or
strategies.
Discussing the rationale of any European regional planning strategy, however,
Kunzmann puts aside the terminological issue of what regional planning is, making
clear that what he means is ‘a long term, forward-looking planning and organization
of European territory in such a way as to enable the population’s claims resulting
from social progress to be satisfied’. In this context, he points out the ambiguity
of what ‘Europe’ means, but for practical reasons he resigns himself to treating
‘Western Europe, the world of the Council of Europe, as the geographical context
of a European regional planning strategy: the same Europe which will constitute the
area of application of the European Regional Planning Charter (sic!) where – and
we hope this will be soon – it comes into force’. The paper was written after the
Committee of Senior Officials had done its preparatory work for the next CEMAT
meeting due to adopt the Charter in 1983. Maybe at the time the title was, indeed,
‘European Regional Planning Charter’!
Kunzmann gives arguments for European planning, including its coordinative
function concerning territorial measures, in my terms the pursuit of coherence. For
this, what he calls a territorial concept – what I call a spatial vision or strategy – is
essential. It should ‘indicate the contextual conditions and pressures as well as the
distribution of land uses and activities in a given area’. On this basis, planning should
seek to counter imbalances so that inequalities in living conditions may gradually
Indirect approach 59

be eliminated. There is a list of supportive arguments, to which Kunzmann adds

that the work itself ‘involves constant preoccupation with the problems of regional
development in Europe. This, again, provides an essential context for the success-
ful realization of the aims set forth in the European Regional Planning Charter’.
Presently, this self-enforcing learning effect of engaging with European planning
receives much attention.
Concerning the approach, Kunzmann rejects the suggestion of merely syn-
thesising existing national policies for the simple reason that many countries do not
have one. He also rejects any top-down strategy for which there is no political sup-
port nor, indeed, are there adequate empirical, material or theoretical foundations for
it. The institutional and political context is unfavourable. So he suggests focusing on
areas of European significance:

This approach is based on the perception of European regional planning

(and European regional development policy) confined strictly to planning and
development measures that cannot be carried out nationally of regionally; the
balanced development of individual regions and satisfaction of basic needs of
existential functions would be the task of national or regional institutions and
governments.
Under this approach, a European regional planning strategy would be
concerned only with European problem areas which had need of projects
transcending national frontiers.

Ten years later, one would have invoked the notion of subsidiarity, meaning that
decisions should be taken at the lowest possible level. The logical conclusion is the
search for ways of identifying European problem areas, but Kunzmann warns against
forging ahead without first doing the necessary theoretical groundwork. It would
take two decades before the lack of theoretical foundations and comparable data,
his other concern expressed in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, would
lead to the establishment of ESPON. Had such an effort been made at the time, the
paper by Kunzmann could have served as the basis for its research programme.
As things were, he at least formulated criteria for identifying regions of
‘European significance’. He listed their function in the context of the European divi-
sion of labour; the ‘rarity-value’ of local conditions, the presence of natural resources
or of facilities, such as ports; the existence of facilities that are used across borders;
cross-border regions and special situations, such as in Northern Ireland. Kunzmann
proceeded to identifying settlement patterns, territorial structure and a number of
other issues as the parameters of a European regional planning strategy, to be
worked out by a group of international experts. He pointed out the need for ‘liberal
support over a fairly long period to the research program drawn up by it along the
60 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

general lines indicated here’. Kunzmann also foresaw in the need for further research
by the Council of Europe before a draft could be submitted for the consideration of
the relevant political bodies.
Kunzmann is not only an old hand; he is also one of the most distinguished
academics in the field. He continues to comment on developments in European spa-
tial planning, becoming more and more critical in the process. A lasting achievement
of his is to have created almost single-handedly AESOP, the annual congresses of
which now form a meeting ground for European planning scholars.

Outlook
The ministers agreed on a follow-up in the form of a ‘European Regional Planning
Concept’, but two CEMAT meetings further down the line, in 1988, a draft by the
Luxembourg expert Nicolas Momper did not even get a hearing. Due to cost-savings,
the Council of Europe had curtailed CEMAT activities and the emphasis had shifted
to cross-border planning. In the margins of that meeting, the Dutch and the French
minister decided to shift the deliberations to the arena of the EC, then undergoing
its revival under Delors. The work of a single-minded individual and being little more
than a summary of the activities of CEMAT up until then, the, as it was eventually
called, ‘European Regional Planning Strategy’ (CoE 1992) was formally adopted at
Ankara and quickly forgotten. At Ankara the Dutch also reported about the meetings
that had taken place since 1989 of planning ministers of the EC of twelve. In effect,
CEMAT had been sidelined. Anyhow, at Ankara the decision was also taken to revise
the Torremolinos Charter.
The Council of Europe, and with it CEMAT, has increased its membership at
last count to forty-seven, but so with the EU which now of course has twenty-seven
rather than the ten members at the time of the Charter. So there is even more overlap
now than before, but CEMAT continues to be a bridge to countries never likely to
join, like the Russian Federation. For this and other reasons, CEMAT continues to
enjoy German sympathies and support. Germany also presided over the update of
the Torremolinos Charter. By this time, the ESDP had been completed and it was
generalised to form ‘Guiding Principles for Sustainable Spatial Development of the
European Continent’ (CEMAT 2000). This document was formally adopted by the
Council of Europe in 2002.
Presently, CEMAT deals with the new macro-regional strategies to be discussed
towards the end of this book. The prototypical macro-regional strategy for the Baltic Sea
of course concerns the Russian Federation. The latter was informed about it but had
no part in its preparation. The Danube Strategy under discussion in 2009/2010, too,
has an impact on non-EU members Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Moldavia and Ukraine, all like the Russian Federation members of the Council of Europe.
Indirect approach 61

There is another CEMAT role. At the EU, whatever spatial planning takes place
goes under the territorial cohesion flag. At CEMAT, though, spatial planning is still
a term of good currency and the spatial planners involved in the ESDP and its vari-
ous follow-ups whom I described as a ‘roving band of planners’ seem more at home
there than in the EU networks emerging over the past years, with other types of
expertise coming to the fore.
Beyond CEMAT, the Council of Europe also sponsors specific issues, such as
the preservation of archaeological remains, the object of the 1992 Malta Convention,
and of landscapes, the object of the European Landscape Convention adopted at
Florence in 2000. There is also a Convention of Madrid from 1980 facilitating cross-
border cooperation.
CHAPTER 4

A EUROPEAN PLANNING PROGRAMME

It is an obligation of the Community to help the most disadvantaged in their de-

velopmental efforts. This must be done by the implementation on the ground of
effective policies and not by simple financial transfers, without any real justifica-
tion and without real contracts, from the Community to the states. What good,
then, is this whole administrative apparatus at Brussels; a simple equalisation
fund would suffice.1

A German version of the Kunzmann paper discussed in the previous chap-

ter was published two years later (Kunzmann 1984). It added a note saying that
whether the ideas expressed were a pan-European scientific pipedream was for the
future to tell. However, Kunzmann informed the reader that, in the meantime, Paul-
Henri Gendebien had submitted a report to the European Parliament on this very
issue. It is the topic of this chapter. There was disquiet, illustrated by the irritated
quote above from a representative of the Limousin Region in France, amongst actors
in the regions about the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of EC regional policy after
the first enlargement.
Gendebien was a Member of the European Parliament from the Walloon
Region of Belgium. In his report he formulated what amounts to a fully-fledged
European planning programme, this time – as against ‘Regional Planning a European
Problem’ – with a view to the EC becoming active in this area. So this chapter
is about a renewed campaign by the European Parliament, after its unsuccessful
attempt described earlier, to coax the Council of Ministers to accept the need for a
form of regional policy.
Although elected by European citizens, like the Parliamentary Assembly before,
the European Parliament did not have much leverage. In the Introduction I pointed out
that it now assumes an increasingly important role. With the coming into operation of
the Lisbon Treaty in what is now called the ‘ordinary legislative procedure’, co-decision

1 ‘C’est un devoir communautaire d’aider les plus démunis dans leurs efforts de développement.
Cela doit se faire par la mise en œuvre, sur le terrain, de politiques effectives et non par de sim-
ple transfert financier de la Communauté aux États, sans justification réelles et sans contrats
véritable. À quoi bon alors tout l’appareil administratif bruxellois; une simple caisse de péréqua-
tion suffirait!’ (André Chandernagor, quoted after Husson 2002. p. 41.)
A european planning programme 63

making applies in many more areas, including cohesion policy and the European
Parliament may also make recommendations pertaining to new Community legislation.
I first discuss the state of the game in the early 1980s, by which time, although
for the wrong reasons, a sort of Community regional policy, but without any real pro-
grammatic element to it, existed. Then I explain why I regard the Gendebien Report
as representing a fully-fledged planning programme. This is followed by an analysis
of the ‘Explanatory Statement’ with the flesh and bones of the argument. As usual, I
end by pointing out what happened in the wake of this report: nothing much!

The state of the game

The report did not come out of the blue. There was of course the Torremolinos Charter
on which it could build. Also, although undoubtedly disappointed with the rejection of
its proposals, the Commission – always good for taking initiatives that would increase
its sway over the Member States – had continued to study regional policy issues, form-
ing in the late-1960s a directorate-general for this purpose, DG XVI, later to become
DG REGIO. DG XVI had reiterated the still valid rationale for European spatial plan-
ning/territorial cohesion policy: integration leading to the recomposition of Europe’s
territory requiring a rethink also of its geography. Any regional policy should be con-
ceived, not only from a national but also a European perspective. Like in France, to
guide the allocation of funds to counteract excessive concentration of population and
economic activity, a spatial framework was therefore needed, which is what aménage-
ment du territoire stands for (Drevet 2008: 46). The proposition in the Gendebien
Report was to apply this French thinking at European level.
Funding for European regional policy had become available in the mid-1970s
when, having been against UK membership regarding it as the camel’s nose, to be
followed by a US takeover, de Gaulle had left the scene, opening the way for this
country, together with Denmark and Ireland, to join. As I pointed out before, the UK
could not profit from the Common Agricultural Policy but could do with assistance
for declining industrial areas. So to compensate the UK for its large contribution to
the budget, a regional policy of sorts was introduced. In the past the Mezzogiorno
would have been the only real beneficiary but Italy had been unsuccessful in obtain-
ing Community support for its distressed regions. Even before its accession, the UK
had however teamed up with Italy. With the European Regional Development Fund
(ERDF) in place, Italy became its greatest beneficiary, followed by the UK, but politi-
cal logic dictated that, in one way or the other, all Member States should benefit. Still
operative, this is called ‘just return’.
As reported, Drevet mocks the policy introduced in 1975 as being neither
regional nor communautarian. It represented financial transfers to governments to
support whatever regional policy they pursued. Even the requirement, written into
64 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

the regulations, of additionality, meaning that European funds must come on top
rather than in lieu of national contributions, was disregarded. A telling example
comes from France where funds promised to Brittany by de Gaulle when he was still
President were subsequently reduced because of ERDF allocations to this region.
The Ministry of Finance argued that since France was a net-contributor to the ERDF
the allocation for Brittany coming from Brussels was in fact the money promised
previously by de Gaulle arriving by a circuitous route.
Drevet describes the continuing efforts by the Commission faced with such
intransigency to obtain ‘Community Added Value’ from regional policy, only to
be frustrated by Member States conducting a veritable guerrilla against it. This
restricted role of regional policy would only change when Jacques Delors intro-
duced a programmatic approach, experimented with in the Integrated Mediterranean
Programmes and modelled further on the evolving French regional policy. Part III
discusses these innovations and the albeit modest role of spatial planners in them.

The context
Seven years after the ERDF had been set up, the Committee on Regional Policy
and Regional Planning of the European Parliament appointed Gendebien as the
rapporteur on EC regional planning policy. His draft report was discussed by the
committee until the motion for a resolution was adopted unanimously with only one
abstention. The report (European Communities – European Parliament 1983) starts
with – this being common practice in such cases – the ‘Motion for a Resolution’, and
there is an ‘Explanatory Statement’.
As will be clear from my account about its attitudes so far, the Commission
needed no encouragement to engage in regional planning. The real addressee was
the Council of Ministers that had never been sympathetic towards such a policy. It
is not uncommon for both the European Parliament and the Commission to be more
proactive than the Council representing the governments of the Member States. It
is also clear that, like in the work of the Council of Europe discussed in the previ-
ous chapter, European regional planning meant more than the planning of and by
regions. As before, though, some ambivalence creeps in. Being from the Walloon
Region of Belgium where regions had just acquired greatly enhanced autonomy
in a process called ‘federalisation’, spelling full regional autonomy in the area of
planning, Gendebien could be expected to support subnational jurisdictions, like
regions. No longer a Member of the European Parliament, he presently advocates
Walloon independence, probably with some form of association with France, no
doubt a reaction to previous vociferous Flemish demands to leave the Belgian state.
At the time, Walloon independence was not on the cards but clearly Gendebien
wanted to accord administrative regions a key role.
A european planning programme 65

He was not the only one to promote regional planning with a view to strength-
ening the position of regions. Their regional lobby organisations, like the Conference
of Peripheral and Maritime Regions and the Assembly of European Regions see the
EC as a partner in affirming the position of regions in relation to national administra-
tions. European regional policy and planning are elements in this equation. This also
explains why they, much as the Committee of the Regions established in the 1990s,
consistently support efforts of the Commission and/or the European Parliament to
promote European spatial planning.
So European regional planning policy is what the Gendebien Report talks
about. As in the reports by the Council of Europe, region is, however, mostly a
generic term for any area or space considered a suitable object for planning. The
report gives a comprehensive analysis of the rationale for and the historical and legal
context of European planning, in so doing debunking the argument advanced to the
present day that the EC does not possess a competence in the matter. The point is,
Article 235 of the Treaty of Rome had been used already for conferring new com-
petences on the Community. Importantly, regional and environmental policy both
were created in this way. This article said that ‘if action by the Community should
prove necessary to attain, in the course of the operation of the common market, one
of the objectives of the Community and this Treaty has not provided the necessary
powers, the Council shall, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission
and after consulting the Assembly [the European Parliament] take the appropriate
measures’. However, neither then nor during the days of the ESDP was this seriously
considered as a way to resolve the issue of an EU role in spatial planning. Planning
was not important enough and, anyhow, unanimity on the issue was unlikely, but at
least Gendebien tried.

The motion for a resolution

As usual, the Motion for a Resolution starts with acknowledging previous opinions
and so forth and discussing legal provisions. There is mention of the fact that ‘many
Community activities and measures in areas such as regional, agricultural, environ-
mental, energy or transport policies are already having a definite impact on European
regional planning’. These are what the ESDP would describe as ‘spatial policies’
that, because of their spatial impact, are in need of coordination through spatial
planning.
Listing regional policy as one of the Community activities and measures that
have an impact on regional planning, the report implies that there is a distinction
between the two. Thus regional policy refers to the measures, in particular the fur-
nishing of financial assistance and regional planning to the coordination of same
measures with each other and with other policies. The major point here, though,
66 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

is to underline that the ‘absence or inadequacy of a coherent Community policy in

some of these areas may have unforeseen, and even negative, effects on European
regional planning’. Gendebien thus raises the problem of the coherence, or rather
the lack thereof, of Community policy, which regional planning should help to solve.
In going through these considerations, the Motion for a Resolution refers, amongst
others, to the Torremolinos Charter adopted earlier that year.
On this basis, it makes eleven points, starting with an invitation to the European
Commission ‘to implement an overall European regional planning policy which will
give expression to the political determination to effectively administer and to preserve
the territory of Europe as a common domain’. The Motion amplifies this by saying
that this is the more necessary since there are structural changes taking place:
industrial decline, rural depopulation, de-localisation of certain activities, interpen-
etration of economies and population, cultural changes, shifting patterns of tourism,
ecological disasters and the loss of natural heritage. In addition, the administration
of the European territory must take account of the quality of life of present as well as
future generations. The urgency of these issues remains undiminished.
A European regional planning policy thus conceived should pursue three
objectives: coordination of existing Community measures and policies ‘to ensure
that, from the spatial point of view, no decision will stand in contradiction to
any other’; the promotion of balanced and integrated regional development; the
assumption of a forward-looking and protective role concerning the European her-
itage. Pursuing these objectives, the European regional planning scheme should
determine the location of ‘certain infrastructures and activities, projects, or zones
of European interest’ for which there should be specific regulations and finan-
cial backing available’. It should be based on an inventory of problems. By way
of example, the Motion identifies eight such problems or issues, from balanced
development to tourism. The scheme should be an instrument for consultation
and arbitration in accordance with ‘grass-roots’ democratic procedures. The work
as such should begin with surveys, proceed to the preparation of a first sum-
mary document by the Commission setting out priorities and alternative choices,
including the holding consultations with the regions and result in proposals from
the Commission to the Council on which the European Parliament should give
an opinion. This was before it was participating in co-decision making, so the
point was well taken. To facilitate this all, the Motion for a Resolution calls for an
operational unit under the authority of a Commissioner responsible for regional
planning and for the spatial coordination of the various Community instruments
and measures.
The Commission was finally asked to take relevant measures to implement the
recommendations of the Motion and to come up within six months with an interim
A european planning programme 67

report. The European Parliament should forward the resolution, once adopted, to
the Commission, the Council and the governments and regional authorities of the
Member States.

The explanatory statement

This is a substantial text with six chapters. Chapter I on ‘The Legal Framework for a
Community Regional Planning Policy’ starts discussing the Treaties. It reiterates the
rationale of Community regional planning policy as bringing ‘greater coherence to
the organization and effective administration of the territory of Europe and greater
rationality to the multiplicity of Community measures’ (emphasis in the original), but
it admits that the treaties do not give the Community responsibilities in the field
of regional planning, regional policy or environmental policy. The fathers of Europe
were, however, convinced that ‘the creation of an area of free trade and the free
movement of goods and persons would not alone suffice for an adjustment of struc-
tures and infrastructures. In other words, a common market would not necessarily
lead to the integration or even convergence of the economies’. The point has indeed
been made, but as will be remembered has not led to specific policy actions. After
the first and second enlargement – Greece had just joined the Community and
Spain and Portugal were about to do the same – and after the first and second oil
crisis, the point was well taken.
The text then interprets the Treaty of Rome to the effect that, in carrying out
their responsibilities, the institutions have launched ‘policies whose respective
spatial implications, when taken together, form the constituent part of “a de facto
regional planning policy”’. That the Community already pursues policies that impact
upon space and spatial development was a point made repeatedly.
The next part of the Explanatory Statement goes into detail as regards
Community measures having such an impact. It recalls the then Commissioner for
Regional Policy, Antonio Giolitti from Italy, being questioned on this point in the
European Parliament and replying by listing regional development programmes; the
Community Action Programme on the environment; measures under the European
Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund; and the Council Directive on mountain
and hill farming measures. They all have an impact on space.
There is much discussion, as is usual in this kind of document, of previous
opinions of the European Parliament, in particular the Committee on Regional Policy
and Regional Planning itself. This is followed by a discussion of similar opinions
by the Council of Europe. There seems to have been rapport between the people
concerned. So the Explanatory Statement discusses the meetings and declarations
68 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

leading up to the Torremolinos Charter,2 describing it quite rightly as the ‘first refer-
ence framework for the drawing up of a European regional management scheme’.
Chapter II of the Explanatory Statement is about the ‘Impact of Current
Community Policies on Regional Planning’. It starts by identifying Community
planning as an ‘unwitting process’, so much so that there is an ‘urgent need for a
voluntarist scheme to give coherence and purpose to the various Community opera-
tions by ensuring the harmonization of State actions and the establishment of a
common policy’. Voluntarist is perhaps too literal a rendering of the identical French
word describing any deliberate, purposeful reaction to situations described as prob-
lematic and giving expression to the will to tackle them.
What follows are detailed discussions of the Community policies concerned.
About the ERDF in particular, the Explanatory Statement claims that its structure
‘makes it impossible for it to fulfil the ambitious goal of correcting the main regional
imbalances in the Community. The Fund’s resources are used almost exclusively to
provide reimbursement for national regional policy measures’, this being the main
complaint against it prior to the reforms under Delors. The Explanatory Statement
then points to the ‘non-quota section’ over which the Commission has more say, and
to the fact that ‘the notion of integrated programmes and multi-annual programmes
and the development of endogenous resources in the various regions’ was calling
for coordination of the Community’s various financial instruments. This is a refer-
ence to the experimental Integrated Mediterranean Programmes then under way in
Greece and Italy which under Jacques Delors would form a source of inspiration for
giving shape to the governance of his regional policy.
There is of course also much to do about transport policy. The Explanatory
Statement recalls amongst others a 1981 resolution of the Conference of European
Local and Regional Authorities pointing out that a joint Community regional planning
strategy should make it possible ‘to ensure that transport infrastructure projects,
even when partially financed by the Community, are not based solely on national
criteria and therefore do not perpetuate the differences and imbalances which exist
at present in the European transport network’. From this the Gendebien Report
concludes the need for efforts to be made ‘perhaps using the scenario technique,
to control the effects on “regional development and balance”, to place the pro-
gramme in the context of an energy-saving policy (sic!) and to establish consultation

2 The English version of the Gendebien Report describes it inaccurately as ‘European Regional
Planning Charter’. For reasons discussed in Chapter 3, its English title was, however, ‘European
Regional/Spatial Planning Charter’. The original text of the Gendebien Report was undoubtedly
French, and the French title of the Charter was ‘Charte européenne d’aménagement du ter-
ritoire’ (see Chapter 3). The translator must have rendered this as ‘regional planning’.
A european planning programme 69

mechanisms involving representatives of local and regional authorities and inter-

ested non-governmental bodies’. One could of course wish for no more than that the
TENs conceived ten years later should be based on a ‘European Regional Planning
Scheme’ formulated in this way. In fact, the networks follow their own sector logic
without making reference to any such scheme. Nonetheless, it must be admitted
that EU transport policy now takes account of the ‘horizontal’ Community objective
– meaning an objective applicable to all Community policies – of sustainability.
The next chapter elaborates upon the content of the proposed European
Regional Planning Scheme. Its justification is the need for a ‘rational spatial organiza-
tion as a function of information (on human activities, natural resources, architectural
and rural heritage) and of social, economic and cultural choices’. So conceived,
regional planning ‘reflects the political determination to manage and preserve our
territory as a common domain. In the eyes of the European Parliament this common
domain belongs to all Europeans of present and future generations’ (emphasis in the
original). Clearly, without saying so in so many words, sustainability was already on
the agenda. ‘Regional’ planning was not conceived, though, as the planning of and
by regions. The need for ‘regional’ planning applied on whichever level, so it is what
nowadays is being described as spatial planning.
The Explanatory Statement then underlines the urgency of European regional
planning. Here comes the claim that, at least implicitly, the legal framework already
existed. This is because the right and, indeed, duty to plan was implied in the fact
that the Community already pursued spatial policies which needed to be made more
coherent: ‘Given that ‘new policies’ are being called for, this is one which would
have the double virtue of being inexpensive and introducing more democracy to the
construction of Europe’ (emphasis in the original). The point is well taken. Increasing
the coherence between policies, planning does not cost any money but may save
money. It also raises broad issues relating to societal goals.
The Explanatory Statement thus lists three objectives of the European Regional
Planning Scheme: coordination of Community measures; survival of the European
heritage through forward planning to maintain its diversity; balanced, integrated and
grass-roots regional development. There is recognition of the role of Commissioner
Giolitti and his ‘idea of developing the endogenous resources of the regions’ as
being ‘in line with the growing need of these regions to work out their own modes
of development’ (emphasis in the original). Stakeholder participation was indeed
one of the main features of the Integrated Mediterranean Programmes, a feature, to
repeat, that would come back with a vengeance under Delors.
Discussing the content of the European Regional Planning Scheme, the report lists
infrastructure, activities, projects or areas of European interest for which the Community
intends to adopt regulations and/or provide finance. In 2006, the Community Strategic
Guidelines for Cohesion would express this idea elegantly by saying that ‘geography
70 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

matters’, but without drawing the conclusion that a scheme outlining where action was
to be taken was needed. Rather than considering location, the practice to the present
day is to allocate funds based on gross domestic product (GDP).
So conceived the European Regional Planning Scheme would give an inven-
tory of problems and formulate a financial framework and a framework of regulations.
Once again referring to the Council of Europe, the Explanatory Statement argues
for democratic procedures and for the avoidance of an over-theoretical approach.
It warns against focusing on new towns and likewise against a policy based on
‘growth pole theory’. Rather, account must be taken of unspecified ‘trends which
have become apparent in European society in recent years’. There follows a pas-
sage reflecting the Belgian situation where the power for regional planning is vested
in the regions:

The Member State should not be the only partner in the discussion, for two reasons:

a The member state too often sees in the European dimension the means of
avoiding democratic debate at home. It hides behind a decision ‘from on high’
to avoid all debate at national level and to impose guidelines which have
received no seal of approval;

b the modern state, which is itself the result of a historical process of unifica-
tion, is not only made up of very diverse geographical and cultural regions but
already constitutes a level of decision-making which is far removed from the
people. A level must be sought which is nearer to them and the region fulfils
these conditions.

This is an astute analysis of nation-states as historic constructs. Strictures

against blaming games being played that reflect ambiguous attitudes towards the
European construct are also well-taken. However, whether ‘the region’ is a more
appropriate receptacle of democratic decisions is a moot point. Much as nation-
states, they, too, are historic constructs with their sizes and internal diversity varying.
The real issue discussed in the Conclusions is whether fixed jurisdictions on what-
ever level should continue to enjoy a monopoly position.
In the same section there is much to do about a ‘grass-roots model’, and there
are allusions to the notion of subsidiarity. The term as such had not yet penetrated
Community discourse but the Explanatory Statement says that regional development
‘must be based on the grass-roots principle. It must combine all the grass-roots
initiatives for establishing contact between people, for firing the imagination, for
developing bonds of solidarity and for devising new projects’. European measures
as such are only needed on three fronts: infrastructure, appropriations, and for
A european planning programme 71

‘dealing with the impact of Community policies … on the preservation of a poly-

morphic regional economic system, i.e. one which aims to conserve and develop
the potential inherent in diversity rather than to introduce uniformity, for example of
products’. Here the European Regional Planning Scheme would act as a ‘regulator’
to ensure balanced regional development. It would not so much be a prime mover
organising development around concepts such as ‘poles’, ‘corridors’ and ‘priority
aims’, as a more modest system seeking to evaluate the impact of common policies
with regard to infrastructures, appropriations or prices ‘… in order to ensure that
these do not reduce the chances of grass roots and polymorphic development’. The
fear of what Kunzmann was quoted as describing as an overpowering, inflexible,
centralised system was clear.
Under methods, the Explanatory Statement looks at the ‘facets’ which should
receive priority treatment: transfrontier problems, large-scale infrastructures, heritage,
less-favoured regions, energy, dangerous activities, and so forth, adding, perhaps
somewhat incongruously since the idea was surely that of an integrated approach,
that work on each of them should be independent of progress on any of the others.
For the definition of areas of European interest, the Explanatory Statement
recommends mapping techniques, adding as a kind of afterthought that it would
perhaps be better to think in terms of a number of schemes rather than one overall
scheme. Then there is a discussion of the steps or phases in the preparation of the
scheme. Importantly, the Explanatory Statement asks for an ‘operational unit’ in the
Commission, ‘a spatial task force which would coordinate the work undertaken within
the Community by the Directors-General for regional policy, transport, agriculture,
the environment, consumer protection, nuclear safety and energy … responsi-
ble for the various phases in the preparation of the scheme’. Such cooperation is
notoriously difficult but towards the end I shall recall that the Baltic Sea Strategy
adopted in late-2009 was the outcome of cooperation between a large number of
directorates-general and naturally with the participation also of the relevant Member
States and other stakeholders. In this as in other respects the Gendebien Report
was ahead of its time.
Surprisingly, the Explanatory Statement also considers a right of appeal against,
and judicial supervision of the European Regional Planning Scheme. Suggesting that
it would have a regulatory character for which appeals and supervision would indeed
be functional is incongruous with the spirit in which the scheme is being discussed.
However, this section has been drawn up by the Directorate-General for Research and
Documentation of the European Parliament. Asking also for the establishment of a divi-
sion specialising in regional policy within the European Court of Justice to deal with
such appeals, the text claims: ‘There is clearly a legal basis for the establishment of
a Community regional planning policy in the European Economic Community Treaty,
Articles 2 and 235 of which have already been drawn on for this purpose’.
72 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

The conclusions of the Explanatory Statement recommend practical measures,

ranging from the appointment of a Commissioner for Regional Planning – not regional
policy as was, and still is, the case – and for the coordination of the spatial aspects
of various policies; the establishment of a directorate or an operational unit for this
purpose; the fostering of an agreement in principle on the preparation of a Community
regional planning programme; a report on procedures to ensure participation of local
and regional authorities and non-governmental organisations plus a legal appeal sys-
tem; and an immediate start of preparatory work, to be delivered within six months,
leading to relevant proposals for regulations or directives for the Council to consider.

Outlook
The Motion of Resolution was duly discussed in the plenary meeting. Naturally,
Gendebien himself introduced it. Husson (2002: 42–45) reports on what may
have been a lively debate where a UK member claimed that the very talk of a
European space, let alone a domain, suggested that Europe was a state with a
government responsible. After two days of what must have been intense negotia-
tions, a much shorter resolution than the one proposed in the motion was adopted.
It retained the first point inviting the Community to embark on a general policy of
managing the European space as a common domain. The next points amplifies this
by saying that the intended European spatial planning scheme should be an instru-
ment of coordination prepared according to a bottom-up democratic procedure
based on the needs and aspirations expressed by the regions themselves and by
the proponents of local initiatives. The third and last point concerned the establish-
ment of an operational unit under the responsibility of a Commissioner charged
with spatial planning and the coordination of various Community instruments.
When the European Commission did not respond – the European Parliament
had less influence than today – two further resolutions were passed. In a presenta-
tion to the Committee on Regional Policy and Regional Planning of the European
Parliament in 1986, the President of CEMAT, at that time the Dutch planning minis-
ter, argued that both the EC and the Council of Europe, each in their own areas of
responsibility, should engage in spatial planning. That the Council of Europe should
do so was unsurprising to hear; that the EC should do the same perhaps reflected
the fact that he was from the Netherlands. It will be remembered that the Dutch
favoured an EC planning role.
Another initiative of the Committee on Regional Policy and Regional Planning
was to liaise with regional and subsequently also with local authority lobbies. Over the
years, several joint conferences were held. To the present day, much as the European
Parliament, these lobbies are supportive of European spatial planning/territorial cohe-
sion policy. This would include an Own-Initiative Report on territorial cohesion in 2005.
A european planning programme 73

As far as the EC was concerned, once again, these pleas fell on deaf ears. This
was why, at the CEMAT meeting at Lausanne, the Dutch minister (the successor to
the one who had spoken at the European Parliament) and his French counterpart
decided to take yet another initiative. By that time, the Single European Act had
become a fact.
Presently the relevant committee of the European Parliament is being chaired
by the former Commissioner for Regional Policy, Danuta Hübner from Poland. With
its enhanced powers since the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty and with
this expert leadership, the European Parliament may become an arena for decisive
political initiatives. If so, the European Parliament could do worse than dust off the
Gendebien Report, bring it up to date, throwing its now enhanced weight behind it.
PART III

THE BOOM ERA

In the mid-1980s, shortly after the resolution based on the Gendebien Report
had passed the European Parliament, Jacques Delors began his two terms as
Commission President and the EC entered its boom era. One of the corner stones
of his attempt to energise it was cohesion policy, reflecting his belief in a ‘European
model of society’. As with cohesion policy, there are two parts to it: redistributive
arrangements softening the effects of market liberalisation and globalisation and
inclusive governance. Indeed, ‘the model is marked by high degrees of interest
organization and comprehensive negotiation between government and social
partners over conflicts of interest. Patterns of social partnership based on trust
encourage social capital to overcome particularistic interests (Hemerijck and Ferrera
2004)’. Redistribution is now criticised for allegedly reducing competitiveness but
there is less opposition to stakeholder participation. The latter are even seen as
ingredients of any policy promoting development.
Under Delors cohesion policy became serious business. Reiterating what had
long been appreciated – that the core stood to benefit disproportionately and to the
disadvantage of the periphery – the countries negatively affected made acceptance
of the Single Market and the euro contingent upon a doubling of the relevant funds.
This addressed the distributive aspect of cohesion policy. In pursuing its new pro-
grammatic approach – its other aspect – the Commission took a leaf out of the book
of French aménagement du territoire as well as the earlier Integrated Mediterranean
Programmes inaugurated under Commissioner Giolliti.
From then on, cohesion policy rather than environmental policy, as could have
been the case if the chief concern had been managing urban growth became the
arena for discussing European spatial planning. Eventually this led to the ESDP.
Coming from different traditions, French and Dutch planners nevertheless shared a
common purpose of giving a spatial dimension to Community policies but Germany
was uptight about this. Eventually all countries agreed that the Community had no
‘competence’ in the matter. So the ESDP became an ‘intergovernmental’ document
under the responsibility of the spatial planning ministers of the Member States.
As the reader knows, I am the co-author of a book on its making, so here I
devote a mere chapter to it, Chapter 7 ‘The mother document’. Chapter 8 ‘The
learning machine’ is about its effects in terms of much experimentation and soul
searching, chiefly amongst the small but growing group of European planners.
 Differences between planning traditions are essential in understanding devel-
opments at European level. Before discussing the ESDP, Chapter 5 focuses on the
trailblazers mentioned: France, the Netherlands and Germany. Not that other coun-
tries were absent in the proceedings. However, these three made their influence
consistently felt. There is another player with an even more persistent presence, the
Commission. Chapter 6 is about its ambitions, including the dashed hopes for the
ESDP to become an EU document. Since the Commission’s ambitions reflect his
unique influence, the title is ‘Delors and the consequences’.
CHAPTER 5

THE TRAILBLAZERS

More attention is certainly needed to incorporate the countries of central and

eastern Europe … for two key reasons. Firstly, these countries have often not
been considered in previous studies …. Secondly, many of these countries have
experienced rapid changes … and an up to date assessment of the current
situation is needed.
(Stead and Nadin 2009)

Dominic Stead and Vincent Nadin in the above quote have a point. However,
in this chapter I am not comparing countries across the board. The focus is on
those countries that have shown the way, the French, Dutch and German trailblaz-
ers. France took the initiative and continues to be supportive of European planning
in its present shape of territorial cohesion policy. With their tradition of international
engagement the Dutch became partners in crime but are no longer keen. The initial
German reaction to French/Dutch initiatives in the matter was defensive. It having
been agreed that European spatial planning was intergovernmental the Germans
contributed consistently but they are more distant from Brussels, certainly than the
French and to some extent also, although they are by no means Brussels insiders,
the Dutch.
One reason for such differences is that, according to the Commission-
sponsored ‘Compendium of EU Planning Systems and Policies’, Member
States pursue different approaches to planning. Indeed, a mixture of factors has
ensured

that different arrangements are created in the Member States and regions.
These factors include historical and cultural conditions, geographic and land
use patters, the constitutional, administrative and legal framework, levels of
urban and economic development, and political and ideological aspirations.
The particular forms of planning that result from such complex forces are
deep seated, indeed they define the concept of spatial planning for each
Member State. Thus they might best be described as traditions of spatial
planning.
(CEC 1997: 33–34)
78 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

For the purpose of discussing European planning, only two traditions are
really important: promoting regional economic development by means of state
support for infrastructure, industry, facilities and the like, the aim being to rectify
imbalances, and the management of spatial development by means of land-use
regulation or, in the case of the UK, a discretionary land-use management system
indentified in the Compendium as a separate category, but for my purpose there
is not much difference. Interfering with property rights, there must be a legal base
for both the UK system as well as its equivalent on the European Continent in the
form of statutory powers and also plans adopted by responsible authorities. For
promoting regional economic development what are required are funds rather than
statutory plans.
Statutory planning is normally a local matter. Even where, like in the UK for
reasons of its centralised administration a government minister answerable to
Parliament at Westminster is ultimately responsible, in practice the work is done
by local planning authorities. The make-up of the system shapes the way in which
broader interests, those reaching beyond local jurisdictions, are being articulated.
This can be in national and/or provincial or regional plans, through the vetting of
local plans by higher authorities, by invoking powers of recall or, as in Sweden, not
at all, but then Swedish local authorities are few in number, large and powerful so
that they can internalise issues that elsewhere require oversight. In any case, there
can be national and even EU regulations, like the Habitat Guidelines, that local plans
everywhere must take into account.
In the federal systems of the EU — Austria, Belgium and Germany — the con-
stituent parts each have their own planning system. Spain with its autonomous
communities and Italy with its fiercely independent regions are both quasi-federal sys-
tems where the relationship between levels of government can be complicated, too.
The Compendium points to Denmark and the Netherlands, neither of which is a federal
state, as prototypes of a ‘comprehensive integrated system’ where planning is

conducted through a very systematic and formal hierarchy of plans, from

national to local level, which coordinate public sector activity across differ-
ent sectors but focus more specifically on spatial coordination than economic
development. … This tradition is necessarily associated with mature systems.
It requires responsive and sophisticated planning institutions and mechanisms
and considerable political commitment. … Public sector investments in bringing
about the realization of the planning framework is also the norm.
(CEC 1997: 36–37)

The last sentence should be taken with a grain of salt. Public sector investments
respectively the agencies concerned often follow their own logic. Conflict between
The trailblazers 79

sectors and spatial planners is endemic, also under the comprehensive-integrated

system. This having been said, I start with France, the archetypical representative of
the regional economic approach according to the Compendium.

France: vive la Republique Européenne!

We declare that the State must hold the levers of command. Yes, now it is the
role of the State itself to ensure the development of the large resources, the
supply of energy: coal, electricity, oil, as well as the principal means of transport:
rail, maritime, air, and the means of communication …. It is its role to distribute
credit, in order to direct the national savings to the large investments.1

‘Vive la République! Vive la France!’, thus ended de Gaulle’s addresses. The

Republic is the embodiment of French values but France has projected some of these
and the concomitant policies onto a Europe which is in no small part its creation anyhow.
Regional-economic development planning is one such policy. In their collec-
tion of classic texts produced at the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of DATAR,
Christel Alvergne and Pierre Musso (2003) show that its credentials go back to
the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Believing in a strong executive directing
the efforts of the nation towards national reconstruction and the re-establishment
of French grandeur, as the wartime leader of the Free French, de Gaulle aspired
to postwar leadership. I already indicated that, when this was denied to him, he
withdrew only to be recalled to solve the Algerian conundrum. Upon succeeding,
he insisted on constitutional change, becoming the President of what is the Fifth
Republic. DATAR was set up in 1963, led by a political appointee or délégué. The
first one was Oliviér Guichard, de Gaulle’s one-time chef du cabinet whilst he was
leading an oppositional movement.
The emphasis on developmental does not mean to say that there is no regula-
tory planning. The latter is being operated by the huge Ministry for Ecology, Energy,
Sustainable Development and Sea. However, when it comes to the European scale,
the regional-economic development approach casts a giant shadow. In fact, France

1 Nous déclarons que l’État doit tenir les leviers de commande. Oui, désormais, c’est le rôle de
l’État d’assurer lui-même la mise en valeur des grandes ressources, des sources d’énergie :
charbon, électricité, pétrole, ainsi que des principaux moyens de transport : ferrés, maritimes,
aériens, et des moyens de transmission… C’est son rôle de disposer du crédit, afin de dir-
iger l’épargne nationale vers les vastes investissements… (General de Gaulle speaking as the
provisional head of state to the Consultative Assembly in early 1945; see Gallo, M. 1998. De
Gaulle- 2. La solitude du combattant. Paris : Éditions Robert Laffort, S.A. p. 525.)
80 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

is the prototype. The policy sprung from the recognition of the dominant position,
already mentioned, of Paris. France thus pursues regional policy within a broad spa-
tial framework (Drevet 2008: 31–35). Aménagement du territoire stands for this
framework. The interventions themselves – what one would describe as regional
policy – go under the flag of l’action régionale, hence the double name of DATAR.
The roots are in the age-old French tradition of central control and expert leader-
ship which under de Gaulle has led to the attempt to recalibrate territorial imbalances
through concerted intervention. Working for the Prime Minister, the délégué has a voice
in all matters relating to regional development and DATAR thus coordinates various
sector ministries. The fact that, in addition to the authority of the Prime Minister, DATAR
has funds to use as seeding money helps. This approach DATAR exported to Europe.
In 1995, a national plan came on the statute book but no further than that. DATAR
rather relies on multi-annual covenants with the regions setting out conditions under
which the latter receive funding. These Contrats de plan Etat-région presently called,
retaining the acronym, Contrats de projets Etat-région, formed templates for EU regional
policy. The programming cycle coincides with EU Financial Frameworks. Having seen
EU cohesion policy being modelled on their approach, the French are content.
French trademarks of a different kind are scenarios, including scenarios of the
doomsday-type. Le Scénario de l’inacceptable, a doomsday scenario envisaging a
dislocated and poorly articulated territory, is the paradigmatic example. The ensu-
ing national debate stimulated Gendebien and his report discussed in the previous
chapter. Such dislocation contravenes a ‘republican vision of the territory’ (Avergne
and Musso 2003: 171). What is relevant here is the notion of ‘republican equality’
going back to the French Revolution when the state assumed social responsibilities.
The knife cuts both ways. Thus, the state insists on loyalty and conformity. When
it eventually came, public education served the goal of national identity formation,
including a common language, literally beating regional languages out of French
children (Robb 2007).
To the present day, there is special concern also for access to public services,
with La Poste the emblematic example. The persuasive story told is about the post-
man bringing pension payments to widows in remote corners. The maintenance of
state enterprises with their expert staff, including graduates from elite state institu-
tions of higher learning, is an additional consideration. In EU jargon, public services
are called ‘Services of General Economic Interest’. It is in relation to such services
that the notion of territorial cohesion has penetrated EU discourse; another French
achievement to be discussed in Chapter 9.
The location of disadvantaged regions is important. So is the geopolitical posi-
tion of the national territory, the Hexagone, being the loving designation, because
of its shape, of the national territory. In the late-1980s, DATAR had its eye on its
changing fortunes.
The trailblazers 81

‘France is not really herself other than in the first rank’, de Gaulle once said.2
The French continue to watch their position in Europe and the world. When the Iron
Curtain fell, they understood that the centre of gravity would move east. Containing
Germany had been a driver behind French European policy, but now this economic
power house would become even more influential! So there was reason to look at
the French territory in its wider context.
DATAR jumped on this. It had lost influence under Prime Minister Jacques
Chirac, a former Mayor of Paris and future French President. Conceptualising the
French territory in a European context could help restore its position. So DATAR
commissioned researchers from Montpellier, with the geographer and political
adviser Roger Brunet in charge. His pan-European study (Brunet 1989) identified a
European dorsale (backbone): a shape with a cunning resemblance to the European
megalopolis identified by Dutch and international planners before. This dorsale no
more than straddled French territory, so Paris and even more so the Atlantic Coast,
were in peril (Figure 5.1).
How did the dorsale become the Blue Banana, the name under which it has
acquired notoriety? Apparently, upon entering the room at DATAR with a wall dis-
play of it in blue, the planning minister asked: ‘What is this Blue Banana for?’ A
journalist (Alia 1989) overheard this and published an article under this title, and the
name stuck.
‘Take a map of Europe and erase the borders. What remains? A new
space’, was the opening sentence. What followed was the shocking news that
notre Hexagone – our Hexagon – was not in the core of Europe. The Brunet
study showed a banana reaching from London to the north of Italy, an area where
the real heart of Europe beats. This banana, the article warned, grew and blos-
somed ‘without us’. It was there, in the European core – Lotharingia, as the
Council of Europe report had called it in 1964 – where decisions were being
taken, where productive forces were concentrated; where the achievers were.
As far as competitiveness was concerned, the banana could hold its own in
global competition, for instance from BosWash, the megalopolis identified by
Gottman and referred to as such in the article.
What was evident was the early concern for competitiveness, now very topi-
cal. Centralisation of political power had led to over-concentration in and around
Paris. The Blue Banana as against his was polycentric, featuring medium-size towns
with a tradition of autonomous local government. It is relevant to note that the way
in which the Brunet Study had identified the dorsale had been by plotting towns

2 ‘La France n’est réellement elle-même qu’au premier rang’. (Max Gallo. 1998. De Gaulle – 2.
La solitude du combattant. Paris: Robert Laffont. p. 13.)
82 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Figure 5.1 The ‘Blue Banana’ when it was still the dorsale, or backbone of Europe.
(Source: Brunet, R. (1989) Les villes européennes. Groupement d’Intérêt
Public RECLUS. La Documentation Française. Paris)

and cities with 200,000 inhabitants and more in the, as it then was, Community of
twelve together with Switzerland and Austria.
So the Alsace did alright. The researchers from Montpellier also identified a
Sun Belt along the Mediterranean, called the nord du sud, the North-of-the-South,
the great beneficiary of French regional economic development policy. However,
France as such was under threat as a result of outdated administrative structures
and the emptying out of its interior. The book on ‘Paris and the French desert’ had
already identified this threat immediately after the war. However, echoing more
recent thinking, the article warned against putting a break on Paris. The French
metropolis played in a different league, needing to hold its own against the other
European world city, London. One of the themes continues to be how to maintain
growth engines, whilst also supporting a more polycentric form of development. The
Blue Banana has greatly influenced European planning.
The trailblazers 83

Another, more indirect French influence has to do with the existence of well
in excess of 36,000 communes, each with an elected council and mayor. Some are
simply too small, but there is no sustained attempt at consolidation. The half a million
mayors and councillors are a force to reckon with, the more so since many a mayor
is also a deputy, a senator or even minister. State services, often through the agency
of the préfectures administering the départements into which the French Revolution
has divided the country, fill the gap. The prefect used to order, entice or cajole
communes to do what was right, but France is decentralising, so this is changing.
One answer to fractured local government is to focus on bassins de vie, or pays,
territories with some common feature covering several communes. This is like early
Dutch planners identifying areas between the municipal and provincial scale, soft
spaces not coextensive with any jurisdiction, as planning arenas. French pays are
the objects of flexible arrangements to formulate what is called a projet de territoire.
Participants are expected to take the strategy, in the formulation of which they have
participated, into consideration. Although a statutory document, the Schéma de
cohérence territorial represents a similar approach.
At first sight to draw a parallel with the EU seems fanciful. However, there are
many issues in the EU criss-crossing borders. Such issues cannot be pressed into
the straightjacket of territorially fixed entities. CEMAT and the Council of Europe
Working Party ‘Regional Planning a European Problem’ have already been shown to
point this out.
In this respect, the EU seems to once more have taken a leaf out of the book
of the French. It gives incentives for cross-border and transnational cooperation
with the intent of promoting ad-hoc strategic cooperation. Like in strategic spa-
tial planning à la française, tailor-made arrangements exist, the latest being the EU
Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region. The so-called European Grouping of Territorial
Cooperation (EGTC) offers administrative facilities for cross-border cooperation
– perhaps the reason why some Member States are reluctant to transpose the rel-
evant EU legislation.
The relation between French and European planning is mutual. Thus, in pursu-
ance of the ESDP, a study of ‘France 2020’ directed by the then délégué at DATAR,
Jean-Louis Guigou, saw the light of day. The second edition (Guigou 2002) in particu-
lar positioned the French urban network in a wider context of European macro-regions,
sometimes called ‘pétites Europes’ – ‘little Europes’. Without an immediate follow-up,
the study nonetheless reverberates in French policy but of course as elsewhere the
discourse changed to take account of the concern for competitiveness. The name of
DATAR became DIACT (Délegation interministérielle à l’aménagement et à la com-
pétitivité des territoires). As already in the Brunet Study, the issue is no longer defined
in terms of what has once been described by an expert from Brittany as the ‘cancer-
ous’ growth of Paris. Rather, like in EU cohesion policy, the issue is defined in terms
84 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

of the co-evolution of all territories so as to maximise their potential and in so doing to

contribute to the competitiveness of France as a whole.
The latest expression of this policy is a strategic report expressing a ‘novel
ambition’ (DIACT 2009). It shows the French keenly observing the evolution, still to
be discussed, of thinking in the Territorial Agenda of the European Union in which
France has of course participated. Accordingly, the new report identifies climate
change and energy as new challenges. It also reflects themes in the Green Paper
on Territorial Cohesion, also to be discussed, invoking policies of concentration,
connection and cooperation. The DIACT report emphasises the interdependence
of territories and the need for inter-regional cooperation, with metropolitan areas
assuming responsibility. It also underlines the need for transnational cooperation.
Perhaps because DATAR is an international brand name, the acronym was
reinstated in December 2009, but it now stands for Délégation interministeriélle à
l’aménagement du territoire et à l’attractivité régionale. Note that ‘regional action’
has been replaced by ‘regional attractiveness’.
It is sometimes said that the French view Europe as an extension of France.
Clearly, France has been successful in shaping the EU and its institutions. True, the
British and the Scandinavians, followed by the new Member States, have meant
change. English is now more common and lunches no longer last for two hours com-
pensated by the willingness to stay late at work. What remains, though, is French
willingness and effectiveness, at least where the experts are concerned, to think
one’s way through the issues. An English author concludes that amongst the politi-
cal classes of Europe ‘only one … has left its distinctive mark on Brussels and the
European Union. … For if we ask about élites within European states today, one
thing is clear. Easily the most formidable, the best educated and most determined
political class in Europe is that of France’. (Siedentop 2000: 134). Clearly, the rest
of us have much to learn from the French.

The Netherlands: paradise lost

Where there can be conflict in space between the policies of the EC, there
spatial coordination can increase the effectiveness of the Community.
What institutional provisions within the EC this leads to can be looked at
in due course.3

3 ‘Waar de maatregelen van de EG ruimtelijk met elkaar in conflict kunnen komen, kan ruimtelijke
coördinatie de effectiviteit van de werking van de Gemeenschap verhogen.
Tot welke institutionele voorzieningen dit binnen de EG leidt, valt nader te bezien’. (Jaarverslag
Rijksplanogische Dienst. 1978. s‘Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij. p. 39.)
The trailblazers 85

Writing before the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, Max Gallo (2007) criticises
French presidents for allowing party-politics to nibble away at their prerogatives
insisted upon by de Gaulle. This applies also and in particular to the definition of
European policy. Gallo also claims that French elites in general are failing to give
leadership. It pains me to say the same about my adopted country in general and
about Dutch national planning more in particular. Wil Zonneveld (2010) signals an
institutional void and the fragmentation of Dutch planning doctrine (Figure 5.2). He
points out that the planning community has dissipated and that planning is low on
the political agenda. This has to do with Dutch politics in general.
On the night of the murder of the maverick politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, then
Prime Minister Wim Kok came on TV. Exasperated and as if to recall the consensus
of the past, he exclaimed: ‘This is the Netherlands!’ However, the Netherlands of

Figure 5.2 Dutch doctrine fragmenting: The Randstad breaking up? (Source: Lambregts, B.,
Janssen-Jansen, L. and Haran, N. (2008) Effective governance for competitive regions
in Europe: the difficult case of the Randstad. GeoJournal 72: 45–57)
86 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

civilised elite compromises celebrated in the international political science literature

was no more. It is no consolation that the other examples which Lijphart (1968)
quotes of ‘consociational democracies’, such as Austria, Belgium and Switzerland,
do not exactly shine either.
Pim Fortuyn’s followers formed part of a short-lived government. The right-of-
centre successor coalition threw out the Fifth National Planning Report ready to be
signed but with the fingerprints of a planning-minded Labour minister all over it. The
report would have continued a tradition reaching back to 1960. Under the telling
title of ‘Making Space for Development’ a new National Spatial Strategy (2006)
eschewed the ambition of controlling development. Under a minister who let it be
known that she would much rather be minister of spatial development than planning,
the standing of planning declined.
In 2005, only days after the French, the Dutch also rejected the European
Constitution, reversing their pro-European stance. No government minister or party
leader who had advised to vote yes resigned.
In the period 2002 to 2005, Dutch planners had succeeded in rekindling, after
a lull of four years, European spatial planning. They organised a meeting of ministers
on territorial cohesion (to be discussed later). However, after the Dutch nee, Europe
was relegated to the tail end of an already weak planning agenda.
In the past, an American Netherlands expert could say that planning was one
of the Dutch central cultural institutions (Shetter 1987: 97). A common explanation
was that the Netherlands was a small country wrestled from the sea so that the
Dutch had learned to put the common good above their own individual interests.
Attitudes have also been shaped by the experience of the Dutch Republic gaining
independence from Catholic Spain, in so doing establishing a ‘commonwealth of
burghers’ (Goudsblom 1967: 15). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism
were at work, of which Max Weber (1965: 117) has said that the ‘moral conduct
of the average man was … deprived of its planless and unsystematic character and
subject to a consistent method for conduct as a whole’. With trust in consistent
method came respect for expertise.
The Protestant Republic never cruelly suppressed Catholics. A grand com-
promise over financing their schools in 1917 was a milestone in their emancipation.
The ‘pillarisation’ of Dutch society enabling groups to retain their identity became a
Dutch trademark. This strengthened civil society already vibrant since the Republic
where burgher elites had provided services. Civic responsibility and mutual trust
spilled over into the relationship between the state and the market, the ‘polder
model’ relying on cooperation and consensus.
Constitutionally, the Netherlands represents a mixture of French and German
elements. Though distinct, the municipal, provincial and national levels are closely inter-
woven but where necessary national government is able to assert itself. Importantly,
The trailblazers 87

the national government is the chief source of finance. By means of the ‘golden cords’
of subsidies and grants, it wields power. It did so effectively until the turn of the millen-
nium, letting urban development fall into line with national planning policies.
Another example of history asserting itself is the openness of the Netherlands.
Setting up the United East Indies Company, the Republic became a trading nation, in
fact the principal global maritime power. It maintained far-flung commercial relations.
The seventeenth century became the Golden Century, making the Netherlands a
magnet for people from all around Europe, including Hugenot refugees from France.
The country could not sustain this position but trade continues to be important.
The Netherlands has one of the most open economies in Europe. With its language
skills, the Dutch workforce caters to international firms. The downside of globalisa-
tion is that the Netherlands has lost major industries.
The capacity of Dutch planning to respond to globalisation pressures stems
from planners conceptualising the position of the Netherlands in its wider context.
Thus, as has become evident in previous chapters, Dutch planners have always seen
their country as part of a north-west European Delta, with a competitive position that
needs to be nurtured. In addition, as described, Dutch planners have always been
willing to reach across borders.
Apart from their confidence gained through experience with national spatial
planning, the reason was once more their understanding of the Netherlands as
deeply embedded in Europe. There was of course discussion of the likely impact
of ‘Europe 1992’, the programme to implement the Single Market, but rather
than defensiveness, this resulted in the decision in the late-1980s to confront
the problems head on. When it came to preparing the ESDP, the Dutch were
amongst its keenest proponents. They also took the initiative to resuscitate the
process after the lull in the early 2000s by organising the ministerial meeting of
2004 already mentioned.
So the Dutch were in agreement with the French that EU policies in general
and cohesion policy more in particular needed a spatial framework. Whether the
European treaties allowed for this – what will be described as the competence
issue – did not immediately come to mind, nor did it to the minds of the French EU
officials concerned. Remember that aménagement du territoire requires no specific
competence and this applies also at the European level, or so the thinking went. In
Dutch planning, as against this, the planning competence is well defined but there is
no national plan, only indicative statements of planning policy. So for Dutch planners
it was conceivable for the EU to have an indicative framework, including, like with
their own documents, policy maps.
Having said this, I hasten to add that not all sectors share these views. As will
be shown to be the case in Germany, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and, since
the Netherlands has become a net-contributor, the Ministry of Finance are sceptical,
88 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

not only of European planning, but of Europe in general. Now the Netherlands is one
of the countries that would like to see cohesion policy being curtailed, the telling
term being ‘renationalisation’. This would amount to breaking away one of the pil-
lars, possibly the most important one, of integration as presently practised; but the
Netherlands has become weary of integration anyhow.
The opinion leader on this is the UK. In other respects, too, the Netherlands
moves closer to Anglo-Saxon models. As part of the reforms of the Dutch welfare
state there has also been a massive realignment of housing policy.
The shake-up is general. Here I return to the beginning of this section. The mav-
erick politician murdered in 2002 has almost single-handedly changed Dutch political
discourse. He had drawn exasperated comments, not only from the Dutch but also
from the international press. Which are the sources of popular dissatisfaction that he
articulated? A sociologist quoted in the Dutch quality daily NRC Handelsblad once
explained that whoever could climb the social ladder had done so. Prospects for those
at the bottom of the social hierarchy for improving themselves were thus poor. And it
was they who experienced competition from immigrants benefiting, where the latter
availed themselves of the opportunities, from the open educational system. Like in
France, the underclass is in other words resentful and falls prey to populists, of which
the Netherlands has more than a fair share. It is also bewildered by, and mistrustful
of, Europeanisation. There is in general said to be ‘increased evidence that the losers
from change, in particular those with low-income and insecure jobs, are turning against
the EU, which is perceived as an important vehicle for change (Tsoukalis et al. 2009)’.

Germany: the shackled giant

The Federal and the State Governments welcome the clarification in the Green
Paper that national and regional competences for spatial planning and development
are not up for discussion. In creating a sustainable form of land-use, the changing
social and economic conditions will lead to specific challenges at regional level.4

4 Bund und Länder begrüßen die Klarstellung im Grünbuch, dass die nationalen und regionale
Zuständigkeiten in Fragen der Raumordnung und Entwicklungsplanung nicht zur Diskussion
stehen. Der Wandel gesellschaftlicher und wirtschaftlicher Rahmenbedingungen wird ins-
besondere auf regionaler Ebene zu spezifischen Herausforderungen bei der Gestaltung einer
nachhaltigen Raumnutzung führen. (Joint Opinion of the Federal and the Länder Governments
concerning the Communication from the European Commission ‘Green Paper on Territorial
Cohesion – Turning Territorial Diversity into Strength’. Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft
und Technologie. Berlin. p. 2. http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/consultation/terco/pdf/2_
national/13_2_deutschland_de%20.pdf.)
The trailblazers 89

The German preference had been for the Council of Europe as a European
planning arena but the Single Market spelled more competition and cohesion policy
was becoming serious business in the late-1980s. So the Germans eventually agreed
to the ESDP relating to the EC being prepared on condition that it would be inter-
governmental, much as the Torremolinos Charter had been. They can take credit for
subsequently bringing the ESDP as well as the Territorial Agenda of the EU into port.
In appreciating German attitudes, the federal set-up, already evident in the
quote earlier and how planning fits into it are important. One should also realise that
Germans think primarily in terms of land-use planning and where the competences
for it rests. The upshot is that, although due to the sheer number of experts and the
variety of issues dealt with in the very different settings of the sixteen Länder a giant
in the field of planning, Germany nonetheless fails to bring its experiences to bear.
Above all, one needs to appreciate that reunification presented huge challenges.
This momentous event also changed the Federal Republic’s position into being a
neighbour of Poland and the Czech Republic and close to the Baltic States. Culturally,
Germany is more self-contained than its western neighbours. There is no aversion, like
in France, against foreign influences but, other than in small countries, foreign films are
dubbed and books, including pulp fiction, translated, which is true also for academic
texts. So the exposure to English is less. Being able to work in this international lingua
franca as required, for instance in the context of INTERREG (one of the Community
Initiatives) and ESPON is thus not self-evident. Reunification added millions previously
untouched by globalisation. The process absorbed much energy, so much so that it is
remarkable that Germany continued to pull its weight in the EU; but then the EU, too,
rose to the occasion, giving assistance to the new Länder.
Concerning the internal make-up, it is hard to overestimate the importance of
federalism. The now sixteen Länder are states in their own right with their own con-
stitutions, parliaments and governments headed by a prime minister. In many areas
they are autonomous and even national policies are conducted jointly with them.
However, for the representation of their interests in Brussels the Länder rely on
Berlin. Now, if it were a Member State, North Rhine-Westphalia would be a medium-
size one with full representation like its smaller Benelux neighbours, Belgium and the
Netherlands, not to mention Luxemburg. Larger by a factor of more than forty than
the smallest Member State of the EU, Malta, North Rhine-Westphalia has even so no
voice at Brussels.
Berlin represents their interests in good faith, but the Länder lose ground. So,
although there are differences between the new Länder and the rest, in general
they are weary of the EU. Its influence seems to increase surreptitiously, a process
described as ‘competence creep’. The Länder thus demand more influence in EU
matters. Prevailing fluid arrangements in the EU raise their eyebrows. Much thought
is spent on preserving the autonomy of existing levels of government (Scharpf 1994).
90 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

There is also a wide gap between Germany and Brussels. Germans are to be found in
prominent positions, true, but sharing a Latin culture, a Frenchman, an Italian, Spaniard
and Portuguese and also a Romanian can move in and out more easily.
Concerning the arena for European spatial planning, cohesion policy, what puts
Germans on edge is Commission interference with their own regional policy defined as
a joint task of the federal government and the Länder. This is attractive for Länder gov-
ernments wishing to be seen to cater to their constituencies. However, the EU is looking
over their shoulders and on occasion imposes fines for contravening rules on state aid.
Such weariness is shared by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Technology,
the present name of the federal ministry co-responsible for regional policy. Planning
as such is the responsibility of the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban
Development, and there is not much love lost between the two. The Ministry of Finance
concerned with the German position as Europe’s paymaster is not sympathetic either.
German local planning is largely about zoning and of no concern here. Above the
local level, planning is going by the name of Raumordnung, spatial ordering. Having
been brought into existence before there was a Federal Republic, the Länder carry
much weight in this. Federalism is a lived reality and diversity accepted as a matter
of course. Within a loose federal framework, each of the Länder thus passes its own
planning legislation and makes its own plans and policies, with recent reforms even
allowing it to contravene federal guidelines. Länder plans thus formulated should
bring order into development by means of coordinating public works and the like.
Integration from a spatial point of view is written all over German planning.
The Länder also review local plans, but spatial planning as such has no instru-
ments for stimulating development. Sources of funding are either private, or they
come from the sectors. German planning has to rely for its effectiveness on the force
of the law and on internal coordination. Basically, German planning is thus regula-
tory. Planners would of course love to be more proactive, one of the reasons why
they were falling for the concept of ‘spatial development’.
At the federal level responsible also for the input into European planning, there is
no plan at all. Much business is conducted through a Standing Conference of Ministers
responsible for Regional Planning comprising the Länder ministers and the federal min-
ister responsible. This is known by its German acronym MKRO, Ministerkonferenz für
Raumordung. Federal planners keep tabs on overall spatial development, commission-
ing their back office, the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning, known by
its German acronym as the BBR for Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung, to
do much of the work. Within it, there is now a specialised agency, the Federal Institute
for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (Bundesamt for
Bau-, Stadt- und Raumforschung – BBSR) doing the research, including the so-called
Raumordnungsberichte, or Federal Spatial Planning Reports. It also provides much of
the German input into European planning.
The trailblazers 91

After German reunification, the former German Democratic Republic was

divided into five new Länder, increasing the number to sixteen. East-west migra-
tion gave urgency to the need to improve living conditions. The response was a
‘quick and dirty’ study, the very first experience with a federal planning framework.
However, the new Länder had not been party to the exercise. So in 1993, so-called
‘Guidelines for Regional Policy’ came out, this time under the umbrella of the MKRO.
Guiding principles are called Leitbilder. The third English-language ‘German Annual
of Spatial Research and Policy 2008’ (Strubelt 2009) discusses the difficulties of
translating the term but guiding principles comes close. Federal legislation enunci-
ates some such principles, and this document – like the next one of 2006 to be
discussed – elaborates upon them.
Five principles were put forward for settlement structures, environment and
land use, transport planning, European planning and for a number of generic issues.
The one on European planning highlighted the German position in the heartland of
the continent. By that time, the Commission had published ‘Europe 2000’. Accepting
that the European treaties gave the Community powers to intervene in spatial devel-
opment, the Guidelines rejected comprehensive rules and codes for regional policy.
‘What we need is not a new super-planning concept on a European scale but the
flexible further development of the various forms of coordination’ (Federal Ministry
1993: 20). The Germans feared that the Commission might formulate a plan like
those the Länder – but not the federal level – were invoking. We cannot give the
Community powers that we ourselves do not have, was the argument.
The Guidelines went on to specify the goals of any European framework, begin-
ning with a balanced, polycentric settlement structure. The list included support for
urban networks and the TENs. Realisation of these goals depended, not only on national
sector policies, but also on measures taken by the Commission. To coordinate such
measures, what was needed was an overall European spatial vision or Leitbild to be
developed by the Member States. This reflected German practices, putting a premium
on initiatives from below. The Germans speak about the ‘counter-current principle’.
Discussing the ESDP process, I shall show German planners to have won
other Member States over to this their position that European planning was to be
bottom up. So this is how the ESDP became intergovernmental. As a consequence,
the ESDP carries more commitment, especially within the small professional plan-
ning community, than would have been the case, had the Commission involved
consultants – the only option for a Commission service starved of personnel.
German thinking has evolved since the Guidelines of 1993. In 2006, the
MKRO adopted new ‘Guiding Principles for Spatial Development in Germany’
(Federal Office and Federal Ministry 2006; see also Strubelt 2009). The three new
key concepts were: ‘growth and innovation’, ‘securing services of public interest’
and ‘conservation of resources, shaping of cultural landscapes’. Like with the latest
92 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

French document, the impact of the Lisbon and Gothenburg Strategies to be dis-
cussed is evident. Thus, under growth and innovation, the Guidelines emphasise
that each region has its own specific development potentials. As Horst Zimmermann
points out (Strubelt 2009: 8) this reflects Paul Krugman-type New Economic
Geography, which is also true for present EU cohesion policy. No region has only
strengths, and none, whether urban or rural, only weaknesses. The motto is thus
‘strengthening strengths’. (In German ‘Stärken stärken’, which works better as a
slogan.) This leads to the identification of eleven European metropolitan regions, but
the emphasis is not exclusively on these. Rather, they must show solidarity with their
surroundings, forming ‘Verantwortunsgemeinschaften´: large-scale alliances for joint
responsibility. In German, the term seems a good one. It is not intended, however, for
this to lead to administrative reform. This is merely a complement to existing struc-
tures. The rhetoric is masterly and so are the graphics (Figure 5.3).
This is also true for the other two key concepts. As in France, securing service
provisions is an issue. In East Germany, demographic decline is already evident and
this will hit the whole country and many parts of Europe as well. Under the heading
of ‘equivalent living conditions’ service provisions have been a long-standing issue,
with central place theory an ever evolving tool-kit for tackling it. To this the Guidelines

Figure 5.3 European metropolitan regions in Germany. (Source: Perspectives of Spatial

Development in Germany (2006) Bonn: Selbstverlag des Bundesamtes für
Bauwesen und Raumordnung)
The trailblazers 93

add the need for integrated policies involving public and private providers. In their
expertise on territorial cohesion, as rare examples of Germans sympathetic to the
concept, Ulrich Battis and Jens Kersten (2008) argue that, conceived as equality of
opportunities rather than of actual conditions, territorial cohesion points to where
German thinking should be heading.
The third key concept addresses sustainability which is written all over German
policy. This requires the active management of spatial resources and development
potentials, with planning in a coordinative role. There is special mention of maritime
spatial planning, in which Germany takes an interest, also at EU level. The country is
active in developing wind farms on land and on the sea, so this figures.
Note that in all this the role of federal planning is to stimulate discussion. It
spends its meagre resources on research, demonstration projects – also of a trans-
national nature – and awarding prizes, all in line with the federalist spirit laying much
store by initiatives from below. There is enthusiasm and support, therefore, for similar
approaches at EU level, for instance under the European Territorial Cooperation
objective. Arguably, the German example is a good one for how EU policy in the
matter should proceed. Unfortunately, the distance to Brussels remains. I remember
outbursts against Eurocrats, both from a respected academic and a key practitioner.
Parallels between the new Guidelines and French and Commission thinking go
unnoticed. This having been said, it is also true that, now that the Lisbon Treaty is on
the books, experts begin to accord a planning role to the EU (Ritter 2009) but this
has not yet penetrated official discourse.

Outlook
Beyond saying that all three countries discussed have been trailblazers, it is tempting
to compare them but there are not many commonalities. France and the Netherlands
have become sceptical about European integration. So far, the Germans have kept a
lid on expressions of popular misgivings. On the expert level, the French continue to be
involved in European planning, whereas the Dutch have bowed out and the Germans
pull their weight mainly in the intergovernmental work that suits their predilections.
Planning has changed, maybe to the better in France, but not in the
Netherlands. German planning with its national guidelines seems on the way up but
nobody makes the connection with European planning. Being net-contributors, all
three would like their contribution to the Community budget to be reduced but the
Netherlands, together with the UK and Sweden, as the only one of the three dis-
cussed here takes a really tough stance. Cohesion policy is a mainstay of European
integration, so this is a major issue playing itself out as we watch.
CHAPTER 6

DELORS AND THE CONSEQUENCES

The distant origins of the Delors strategy could be found in France’s agonizing
policy reappraisal in the early 1980s. … It was no longer possible … to go it
alone …. Mitterrand and his team, including Delors, decided to transfer the
goals of economic competitiveness and international political prestige … to
the EC. In doing this France had solid comparative advantages in political
coherence, derived from … superior administrative capacities and foreign policy.
(Ross 1995: 228)

Fluent in French – most of the objects of his research were French – an

American student of French politics, George Ross, carried out a participatory
observer study of the political cabinet of Jacques Delors in action. Nation-states
have pursued regional policy since World War II reflecting their concerns for unbal-
anced development, naturally within the confines of their territories. Imbalances raise
the issue of equity and ultimately of national cohesion. The answer is to be seen to
be doing something to achieve a more equitable distribution. Applying this kind of
reasoning to the EU forms the basis of cohesion policy.
As usual, terminology is confusing. The Single European Act of 1986 identi-
fies economic and social cohesion as objectives of the EC. The instruments are
the Structural Funds, with the ERDF existing since 1975 the most important one
which is why cohesion policy is often used interchangeably with regional policy. The
other funds are the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund, Guidance
Section and the European Social Fund but the European Investment Bank and other
financial instruments may also be used. Confusingly, since 1994 there is also a
Cohesion Fund. Rather than, as the name would suggest, relating to cohesion policy
as a whole, this fund only applies to the ‘cohesion countries’ with a GDP per capita
of less than 90 per cent of the EU average. At the time these were Spain, Portugal,
Greece and Ireland but the membership of the group fluctuates, with most now from
central and eastern Europe.

Cohesion and coherence

Notwithstanding this, ‘cohesion’ and ‘cohesion policy’ are increasingly being used
as umbrella terms. For instance, in 2006 the Council of Ministers issued ‘Community
Strategic Guidelines for Cohesion’ laying down the principles and priorities for this
Delors and the consequences 95

whole policy area. However, there is not one Commissioner or directorate general
responsible, but rather several, depending on the fund concerned. The Commissioner
for Regional Policy and the DG REGIO are however responsible for the largest one,
the ERDF, and for drafting the Cohesion Reports which the Commission is obliged
to issue every three years.
For all of these reasons, it is optimistic to speak about cohesion policy as if
it were coherent. Nonetheless, I do so in order to emphasise one underlying idea
which is to use a range of instruments to form coherent packages in the pursuance
of overarching EU objectives.
Presently the largest item on its budget, cohesion policy is the jewel in the crown
of the EU. It bears witness also to the ambivalence of the European construct. As indi-
cated, the Single European Act of 1986 defines economic and social cohesion as an
objective. Importantly, the procedures are designed to ensure an integrated approach
through, amongst others, partnership: coherence and cooperation. Although recipi-
ents will not see it this way, arguably, as the keys to innovative methods of governance
coherence and cooperation are of equal importance to the funding mechanisms.
The need of policy coherence and also of cooperation with stakeholders applies
to all policies with spatial impacts and not just to policies regarding the Structural
Funds. Even though historically related, the coherence and cooperation rationales
of European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy are thus systematically inde-
pendent. The inverse is not the case: cohesion as an aim is greatly enhanced by the
formulation of coherent policy packages and such packages cannot come about
other than through cooperation.
A simple thought experiment will show why coherence and cooperation are pri-
mary aims, independent from cohesion. Thus, imagine that the aim was to promote
growth in the strongest regions in Europe and only those, the likes of Singapore and
New York and to do so single-mindedly, accepting, nay encouraging, the concen-
tration of economic development and people. In other words, imagine cohesion as
presently conceived being anathema and extremely unbalanced metropolitan devel-
opment the aim. Surely, the relevant policies, too, would need to be coherent and the
cooperation of stakeholders would be needed to ensure success.
Cohesion policy is the opposite. Convergence is its first and foremost objec-
tive. To achieve it, the EU finances much hardware, including the TENs in the
cohesion countries. As against this, coherence and cooperation require software:
approaches, methods, social capital. The uses are multiple. Indeed, for cooperation
to become a self-sustaining process is one of the aims of cohesion policy.
Since this puts into focus the European construct, prior to considering cohe-
sion policy as such, I reiterate some of the fundamentals of European integration,
showing the tug of war that goes on in it. Thereafter I discuss Delors, his background
and outlook. What follows is a discussion of cohesion policy with an emphasis, not
96 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

on its distributive aspects, important though they may be to Member States and
subnational authorities but on programming, which is where coherence and coop-
eration, what I described as software, come in.

A tug of war
On 1 January 2008, the European Union (EU) could have celebrated its fiftieth
anniversary but the celebrations were of the anniversary of the earlier Treaty of
Rome. Each major step on the road to integration since has been marked by a
treaty between the Member States. So-called Intergovernmental Conferences pre-
pare them, the highest representatives of the Member States sign them – the list of
signatories of the Treaty of Rome starts in alphabetical order with ‘His Majesty the
King of Belgium’ – and the treaties are ratified in each Member State under national
law, sometimes – in the Irish Republic always – involving referenda. So the Member
States are supreme. It is they who voluntarily sign away some of their competences.
They therefore expect the EU to do their bidding.
However, the treaties have created institutions with a prime calling to pro-
mote integration, above all the Commission flanked by the European Parliament. The
Commission has fulfilled this role and continues to do so, developing great ambi-
tions, also in the area of cohesion policy.
Before going into detail, I remind the reader that integrating markets gives rise
to territorial issues and market integration was what Europe was initially about. The
idea was that the Common Market – now dubbed the Single Market – would boost
economic activity overall and that this would have a trickle-down effect, even in the
periphery. However, by the time of the Treaty of Rome, Swedish Nobel Laureate
Gunnar Myrdal had already demonstrated that underdeveloped regions were a
systemic rather than a temporary problem that would disappear if only there was
sufficient growth overall. In Chapter 2 I recalled that the founder governments none-
theless ignored calls to address distributional issues in any but the most perfunctory
way. Initially, they also ignored the very obvious need for a common transport policy
and, as part of it, infrastructure provisions but at least now there is attention for the
‘missing links’.
Not only was there no policy to address regional imbalances nor to coordinate
relevant national efforts, other evolving policies with spatial impacts were disjointed.
There was the Common Agricultural Policy, an example of a single-objective, so-
called sector policy, and a bundle of others, such as competition policy and the
European Social Fund, initially designed to assist migrant workers. Presently, there
are many more, such as the TENs, with obvious effects on space or territory.
There are also and in particular national sector policies. Ministries and their
Brussels counterparts form coalitions, taking little or no responsibility for the territorial
Delors and the consequences 97

impacts of their policies. Regional and local authorities might have signalled any
negative impacts on their territories, but they were not at the negotiating table.
When a regional policy of sorts did get off the ground in the mid-1970s, the
aim was not rectifying imbalances on a European scale but to give financial assist-
ance to Member States in pursuing their own policies in the matter. This policy was
as much sectoral as any other one. It was certainly not based on any broad appre-
ciation of the European territory. Member States would not have allowed such an
appreciation to guide the distribution of funds which they considered to be theirs as
a matter of right.
It has been recognised, for instance in the Council of Europe report ‘Regional
Planning a European Problem’ and the Gendebien Report to the European Parliament
discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively that from an overall point of view the
resulting incoherent policies were neither effective not efficient. Chapter 5 has dem-
onstrated that in some countries in any case the need for more policy coherence had
already been accepted.

Come Delors
The incoherent state of affairs as described only changed when Commission
President Jacques Delors introduced the programmatic approach, as indicated
experimented with in the preceding Integrated Mediterranean Programmes. His
‘Europe 1992’ programme aimed to remove obstacles in the way of the free
movement of goods, capital, services and people by 1 January 1993. Indeed, capital
is presently roaming freely and remaining barriers in the way of the free movement of
goods are on the way out. There has been, albeit more limited progress as regards
services and by 2014 there will be free movement of workers within the EU as
presently constituted.
Delors saw a need for flanking policies to generate support for the European
project. One of his ambitions was to reshape regional policy into the instrument
of integration which it had not been before. So cohesion policy took shape. In
Chapter 7 I show it to have become the arena also for European spatial planners to
pursue their ambitions. Here I am discussing cohesion policy as such.
There was the new twin objective of economic and social cohesion. Since
the reforms that followed – the so-called Delors I package – the procedure is this:
within national and regional envelopes that are the outcomes of intergovernmental
bargains in which to the present day payouts rather than ‘Community Added Value’
play a dominant role, regional and local authorities and private stakeholders apply for
funding. They need to augment their allocations with their own resources for relevant
projects formulated from below. This has led to a form of ‘multi-level governance’
(Hooghe and Marks 2001): the ‘low’ politics of programming nested within the ‘high’
98 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

politics of distributing funds, with the Commission the linchpin. In addition, there are
Community Initiatives for experiments where common objectives were more promi-
nent. One of them, INTERREG, has provided an avenue for the application of the
ESDP and as such will be discussed later.
Naturally, in all this the personality and outlook of Delors were important. I dis-
cuss them following Helen Drake (2000) augmented by observations from George
Ross (1995). Drake points out that Delors’ politics was based on the power which
he ascribed to soundly-researched ideas. The picture of him as somebody more at
home in the language of experts than in political rhetoric reminds one of the Saint-
Simonian tradition, so called after Claude-Henri de Saint Simon, the count who gave
up his title during the French Revolution to become a theorist of expert rule and a
source of inspiration for French elite administrators and engineers.
Delors’ political home was on the moderate left but he nonetheless became
a member of the political cabinet of the Gaullist Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-
Delmas. Among his responsibility were industrial relations. He pursued ideas of
creating or reinstating the role of intermediaries, such as the trade union movement,
in social dialogue. This was when he started thinking in terms of a new society.
Political cabinets in France are stamping grounds for future politicians. In
1979, Delors was elected to the European Parliament. Subsequently, he became
French Minister of Finance. This was a continuation of his role as a moderniser on
the left accepting liberal capitalism. However, his

experience of government office only served to underline the contradictions

that he had always experienced between the desire to change society, and the
constraints inherent in the political means of doing so, and in his own tempera-
ment. His forty years of professional life in France had been heavily skewed
towards roles where he hoped to bring about change through influence in the
form of ideas, expertly researched, effectively communicated to the appropriate
channels, and delivered by others. The flaw in this formula in France was that
his ideas were often distorted or dropped in the political process … The same
formula, in the very different setting of the EC, was to meet with greater suc-
cess, before indirectly contributing to similar sorts of political constraints.
(Drake 2000: 45)

Indeed, Delors arrived at the Commission ‘as a “rational European”, a prag-

matist predisposed towards the neo-functionalist analysis of European integration,
tempered with idealistic if not abstract hopes’ (Drake 2000: 46). Incidentally, it is
said that his name had been put forward by President François Mitterrand by way of
compensation for not, as he might have expected, appointing him his Prime Minister.
Maybe because of having been passed over, he gave his new role his best.
Delors and the consequences 99

He was suspected to have arrived with a ready-made plan for a ‘European

society’. Presenting it as a ‘polity in the making’, he started to refer to ‘Europe’ rather
than to the EC. His ideas were not, however, in any way fixed. With a witticism I par-
ticularly like, he is said to have described Europe, with a pun referring to ‘unidentified
flying objects’, as an ‘unidentified political object’.
Delors’ hallmark was a combination of pragmatism and vision. Ross (1995: 11)
tells us that he and his team ‘were practiced in scanning their environment, seeking
things that were malleable, avoiding those which were implacable’. However, he was
deeply convinced that Europe needed to reform its ways to become more competitive,
a theme that was to remain on the agenda. At the same time, Europe ought not to open
itself completely to the floodtides of globalisation. Rather, for Delors

it was possible instead to make the Community into a regional economic bloc
whose synergies and economies of scale would stimulate European innovation.
The fruits of new economic successes could then be directed towards perpetu-
ating the ‘European model of society’. Europe would then stand – practically –
as a humane combination of institutions and ideas that could stimulate market
success while simultaneously promoting social solidarities designed to amelio-
rate the harshness of market relations.
(Ross 1995: 4)

There is a tendency now to remember Delors as a ‘softy’ and to see the Lisbon
Strategy of 2000, to be discussed, aiming to make Europe into the world’s paragon
of competitiveness, as heralding a more realistic, hard-nosed politics. However, clearly
Delors saw the dialectic between competitiveness and the values he wanted to pro-
mote, a dialectic which the rhetoric of the Barroso Commissions continues to invoke.
Delors’ achievement is the Single Market, the completion of the Common Market
with which integration has started. However, the Single Market made it necessary for
the Community to take on tasks normally performed by states. Delors was therefore
leaning towards a modest form of European federalism. Ross invokes the metaphor of
the ‘Russian dolls’: the Single Market progressively requiring more and more flanking
measures. The flanking measures included the doubling of the Structural Funds, as
mentioned a measure insisted upon by a number of countries rallied around Spain.
This turned cohesion policy – the seedbed of European spatial planning – into one of
the main axes of European policy, now in the process of eclipsing the huge agricultural
budget. This was seen as part of the state-building that according to this dialectic fol-
lows from market integration, which is why cohesion policy is anathema to Eurosceptics.
This was what was behind the ‘Delors package’ in the wake of the Single
European Act of 1986. Just after the package had been made public, Delors said in
the European Parliament:
100 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

[T]he ship of Europe needs a helmsman … The large market without internal
frontiers cannot, by itself, properly be responsible for the three main functions
of economic policy: the quest for greater stability … the optimum allocation of
resources to obtain the benefit of economies of scale and to stimulate innova-
tion and competitiveness and the balanced distribution of wealth allowing for
individual merit.
(Ross 1995: 41)

Ross sees this package as the first test of the willingness of Member States to go
and act in the spirit of the Single European Act. Governments appreciated the meaning
and importance of the package. Not only did it represent a vast increase in Community
funding, it also signalled a break with the past when, as reported, each country expected
to receive roughly what it contributed – the principle of ‘just return’ – and to be able to
distribute the funds received according to its own priorities. As against this, the Delors
package ‘asked that the Commission be granted a large measure of new autonomy in
targeting and distributing the new budget’ (Ross 1995: 42).
In the latter days of his second term of office, Delors presented another pack-
age with more measures. This time he was less successful. The first Danish vote
on the Maastricht Treaty had been negative, the French had accepted it with an
almost imperceptible majority and the UK was still run by the Conservatives with
their Eurosceptic wing. The package itself focused on employment, which is true
for all similar strategies since. Anticipating the Lisbon Strategy, it identified lack of
competitiveness as the root cause of Europe’s unemployment problem.
A remarkable aspect was the launch of the TENs. However, in this as in other
respects the Member States refused to give the Community the necessary instru-
ments. Delors had proposed a common infrastructure fund but funding was restricted
to the so-called ‘missing links’ in the TENs. In the core of the EU, this meant some
seeding money, for instance for feasibility studies. Member States do not wish to relin-
quish control over vital infrastructure investments and by the time of the publication of
his second package, 1993, Delors had spent his powder. The symbolic importance of
designating missing links as such should not, however, be underestimated. This helped
secure agreement on the high speed train from Antwerp to Amsterdam. Without this
being labelled a European missing link, agreement on a line through Flemish territory
perceived to be solely in the Dutch interest might have been difficult.
This experience of Member State reluctance to give the Commission the
opportunity to make direct investments was to be repeated when the proposal to
finance projets structurands – strategic projects – under the European Territorial
Cooperation objective of cohesion policy 2007–2013 was flatly rejected.
There were other successful measures taken under Delors, above all European
Monetary Union, but they are not the topic of this book. What remains is to point
Delors and the consequences 101

out that it is impossible to understand Delors without taking into account the French
position on Europe, a topic already discussed. Larry Siedentop (2000) has already
been quoted as crediting the French elite with a vision of a Europe modelled on
France and with great effectiveness in pursuing it but his book might just as well have
‘The Menace of French Bureaucracy’ as its title. His concern is the accumulation of
power in Brussels. He admits that this is not the result of any French conspiracy
but rather ‘… a matter of habit and attitude induced by the powerful administrative
machine at the disposal of the French élite. When the French executive has decided
that it wants something, it gets its way’ (Siedentop 2000: 107).
Siedentop acknowledges changes in French political culture. Reforms under
way represent ‘an institutional move away from the fabled tutorship of the state’
(Siedentop 2000: 111). Since then, in 2004, the Constitution was even amended to
say that France was a decentralised state. In fact,

the process of decentralization initiated in France … testifies to what the

French have long considered a weakness of their own bureaucratic and dirigiste
form of politics. It has been a conscious attempt to create a wider political class
and thereby give French public institutions a deeper anchor in local opinion and
local interests – in fact, to promote the kind of intermediate associations that
would work against the disjuncture of élite opinion and popular opinion which
has, at frequent intervals since 1789, led to revolutionary upheaval.
(Siedentop 2000: 129)

Witness the introduction of stakeholder participation in French aménage-

ment du territoire and the influence that this has had on cohesion policy under
Delors. However, creating a wider, more open political class on a European level
will take time. Meanwhile, the insider joke is about Brussels forming the last ref-
uge of the French centralisers, the jacobins: ‘The slow work of decentralization
in France may already look like ominous writing on the wall to the French élite.
How tempting, then, to turn Brussels and the European Union into a refuge for
dirigiste habits and attitudes which may at last have had their day in France itself’
(Siedentop 2000: 143).
This may have contributed to idealism for Europe draining away, some-
thing that Delors has experienced to his peril. This is the risk of ‘over-integration’
(Siedentop 2000: 220), a reminder of growing unease, not to say scepticism, about
European integration leading to the rejection in France, as indeed only days later
in the Netherlands, of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe in 2005, a
rejection that would finally make clear that Europe was in a crisis (discussed further
in Part IV).
102 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Elements of the policy

Having discussed Delors in context, I now relate the elements of cohesion policy. As is
well known, the doubling of the Structural Funds in the 1990s laying its foundations was
justified by the need to compensate those outside the European core for disadvantages
in competing in the Single Market. This continues to be the case, with a large share
of the funds devoted to the first of three objectives of cohesion policy 2007–2013,
‘Convergence’. Under whichever designation, convergence has always been and con-
tinues to be the first and foremost objective of cohesion policy. Presently, most of the
funds go to central and eastern Europe, with the share of the ‘classic’ periphery within
the EU15, the Mezzogiorno and vast areas in Portugal, Spain and Ireland diminishing.
One can imagine cohesion to mean all sorts of things. However, since the
Single European Act cohesion refers to a state in which convergence has been
achieved. In terms often repeated in the treaties, this is an, as yet non-existent state
of harmonious development in which there has been success in reducing disparities
between the levels of development of the various regions and the backwardness of
the least favoured regions.
I am not going to discuss all permutations of the successive formulations of this
most important objective. Those preparing the decisions ‘have assimilated the Byzantine
codes and rules of six successive treaties of which each includes the amendments to the
previous one, but the European debate is thus sealed in a totally opaque secrecy’, said
François Bayrou and Daniel Cohn-Bendit arguing jointly for a European Constitution
clarifying the situation in Le Monde of 14 June 20001. Rather than proving my mettle in
penetrating this secret world – for those interested, Claude Husson (2004) has done it
for us – I commit the sin of anachronism and refer to Article 174 of the Treaty of Lisbon in
force since 1 December 2009. It amplifies the Single European Act by saying that, least
favoured regions apart, ‘particular attention shall be paid to rural areas, areas affected
by industrial transition, and regions which suffer from severe and permanent natural or
demographic handicaps such as the northernmost regions with very low population den-
sity and island, cross-border and mountain regions’.
With a summary term, the last categories listed are also referred to as areas
with specific geographic features. They are privileged in that their status as cohesion
fund recipients has been sealed. Member States that do not have such areas are not
always enamoured.

1 ‘ont assimilé les codes at les règles byzantines de six traits successifs, don’t chacun rassem-
ble des amendements au precedent; mais la deliberation européenne est ainsi enfermée das
un secret totalement opaque’. (Quoted after Claude Husson. 2002. L’Europe sans territoire.
DATAR. Paris: Editions de l’aube, p. 66.)
Delors and the consequences 103

In practical terms what all this means is funding for projects located in eligible
areas. This funding is, however, conditional upon pursuing common objectives and tak-
ing a programmatic approach, amongst others embracing modern methods of project
management. SWOT-analysis (Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats) and
mandatory ex-ante, mid-term and ex-post evaluations have become standard. A pro-
grammatic approach also implies projects being packaged into coherent wholes, with
common objectives and means appropriate to achieve them. It also implies – but this has
taken time to recognise – attention being paid to where measures are intended to take
effect, thus to space. The Community Strategic Guidelines for Cohesion of 2006 would
famously say why: because ‘geography matters’!
An analytical approach is not enough. Since many interests are involved, the
cooperation is also needed of the multitude of public and private actors concerned.
The next article of the Single European Act recognises this. Since the formulation in
the Treaty of Lisbon differs only in minor detail – talking about the Union rather than
the Community – I once again quote from this latest legal text. My concern is after all
not the genealogy of the treaties. Thus:

Member States shall conduct their economic policies and shall coordinate them
in such a way as … to attain the objectives set out in Article 174. The formu-
lation and implementation of the Union’s policies and actions and the imple-
mentation of the internal market shall take into account the objectives set out
in Article 174 and shall contribute to their achievement. The Union shall also
support the achievement of these objectives by the action it takes through the
Structural Funds.

This asks for no less than full cooperation to ensure the coherence of all rele-
vant policies, first those of the Member States and second of the EU institutions. The
article thus seems to imply the obligation to aim for internal and external coherence,
for vertical and horizontal coordination. As quoted before, Article 13(1) requires EU
policies to be ‘consistent’, which points in the same direction. However, by referring
to Article 174, the scope of this one, Article 175, can be construed to be restricted
to reducing disparities between the levels of development of regions, to the present
day the main business of cohesion policy. Here we come yet again across the
ambivalence of cohesion policy, especially as regards coherence. Be that as it may,
coherence between all policies – at least as far as policies with a spatial impact are
concerned – is what the ESDP and many other pronouncements by spatial planners
before and after insist upon.
Another issue relates to what a ‘region’ is. I raised it already when discuss-
ing the Torremolinos Charter and the Gendebien Report. There I concluded that
region was a generic term, like area, or space and not necessarily the territory of a
104 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

subnational authority. Anyhow, not all Member States have a regional level of admin-
istration let alone one that is in any sense self-governing. Since the EU does not
meddle with the internal administration of its members the solution was to identify
units created originally for the purpose of collecting EU-wide statistics as ‘regions’.
There is a hierarchy of such ‘NUTS’ (Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics)
from NUTS 1 to NUTS 3. Below NUTS 3 there are so-called Local Administrative
Areas (LAUs), but they are of no concern here. In fact, the most important units are
NUTS 2, from 800,000 to three million in size. The threshold below which a region
at NUTS 2 level is considered ‘least favoured’ and thus due to receive funding under
the Convergence objective is a GDP per capita of 75 per cent or less of the EU
average. Importantly, this is adjusted for purchasing power.
There are other technical rules which do not concern me here. Importantly, the
division of Member States into NUTS 2 areas is to some extent negotiable. Obviously,
Member States wish to optimise their allocation under the cohesion funds, so it may pay
them to divide their territory in such a way as to create as many least favoured regions
as possible. Ireland did so. By dividing the country into regions, the Dublin metropolitan
area being one of them, the remaining regions continued to qualify for support.

Outlook
Cohesion policy is not to everybody’s liking. The dislike has become particularly
virulent in the mid-2000s, so much so that there is now a cloud hanging over cohe-
sion policy post-2013, the period of the next ‘Financial Framework’. The issue of
its ‘renationalisation’ – reclaiming cohesion as a Member State responsibility – will
be discussed in Part IV and in particular the Conclusions. After all, if according to
ideas entertained by some Member States, EU cohesion policy were to be, if not
altogether rescinded, then at least severely curtailed, then the opportunities for EU
spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy might become less.
Back to the present when, naturally, the Commission is eager to demonstrate
that cohesion policy works. It does so in the Cohesion Reports. The latest, Fourth
Cohesion Report came out in 2007, with additional Progress Reports appearing
since. In 2010, the Fifth Report is expected. In these reports, the Commission
documents the achievements of its policies, often illustrated with examples and it
indicates the directions of its thinking. There have been other evaluations, including
independent research. In general, the view is that at the level of Member States,
development throughout the EU is now more balanced. However, within Member
States, imbalances often seem to increase, with core areas benefiting more from EU
membership than peripheral ones. New Member States are sometimes arguing for
recognition of development proceeding in phases, which means that uneven devel-
opment must be accepted until the benefits trickle down to the periphery.
Delors and the consequences 105

There is also the question of whether GDP per capita is an adequate, indeed the
only measure of success in cohesion policy. Suffice it to say that, as everybody can
confirm who has travelled through areas receiving funds and sees the signs pointing
out in standardised lettering where and for what purpose EU funds have been used
can vouch, cohesion policy makes the EU visible. Indeed, this was one of its purposes:
supporting the European project. Maybe this is why it is unpopular in some circles.
Finally, much has been written about Delors, his achievements and failings. For
my purposes it suffices to say that without him European spatial planning/territorial
cohesion policy would not be what it is – which is not brilliant anyhow. As regards
this, two comments by Ross (1995) are relevant. The first is that, as I have already
shown, the Delors strategy of slow but persistent state building ran into trouble and
contributed to the crisis of integration, a crisis which forms the background of devel-
opments discussed in Part IV. The other one is that Delors, or rather his cabinet to
whom he left this to deal with, failed to refashion the Commission services to suit his
ideas, in particular the need for coordination, which is still an issue.
CHAPTER 7

THE ‘MOTHER DOCUMENT’

The European Spatial Development Perspective, although thought to be a mile-

stone … could hardly be called a vision. Apart from the concept of polycentricity,
which in itself can be interpreted in many ways, the ESDP does not give a vision
of Europe’s territorial structure. Key players … equated vision with a master plan,
and so the route to articulating spatial concepts, let alone maps, was not taken.
(Zonneveld 2007)

This chapter is about the document failing to give a vision. By now it is history
but essential to the understanding of the European Spatial Planning Observation
Network ESPON, the Territorial Agenda of the European Union and the Green
Paper on Territorial Cohesion, in short, almost everything that has happened since in
terms of European spatial planning. The ESDP is truly the ‘mother document’.
It is illustrative also of problems in European planning. I start with language
issues which are but reflections of deeper problems. Then the document as such
and its key propositions get attention: the identification, under what it calls the spatial
planning approach, of coherence as a key issue and the conceptualisation of the EC
territory as it was in 1999 in terms of a centre-periphery model, leading to a policy
of polycentric development designed to secure the harmonious development of the
EU territory, this being a spatial translation of the intention behind cohesion policy as
described. Next I discuss the process, invoking a term that I have coined before: a
roving band of planners. Finally, there is no avoiding the competence issue that has
overshadowed the process.

The languages of European spatial planning

The ESDP exists in the eleven Community languages at the time and there are
Norwegian and Slovenian versions, the latter even with the official cover. I have also
heard of a version in Catalan and Romanian and a summary in Russian.
The first ERDF Regulations coming out under Delors earmarked funds for
Community level studies aiming to identify ‘the elements necessary to establish
a prospective outline of the utilization of Community territory’, in French: schéma
prospectif de l’utilisation de l’espace communautaire. Prospective outline is per-
haps not the best translation of schéma prospectif, but the real puzzle is the use of
espace in French and of territory in English.
The ‘mother document’ 107

Territory, as in aménagement du territoire, is an evocative and space – espace –

a neutral term in French. The vision of France 2020 (Guigou 2002: 12) calls the former
‘warm-blooded’ and the latter ‘cold-blooded’. The French author François Damette
points at the interdependence between (state) territory and the social formation pro-
ducing it (Damette 1997). By the grace of France decentralising, it is now accepted,
however, that not only the state, but French regions, too, engage in aménagement du
territoire, so much so that a recent book is about: ‘La France: aménager les territoires’
(Jean and Vanier 2008). Anyhow, Damette applauds the use of the term space or spa-
tial where Europe is concerned. Europe is but an economic and monetary space and
not a state and thus has no territory, a point that a Member of the European Parliament
from the UK has been reported as raising concerning the Gendebien Report. German
legal scholars also make the point (Gatawis 2000).
In English and German, the connotation of territory is not the same, nor is the
distinction with space as clear-cut. The English subtitle of the ESDP thus refers
happily to the territory of the EU. The German version avoids the use of territory in
the title, but the opening sentence nonetheless speaks of the territory of the EU.
Surprisingly, the final French version, too, refers to the territory of the EU in the subti-
tle. Maybe by that time, 1999, Damette’s strictures made in relation to the 1997 draft
against the use of the word have been forgotten. Maybe also the official translators
were unaware of such subtleties, which, if true, would further illustrate the point I
want to make: even with the most professional of language services, language is a
problem.
I cannot say whether, in drafting the earlier ERDF Regulation, the distinction
between space and territory was a consideration but using that regulation as my
entry point has at least allowed me to demonstrate that the meaning of concepts
depends on context.
As to the ESDP itself, an expert from the Walloon Region of Belgium was
responsible for putting it on the agenda. One of the polyglot European planners por-
trayed in the Preface, the language in which he conversed with Commission officials
was nonetheless his native French. So at birth the name of the ESDP was Schéma
du développement de l’espace communautaire. Meanwhile, the ‘prospective study’
as foreseen in the ERDF Regulations had taken the form of ‘Europe 2000’. Damette
and others, the German Parliament included, had criticised that document as bearing
witness to Commission activism, but our Walloon expert thought that it was too timid.
He wanted to proceed to formulating strategy, so he replaced outline of the utilisation
of the Community territory in the ERDF Regulations with development. By that time,
spatial development, about which more below, had become a term of good currency.
Taking advice, he translated the French original into European Spatial Development
Perspective. In German this became Europäisches Raumentwicklungskonzept and
in Dutch Europees Ruimtelijk Ontwikkelingsperspectief.
108 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Consider for a moment the Swedish version. Kai Böhme (2002) reports on
protracted discussions between the Commission services, Swedish planners and
the responsible industry ministry before arriving at Det Regionala utvecklingsper-
spektivet inom Europeiska unionen (The Regional Development Perspective of the
European Union). Regional development for which the industry ministry was respon-
sible was not exactly what the ESDP stood for. However, spatial development in
Sweden was a matter for the communes, so it could not figure in the title of a docu-
ment to which a Swedish minister had assented. With national spatial planning well
established, the Danes had it easier, but then the translation of ‘spatial’ proved tricky.
So ESDP became Det europœske fysieke og funktionelle udviklingsperspektiv (The
European Physical and Functional Development Perspective)!
As indicated, the term development has its history, too. It entered the dis-
course in 1991 when the then Dutch Presidency proposed a ‘Committee on
Spatial Planning’ to prepare the meetings of the ministers responsible for spatial
planning. However, planning was anathema to the Conservative UK government.
Thus the committee got the name under which it would be known: Committee
on Spatial Development (CSD). Actually, to the Germans this was welcome.
To them, spatial development stood for a synthesis between spatial planning
German style balancing claims on land against each other and proactive French
regional policy. Ironically, development, as in aménagement et développement
du territoire in French legislation of the mid-1990s stood, not for a proactive
policy – of the essence of aménagement du territoire – but for more attention to
sustainability. Under New Labour, finally, spatial planning in UK English acquired
the progressive meaning beyond the narrow interpretation of town and country
planning under the Conservatives referred to in the Introduction. This gives con-
fidence that, seen as strategy rather than land-use regulation, spatial planning
can be invoked as the equivalent of territorial cohesion. This having been said, it
is time to discuss the ESDP as such.

A slim document
On the cover of the ESDP it says that it has been agreed at the ‘Informal Council
of Ministers responsible for Spatial Planning in Potsdam, May 1999’. The inside
cover relates that the document has been prepared by the CSD, but writing had
in fact been a task for the so-called troika formed by the past, current and next EU
Presidency. This was thus a group with a shifting membership, the only fixture being
the Commission representative, so quadriga would have been a more fitting term.
The ESDP is not, therefore, of the Commission or the Community for that mat-
ter. Nonetheless, it was translated and its publication financed by the Commission.
All versions were published by the Office for Official Publications of the European
The ‘mother document’ 109

Communities at Luxembourg and can be found on the website europa.eu. So, know-
ing that this is problematic, I still refer to the ESDP as ‘CEC 1999’.
The document comes in two parts, Part A is on policy and Part B on analysis.
Part A is less than fifty pages in English, quite an achievement given the gesta-
tion period of, depending on when one posits the process to have started, six to
ten years. This part owes much to the European planning programme discussed in
previous chapters of this book. Part B reflects the state of knowledge and topics
of the late-1990s and has been superseded by work since, amongst others in the
framework of ESPON.
The title of Part A, the only one I discuss, is ‘Achieving the Balanced and
Sustainable Development of the Territory of the EU: The Contribution of the Spatial
Development Policy’. Chapter 1 identifies territory as a new dimension of European
policy and specifies the goal as balanced and sustainable spatial development, recon-
ciling social and economic claims on land with ecological and cultural functions. The
ESDP thus comes down on the side of planning fulfilling an umpire role, an old idea.
Chapter 2 deals with the Community policies with an impact on the territory of
the EU. They are the Structural Funds promoting economic and social cohesion, the
TENs and environmental policy. In addition the chapter lists competition policy, the
Common Agricultural Policy, research and technological development and the loan
activities of the European Investment Bank. Since then, there has been more research
by, or on behalf of, the Commission on the spatial impacts of Community policies
(Commission Services 1999; Robert et al., 2001). ESPON continues to explore the
issues. The chapter makes a case also for improving the ‘spatial coherence’ of these
Community policies, a point central to my understanding of its message.
Chapter 3 presents policy aims and options for the territory of the EU grouped
under ‘Polycentric spatial development and a new urban-rural partnership’; ‘Parity
of access to infrastructure and knowledge’; ‘Wise management of the natural and
cultural heritage’, which is where the ESDP draws on the European planning pro-
gramme of previous decades. Under each of these headings, several topics are
discussed and there are altogether sixty ‘policy options’, a mixed bag reflecting pre-
dilections of various Member States.
Chapter 4 is on the application of the ESDP on various levels. This has been
the object of various follow-ups, beginning with the Tampere Action Programme
adopted only months after the ESDP. The notion of the ESDP being ‘applied’ rather
than implemented is significant but this belongs to the discussion of the impact of
the ESDP in Chapter 8 of this book.
Chapter 5 is about the enlargement of the EU and has been out of date as
soon as the ESDP came out. Amongst others to take account of these develop-
ments, the makers of the ESDP wanted it to be revised. To the present day, planners
from the new members concur but this has never come to pass. In any case, that
110 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

there should have been an ESDP is remarkable. Even at national level, planning is
not universally practised, nor is there agreement on its mode of operation.

The spatial planning approach

I discussed spatial planning as a Euro-English concept in the Introduction. Williams
(1996: 7) also invokes the term spatial policy for ‘any policy which is spatially spe-
cific or is in effect spatial in practice, whether or not it is deliberately designed to be,
and any policy which is designed to influence land-use decisions’. As indicated, in
the ESDP they figure as policies with a spatial impact.
Spatial planning stands for the systematic preparation of such spatial poli-
cies, including those of national spending departments and their counterparts at
Brussels, often working in cahoots with each other and unwilling to let their freedom
of manoeuvre be curtailed. As they apply to specific areas, their policies must not,
however, be at cross-purposes with but rather mutually enforce each other.
As against these ‘sectors’, spatial planning is said to be one of the ‘facets’
of each and every policy that makes a claim on land. In German terminology it is
Querschnittplanung, ‘cross-section’ planning. Recalling the Schuster Report, it is
clear that planners see spatial plans, originally designed to provide grounds for giv-
ing or withholding development permits, as the appropriate vehicle. Ideally, they
would like to see these plans, like masterplans for large-scale developments, to form
the basis for sector plans and projects. In practice they can congratulate themselves
if their plans are consulted.
The tendency is for planning to encompass everything that seems relevant to
the development of an area, hence the adjective ‘comprehensive’ sometimes used. At
the same time, quite rightly, at the scale of regions and nations, such plans are broad-
brush: frameworks rather than master plans. Even as such, spatial plans have a hard
time, though, getting accepted. Thus, the ‘struggle to establish a territorial focus in
a government landscape traditionally organized around functional ‘sectors’ … lies at
the core of episodes in strategic spatial planning in Europe’. After all, ‘the search for
‘territorial’ or ‘area’ ‘integration’ means a ‘disintegration’ from some sector priorities, in
order to be able to ‘see’ an issue from the angle of the interrelations of activities in par-
ticular places’, says Patsy Healey (2006: 539). The battle lines are thus drawn in the
seminal struggle with the sectors over the coherence, in a spatial or territorial sense,
of policies. We should not assume that the planners will necessarily prevail.
Where the EU is concerned, as in other multi-level systems, there is the added
issue of the level at which planning should take place. An EU-wide planning frame-
work is up against national sovereignty. Responsibility for their territory – territoriality
– is a defining characteristic of nation-states. In the Conclusions I discuss this fur-
ther. Suffice it to say that, in conceptualising its territory and in so doing assuming
The ‘mother document’ 111

responsibility for it, the EU might be seen to be usurping the role of nation-states!
This has been articulated as the ‘competence issue’. Before discussing it, I relate the
key substantive proposition in the ESDP.

Core and periphery

The first policy option in the ESDP, the strengthening of several larger zones of glo-
bal integration in the EU, is predicated upon recognition of the so-called ‘Pentagon’
as the core of the Community territory as it then was.
Earlier on I referred to a north-west European ‘megalopolis’ and in Chapter 5 to
it taking the form of the Blue Banana. The ESDP recast the latter as the ‘Pentagon’
London-Paris-Milan-Munich-Hamburg, the only ‘global economic integration zone’
of the EU, with 20 per cent of the territory of the EU of fifteen Member States. On
it, 40 per cent of the population of the EU were producing 50 per cent of its GDP,
which is why there was also talk of the ‘20-40-50 Pentagon’. The boundaries had
been drawn deliberately so as to result in memorisable figures. Note, however, that
eschewing the delicate issue of mapping them, the ESDP does not contain a dia-
gram depicting the ‘Pentagon’, a point to which I return below.
A simple calculation shows that GDP per area in the core was four times that
outside. Such concentration was responsible for agglomeration diseconomies and
imbalances in the development of territory, hence the first of three ‘spatial develop-
ment guidelines’: ‘Polycentric spatial development and new urban-rural partnership’. In
fact, the second guideline, ‘Parity of access to infrastructure and knowledge’, reflected
the same concern, with the third one, ‘Wise management of the natural and cultural
heritage’ complementing the sustainability agenda of European spatial planners.
As indicated, under each guideline, the ESDP identified policy aims and
options, but only a few related to the EU territory overall, in particular option 1
where it recommends strengthening zones of global economic integration in the EU
‘equipped with high-quality, global functions and services, including the peripheral
areas, through transnational spatial development strategies’ (CEC 1999: 21). The
ESDP related this to Europe’s competitiveness. In this respect the ESDP was ahead
of its time. It came out before the Lisbon Strategy of 2000 identified this as Europe’s
Achilles’ heal. This is worth pointing out, in particular since planning is criticised for
being over-concerned with ‘soft’ issues, such as the preservation of open space.
The ESDP was trying to balance such concerns, including the pursuit of sustain-
ability, against economic development issues.
Naturally, given its character as a spatial planning document, the ESDP related
competitiveness to the spatial configuration of the EU territory. It pointed out that
this territory ‘differs from that of the USA with its several outstanding economic
integration zones on a global scale: West Coast (California), East Coast, Southwest
112 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

(Texas), Mid West’ (Figure 7.1). In ESDP terms, the territory of the US was more
balanced, giving it a competitive advantage.
At EU level, polycentrism thus meant promoting the development of global
economic integration zones outside the one and only such zone, the ‘Pentagon’.
Now, the latter housed many command centres but this was not the reason for its
designation as such. As with the Blue Banana, the area owes its name to a coinci-
dence, another example of language playing a, sometimes unsolicited role. During
the drafting of the final version of the ESDP, Germany held the EU Presidency. In
their internal proceedings German planners described London-Paris-Milan-Munich-
Hamburg innocently as ‘Städtefünfeck’. ‘Pentagon’ is the correct English translation
but ignores the association with a certain building in Washington DC. The French
translator was savvier and translated it as ‘le cœur de l’europe’, the heart of Europe
but the power of ‘Pentagon’ as a term is so strong that French texts since use it, too.
This was not the first time the core of Europe was defined in these rather sim-
plistic terms. Already in 1990, the then Italian Presidency presented the planning
ministers at Turin – the process I discuss later – with a discussion of the Community

Agglomerations Existing zone of significant global

> = 5 million inhabitants integration
2 million to < 5 million inhabitants
750,000 to < 2 million inhabitants

Figure 7.1 Global economic integration zones in the US. (Source: Mehlbye, P. (2000) Global
integration zones: Neighbouring metropolitan regions in metropolitan clusters.
Informationen zur Raumentwicklung. Bonn: Selbstverlag des Bundesamtes für
Bauwesen und Raumordnung)
The ‘mother document’ 113

territory at the crossroads of Africa, Asia and in particular the Middle East and Central
and Eastern Europe, the latter still largely terra incognita at the time. Within this
Community territory, the Italians with their Mezzogiorno – the paradigmatic ‘least
favoured region’ in Europe – stipulated a core within a 500-kilometre circle around
Luxembourg. Simplistic though this may seem, considering where the majority of the
Structural Funds went at the time, the Italians were not far off the mark.
There was also a study, commissioned by the European Commission, articu-
lating the antithesis of the Blue Banana, a ‘European Bunch of Grapes’ (Kunzmann
and Wegener 1991). This metaphor, the ‘European Bunch of Grapes’ (Figure 7.2)
helped shape the notion of a more balanced European territory. New global eco-
nomic integration zones should thus be the counterweights to the ‘Pentagon’, just
like the métropoles d’equilibre had been conceived as counterweights to Paris. I
pointed out before that this is a planning idea ever since Ebenezer Howard has
devised garden cities as counter magnets to London. The ESDP said about global
economic integration zones:

FIgure 7.2 The European Bunch of Grapes. (Source: Kunzmann, K.R. and Wegener, M. (1991)
The Pattern of Urbanisation in Western Europe 1960–1990. Berichte aus dem Institut
für Raumplanung. Nr. 28, Dortmund: Institut für Raumplanung, Universität Dortmund)
114 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Pursuit of this concept will help to avoid further excessive economic and de-
mographic concentration in the core area of the EU. The economic potential of
all regions of the EU can only be utilised through the further development of a
more polycentric European settlement structure. The greater competitiveness
of the EU on a global scale demands a stronger integration of the European
regions into the global economy.

So the key ESDP strategy was for global economic integration zones to
develop outside the ‘Pentagon’ in order to foster Europe’s global competitiveness.
The ESDP left the question of where such zones should develop hanging in the air.
Cooperation and initiatives from below were the keys to formulating the requisite
transnational development strategies, so the matter was for others to decide. The
policy envisaged was not one of European funding for global economic integration
zones either. Rather, cities and regions aspiring to become part of a new global eco-
nomic integration zone were encouraged to take the lead, such as in the North Sea
Area (NorVision 2000) or around the Irish Sea where such ambitions also existed.
Another follow-up by the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR 2002)
showed what a determined policy might achieve in terms of a polycentric Europe.
In emphasising cooperation and initiative from below, the ESDP reflected the
shift to what has been dubbed the contemporary paradigm of regional development
(Polverari and Bachtler 2005). In this and other respects, the ESDP foreshadowed
territorial cohesion thinking. This is also true for the level of abstraction at which it
discussed concepts. The ESDP is thus devoid of any key diagram or figure or policy
map illustrating its strategy of polycentric development. Not even the ‘Pentagon’ was
depicted. It is of course easy to draw a figure, the corners of which are London-Paris-
Milan-Munich-Hamburg, so the problem was not technical. The reason was that policy
maps were controversial. For the Noordwijk draft the Dutch proposed, not so much a
policy map but one purporting to represent the situation in Europe as it was. The story
has been told before (Faludi and Waterhout 2002: 104–109) but is worth repeating:
a seemingly innocent map of Europe in a first draft of the document had indicated the
core of Europe with an elliptical shape where it had always been considered to be,
in north-western Europe, but in the published version this shape had been rescinded
(Figure 7.3). Interviewed, a Finnish planner volunteered the information that her coun-
try could never agree to such a map. Finland would always be outside the core. The
massive opposition had however come from Spain, ironically at the time the greatest
beneficiary from the Structural Funds based on its peripheral position making it diffi-
cult to compete in the Single Market. Wizened, the authors of the final ESDP decided
to exclude such maps. I will have occasion to report that, for the same reason, the
Territorial Agenda of the European Union features no maps at all. Maps showing the
‘Pentagon’ were of course published subsequently (Figure 7.4).
Figure 7.3 The controversial map showing the core of Europe. (Source: Faludi, A. and
Waterhout, B. (2002) The Making of the European Spatial Development
Perspective: No Masterplan. London: Routledge)
116 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Figure 7.4 The ‘20-40-50 Pentagon’, the first and most accurate representation, because
of the curvilinear connections between the five corners, of this figuration
described verbally in the ESDP. (Source: Schön, K.P. (2000) Das Europäische
Raumentwicklungskonzept und die Raumordnung in Deutschland – Einführung.
Informationen zur Raumentwicklung. Bonn: Selbstverlag des Bundesamtes für
Bauwesen und Raumordnung)

An added problem had been that some countries lacked a tradition of spelling
out policy in diagrammatic form. The short Study Programme on European Spatial
Planning afterwards gave special attention to this issue.
Polycentrism as described is thus a key message on the ESDP. There have
been many critical reviews questioning its validity but its function as a ‘bridging
concept’ (Waterhout 2008) remains unchallenged: there is something in it for
The ‘mother document’ 117

everybody. ‘The main thing is thus perhaps not so much the content of the policy
than the possible partnership that might come out of it’ (Vandermotten et al. 2008).

A roving band of planners

The ESDP process was marked by a succession of informal meetings of ministers
starting with one at Nantes in 1989. Presently, such meetings are described as
Ministerials, a practice which, even if an anachronism as applied to the ESDP proc-
ess, I follow. In between Ministerials, there were numerous working meetings by
experts at Brussels and elsewhere; hence the term ‘roving band of planners’.
Ministerials were, and still are, presided over by the minister responsible
from the Member State holding what is officially the Presidency of the Council of
Ministers, for short the EU Presidency. Nowadays, of course, there is also a more
permanent President of the European Council of Heads of State and Government
alongside the rotating EU Presidency chairing most other meetings of the Council
but at the time of the ESDP this was not even on the horizon.
The rotating EU Presidency was preparing the Ministerials and chairing any
international working groups formulating successive drafts of the ESDP. Naturally,
as time went by the composition of the teams changed. The ESDP process can
thus be likened to a serialised novel where the authors change from one sequel to
another. Fortunately much effort was spent on editing. At one such occasion when
the UK held the EU Presidency in 1998 the CSD thus found that the draft had
changed so much that it must have been written ‘in splendid isolation’. Interviewed
about the UK Presidency, the chief negotiator agreed: he had edited it at home in
the early hours of the morning. It is common for collective work to gel into a coher-
ent document by the grace of one individual skilfully holding the pen but the text
had to undergo another collective review before the CSD as such acquired own-
ership of it and was willing to let it past as the ‘Complete Draft: European Spatial
Development Perspective’ presented at the Glasgow Ministerial.
After the next Ministerial at Potsdam gave its assent to the final document,
as indicated, the process was meant to continue but, for reasons to be explained,
it ceased. The novel has thus never been completed but at least a similar set of
authors started writing in 2004, leading in 2007 to the Territorial Agenda.
I now return to discussing the first meeting, Nantes, in 1989. The French minis-
ter for aménagement du territoire, Jacques Chérèque, was a friend from their days at
the trade unions of Jacques Delors’. Chérèque himself had previous experience with
a sort of European planning in the framework of the ECSC. A trade unionist turned
regional politician in Lorraine, he had been involved in a joint project with Belgium
dealing with industrial conversion. Now that he was a national politician he had to
118 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

demonstrate his broader concern. This is why Nantes on the Atlantic Coast far from
Lorraine became the venue. That coast had been identified the same year by Brunet
as being in danger of marginalisation.
It may have been because of their previous encounters that Delors attended
an unimportant meeting of assorted ministers, many of them allowing themselves to
be represented by officials. I am mentioning this so as to once more illustrate the
role of the human element. Delors’ apparently improvised speech has been reported
on elsewhere (Faludi and Waterhout 2002: 36–38). Suffice it to say that he gave
his support to European aménagement du territoire, a concept that he, with his long
experience in French politics, was of course familiar with.
This first Ministerial had been concocted by the Dutch and French planners
engineering the encounter between their ministers in the margin of the CEMAT at
Lausanne in 1988 (discussed in Chapter 4). The Dutch were refocusing on the
position of their country in a Europe about to become serious about market integra-
tion. As explained, DATAR’s position was under challenge which was why it made
sense for it, too, to focus on Europe. The Brunet Study resulting in the Blue Banana
had specified the threat to the French territory. Indeed, that had been its purpose.
So the constellation was favourable but a joint initiative would not have come about,
had it not been for the fact that the Dutch expert was already experienced in matters
European and had previously befriended his French colleague.
It is often said that Nantes was informal because there was no Community com-
petence for spatial planning – the issue to be discussed next. However, at Nantes,
this was not quite as clear-cut. Chérèque was minister of aménagement du territoire,
close to Community regional policy for which, of course, there was a competence and
a handsome sum of money available. However, there was no formation of the Council
of Ministers for regional policy. Rather, to the present day, it is the General Affairs
Council of foreign ministers that deals with it and in many countries the ministers of
finance and/or the economy are involved, too. Presumably, it was for reasons of turf
protection and not because there was no competence, that the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs ruled that Nantes had to be informal. It also insisted that that meeting could not
pass resolutions. Rather, Chérèque should summarise the sense of the meeting. So
it was not the lack of a Community competence that was at the heart of this but the
reluctance to allow planners to meddle with the affairs of foreign ministers.
After Nantes, the French expert behind the initiative joined the Commission
to work on ‘Europe 2000’ and ‘Europe 2000+’. He insisted on his Dutch colleague
joining him as a National Detached Expert. To this day, much planning work at
Brussels is done by experts on secondment.
The Italians organised another Ministerial – the one at which they ventilated
their somewhat simplistic view of the Community territory – and so did the Dutch in
1991 when the CSD was born. The Dutch also presented their counterpoint to the
The ‘mother document’ 119

Italian view, a document called ‘Urban Networks in Europe’ showing that successful
metropolitan areas existed throughout the Community territory. The Dutch were not
taken by an exclusive focus on the periphery.
By that time the Germans had started to campaign for European spatial
planning as a joint Member State responsibility. They wanted European spatial plan-
ning to evolve along the lines of voluntary cooperation, as with their own so-called
‘Guidelines for Regional Policy’. Their ideal was the Torremolinos Charter, the prod-
uct of voluntary cooperation. They were due to hold the Presidency in 1994.
Between the Dutch and the Germans were, amongst others, the Portuguese and
Belgian Presidencies. The Portuguese focus was on the TENs in the making. Practically
all relevant policies in Belgium had been devolved to the three regions, so the latter took
turns representing Belgium when it came to organising Ministerials. In 1993, this honour
went to the Walloon Region and that is how one of my favourite European planners,
quite junior in a hierarchy more interested in Community funding than in spatial plan-
ning, came to be given a free hand to prepare the second day of a Ministerial at Liége.
Taking soundings from key players, including the Commission and the future German
Presidency, he came up with, and the Ministerial agreed to, the idea of an ESDP.
In anticipation of their turn, the Germans presented the CSD with what they
thought was a perfectly adequate draft, but this was rejected in favour of a more
collaborative effort. The procedure to be followed was dubbed the Corfu Method,
after the venue of a Ministerial under the Greeks where this was agreed upon. It
entailed the need for unanimity in the CSD before any document was to go to the
Ministerial. In this way the so-called Leipzig Principles came about, in full: ‘Principles
for a European Spatial Development Policy’. Functionally they were the first draft of
the ESDP published in English, French and German.
Recognising the inadequacy of European-wide data on which to base policy,
at a conference at Bonn the Germans also reiterated an idea originally launched
by the Italians, a network of research institutes which would see the light of day as
ESPON in the early-2000s.
The next French Presidency was plagued by elections half-way through its
term. A scenario-exercise showed that many of the, at that time fifteen Member
States – Austria, Finland and Sweden had joined – were ill-equipped. Coming next,
the Spaniards and Italians, neither of them keen on spatial planning northern style,
procrastinated. Their ‘least favoured regions’ resented the conditions imposed upon
the use of funds. The fear was that an ESDP might result in more of the same. Thus,
Spain insisted on more research. The Italians injected the preservation of the cul-
tural, next to the natural heritage into the proceedings and grudgingly handed over
to the Dutch, knowing that the latter would do their best to complete the ESDP.
Indeed, the Dutch put much effort into preparing the ESDP. They involved
experts from other Member States in the production of what became the ‘First official
120 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

draft’. By the time of the Ministerial at the Dutch seaside resort of Noordwijk, suffi-
cient momentum had been created. Spanish reluctance was resolved in a last-minute
tête-à-tête between the Dutch minister chairing and her Spanish counterpart. Freshly
elected, the UK Labour minister promised to complete the process within the year but
the decision to hold transnational seminars – a reflection of the new concern to elicit
stakeholder support – made this impossible. Still, the UK presented the ‘Complete
Draft’ to the Ministerial at Glasgow. Meanwhile, Luxembourg had put its teeth into the
thorny issue of financing ESPON. Luxembourg would eventually sponsor ESPON.
Wedged between the UK and Germany, the Austrian Presidency held a CSD
seminar, the occasion at which I was allowed to speak to the CSD on the future of
the ESDP. Optimistically, we were assuming that the process had a future. For the
rest, the Austrians gave the Germans breathing space, as they would once more
with the Territorial Agenda, to prepare the final ESDP. It was presented at Potsdam
at an event so well prepared that there was nothing much left to discuss. In the
broader context of the German Presidency, this informal meeting was unimportant.
Ill-disposed towards European spatial planning, the economics ministry would not
have wanted it otherwise.
The Finnish Presidency followed with the Action Programme, to be discussed
in the next chapter. Meanwhile, I pause to make clear my admiration for the sheer
skill and stamina of the planners involved. When I coined the expression ‘a rov-
ing band of planners’ (Faludi 1997), I said that for whoever sees planning as a
smooth process, the ESDP seemed nothing like an exemplar of good practice, add-
ing though that it was the only game in town and congratulating the roving band on
their achievements. The congratulations stand.

The competence issue

On the face of it, this was about whether the EU treaties do, or do not allow the Community
to engage in anything like spatial planning. As explained, if so, under the Community
Method, the Commission would have the right of initiative but such a clause did not
exist. Even with territorial cohesion now on the books, whether this implies, as I am
arguing, spatial planning is controversial. The competence issue was why the German
Presidency at Potsdam merely put on record that the ministers and the Commissioner
had concluded their work on the ESDP. Since there was no competence, ministers were
not meeting on Community business and so no vote was taken and, anyhow, they were
meeting outside Brussels or Luxembourg where Community business is conducted.
That the ruling on the matter at Nantes ten years earlier had been taken on different
grounds – regional policy being a matter for foreign ministers – had been forgotten.
At Nantes, the German minister had been represented by an official about
to retire. To articulate the German position had become the task of his successor.
The ‘mother document’ 121

Meeting over breakfast, the new German chief planner had explained to the equally
new Dutch planning director that planning was a competence of the Länder, making
it inconceivable for the Federal Republic to allow the EC to meddle with it. Indeed,
many a German expert report and a PhD (Gatawis 2000) argue that a Community
competence is out of the question. The present position as regards territorial cohesion
is more nuanced (Scholich 2007). The really warm German supporters of territorial
cohesion already mentioned are Battis and Kersten (2008) but now that the Lisbon
Treaty is here, Ernst-Hasso Ritter (2009) also concedes an EU role in the matter.
That spatial planning was not a Community competence became the dominant
view. In contrast to so-called ‘comitology’ committees chaired by a representa-
tive of the Commission services, the CSD was therefore chaired by the rotating EU
Presidency. However, the CSD met – and continued to meet until the very end, with
travel expenses paid – in the Centre Borschette at Brussels with facilities for inter-
pretation and so forth enabling comitology committees to function. Reporting on the
first meeting of the CSD, the Dutch noted that the Commission representative was de
facto chairing, a situation to which the Portuguese Presidency acquiesced. Indeed,
years later, the key Commission representative throughout the ESDP process remem-
bered having chaired the CSD, but in a formal sense this was not the case. Materially
he may have been correct. Participants recollect him having been dominant.
Be that as it may, competence remained controversial and it took a while for
the procedures and work practices of the CSD and the Ministerials to be sorted
out. The Ministerials were also in uncharted waters. Were they to become a Council
formation? Sometimes they were labelled Informal Councils, so maybe this was the
ambition but this was a misnomer. Informal Councils are formations of the Council
of Ministers meeting away from the either Brussels or Luxembourg in the country of
the rotating Presidency where, formally speaking, they cannot take decisions.
Whether Informal Councils or not, Ministerials were deemed to be unable to take
decisions. Come to think about it, this is odd. They were not meeting on Community
business, so what should have prevented them from taking decisions? At Bologna,
European education ministers took a decision of momentous importance – nothing to
do with the EC – to recommend the bachelor-master throughout Europe. So what pre-
vented spatial planning ministers from taking firm decisions? The point is, they were
deliberating in the orbit of the EC on matters related to its business and in the pres-
ence of the Commissioner for Regional Policy, with other ministers jealously guarding
their own positions watching from the wings. So they had to abide by the rules laid
down by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs: no resolutions.
Returning to the competence issue, the argument often put forward is one of
sovereignty and subsidiarity. Conceived as a matter of legal rights to self-determina-
tion, sovereignty remains a well-established principle, unimpaired by the EU. Cohesion
policy nowhere affects it, but it circumscribes what Member States can do through the
122 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

conditionality – the requirement to observe common objectives – of obtaining funds.

This is where spatial planning could have an effect. By providing a framework, it could
strengthen the programming of funds and thus the hand of the Commission.
This was not the argument, though. For the Germans as indicated the stated
reason for opposing a Community competence was that spatial planning was of the
Länder. Likely more important was the fear of beneficiaries of funds that planning
would mean restrictions on their freedom to use them as they wished. So the real
purpose behind the claim that there was no Community competence may have been
to deprive the Commission of the means to exercise its powers more effectively.
I desist from discussing the legal issue of a competence for spatial planning/
development policy as such. If there had been consensus on the matter, a solution
could have been found. The Gendebien Report has been quoted as pointing out that
environmental and regional policy, too, had been given shape long before the Single
European Act formalised them. What was lacking was the political will to explore
options for a form of European spatial planning. In fact, with their reluctance to allow
the Commission a role in this matter, Member States left the Commission off the hook.
They should have insisted on the Commission’s planning cycle to address spatial
issues. Reactions to the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion will be shown to have
led to demands for the Commission to put its house in order. The EU has the duty to
ensure the consistency – in the Introduction I explained that cohérence in the French
version of the Lisbon Treaty seems a stronger term – effectiveness and continuity of
its policies and actions. If it were to do so, surely, amongst others it would have to
address spatial or territorial issues and for as long as the EU would restrict itself to its
own policies and actions, there could not be the slightest legal complaint.
The Commission already operates a planning system, setting out strategic
goals at the start of its term and making annual work programmes and the like. Why
does this not include some reflection on the spatial or territorial dimension of its poli-
cies? The competence for this would flow directly from Article 13(1) of the Lisbon
Treaty. In a similar situation, that of Austria where under the constitution planning
is firmly in the hands of the Bundesländer, self-governing regions like the German
Länder, it has been argued that, had it so wished, this would not prevent the federal
government from devising a scheme or framework for its own sector policies to fit
into (Faludi 1998b). Also, if this were to be done, General Impact Assessments pay-
ing attention to spatial or territorial issues would generate the demand for such a
scheme to refer to. Thus, even without the Lisbon Treaty, there would be the need
for this and naturally this is even more the case now that that treaty stipulates territo-
rial cohesion to be an objective of the Union.
The ‘mother document’ 123

Outlook
A side-effect of the competences issue has been that coordination at the Community
level has been allowed to fall out of sight. Could the Commission tackle inter-sectoral
relations? Could it secure the coherence, in a spatial or territorial sense of the word,
of its policies? At the end of the previous chapter I have already shown that the
internal organisation of the Commission services has its shortcomings. Specialised
departments always form specific views defining their problems and where to search
for solutions, which is why coordination is always controversial and even more so
within the Commission. In addition, the cards are stacked against directorates gen-
eral cooperating because they sometimes embody national traditions. DG REGIO,
for instance, was for a while said to be ‘French’.
Once territorial cohesion policy comes into its own, this problem which,
by making such play of the competence issue, Member States have allowed the
Commission to avoid, will indeed come into focus. However, Lisbeth Hooghe
(2001: 39) is not optimistic: ‘[R]eport after report … has recommended strength-
ening central political control over ‘local fiefdoms’ or cosy networks. Coordination
across units and directorate-generals is perceived to be an endemic problem in the
Commission’. There are no mechanisms for ongoing coordination, such as spatial
planning would require. The Secretariat-General is not equipped for this and the
political cabinets cannot deal with such issues either.
So, even if problems of coordination – coherence in the terms of this book –
are not specific to the Commission, they are particularly virulent there. There is less
coherence than in national administrations where inter-sectoral relations are difficult
enough to tackle. Anyway, what is evident is that, rather than occupying the umpire
position that planners are fond of claiming, success depends on forging coalitions.
This, too, is in general the case. For instance, Dutch planning has forged a powerful
coalition, now defunct, with housing. So, the frameworks which planners invoke are
inevitably biased towards the sector with which they are in cahoots. If the coalition
partner were a different one, the framework would have a different slant. There is no
single, objective point of view from which to deal with inter-sectoral relations. Rather,
there can and should be various such points of view.
This is the most that one can wish: actors articulating a range of spatial planning
frameworks. There is no privileged vantage point from which to tackle coherence.
There is no neutral umpire. Rather, coherence must emerge through debate and this
applies even more so in the European context.
CHAPTER 8

THE LEARNING MACHINE

[I]t is agreed among the many who now take the EU to be a functioning novel polity
without a state that its regulatory successes are possible because decision making
is at least in part deliberative: actors’ initial preferences are transformed through
discussion by the force of the better argument. Deliberation in turn is said to depend
on the socialization of the deliberators … into epistemic communities.
(Sabel and Zeitlin 2008)

European spatial planning unleashing mutual learning seems more significant

than whether or not there is a Community competence. Indeed, the ESDP has cre-
ated a learning machine (Faludi 2008).
In general, planners are fond of plans being implemented but the makers of
the ESDP talked about its application rather than its implementation. I first explain
this concept. Then I go into what the ESDP said about its application and what the
Tampere Action Programme made of it. An important avenue for the application of
the ESDP was, and still is, INTERREG. Its transnational strand started even before
the ESDP process came to an end and has continued ever since, now mainstreamed
as part of the third cohesion policy objective, European Territorial Cooperation. So
the ESDP process did not end with publication of the document and learning was
and still is an integral part of its application.

Application, not implementation

Pointing to its soft language, critics dismiss the ESDP. Facilitating acceptance, soft
language is however a feature of consensus documents. Consensus was of course
an irrevocable condition under the Corfu Method. Any single country, small or large,
leaving the boat could have wrecked the process.
This contrasts with technical plans. They need to be accurate. If one conceives
of planning as technical, then the conclusion is simple: the plan needs to be followed
– implemented. A strategic framework, as against this, is not technical but food for
thought for when it comes to taking action. The planning document – if indeed there
is such a document – is a strategic framework.
The ESDP was explicitly meant to be such. How does one know whether a
framework has worked? Asking whether it is being implemented is asking the wrong
The learning machine 125

question. The answer is that a framework works if it frames! This is more than a play
of words. To explain why, I need to take a closer look at what application implies.
Application of a strategic framework is a drawn-out, interactive process with
inherently unpredictable outcomes. Importantly, the addressees are as resourceful
as the creators of the framework, so they may be expected to react as the com-
petent agents they are. This is to the best. It is after all through their agency that a
framework can achieve anything at all. However, this means that there is symmetry
between the makers of the framework and their target group. To put it differently,
other than with a technical plan, there is no assumption that the framework rests on
some superior logic. This does not mean to say that the framework is useless. It can
inject considerations into the proceedings that help the addressees making sense
of their situations. If so, then the plan-as-framework works. If not, it fails to frame
subsequent decisions.
However, and this is crucial, the outcome depends on more factors than just
the plan-as-framework. There is situational information that its maker may not, indeed
cannot have been aware of. Also, although assimilating the framework, the addressees
may come to different conclusions. So their actions may quite legitimately depart from
what the plan says. For the evaluation of strategic frameworks such as the ESDP, this
is neither here nor there. What is relevant is whether the framework has been consid-
ered. Where it has, by injecting new considerations, by giving addressees pause for
thought and thus improving the quality of decisions, a strategic framework performs its
role, even if the outcome is different from what has been anticipated.
So this is what application means. It is furthermore important to realise that, so
conceived, application is not a separate phase but part and parcel of the interactive,
deliberative process as which planning is often and rightly portrayed amongst others
in the quote at the beginning of this chapter. For instance, Danish national planners
took note of the ESDP, even before the First Official Draft, let alone the final docu-
ment appeared. Having participated in the process, they knew what was coming.
There was no point in waiting until the document came out before applying ideas
that the Danes could make sense of. Two of them were so taken that they, one after
the other, went to Brussels as Detached National Experts.
INTERREG IIC, to be discussed, was likewise put on the rails before the end of
the ESDP process to give planners hands-on experience in transnational planning.
INTERREG has become a permanent feature, presently coming under the European
Territorial Cooperation objective of cohesion policy.
Application thus goes through many gyrations and includes devising new or
adapting existing work routines, a process in which the framework may change to
such an extent that it takes some effort to recognise where it comes from. Part IV
discusses such ESDP mutations. What remains is to discuss how to establish with
more precision whether a framework has been applied.
126 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

First one needs to identify its messages as the units of analysis. The ESDP
contains sixty so-called ‘policy options’, each representing an attempt to formulate
a message. The message that was drawing most attention afterwards was that of
polycentric development in Europe discussed in the previous chapter.
What happens with such messages is the key. The principle is that a mes-
sage fulfils its role if it helps actors making their choices, in the terms of previous
pages, if it frames their decisions. Who these actors are is not always clear from the
beginning. The plan may of course name or at least imply the chief target groups,
but others, including actors that the makers of the plan have never thought about,
may likewise be attracted by the ideas expressed. For instance, a Dutch document
concerning cultural policy gave the ESDP as a source of inspiration for focusing on
architectural heritage, something that the makers of the ESDP had not, indeed could
not have counted on since at the time this type of Dutch policy did not exist.
To reiterate, even if addressees do not follow an ESDP recommendation, this
does not necessarily prove it ineffective. As any strategic document, the ESDP plays
its part for as long as it informs actors, for as long as by looking at the ESDP they
learn something. Learning is the key criterion of success of a strategic framework.
So conceived, application works through many channels: conferences, work-
shops, focus groups, plan elaborations designed to clarify meanings and to develop
ideas. As regards the ESDP, the main thing was, indeed, to make arrangements for
following it through. Evaluation has to look at these arrangements. This is what I do,
but not before relating what the ESDP itself says about its application.

The ESDP on application

The ESDP is no theoretical treatise. The notion of application as described is
more implicit than explicit. The fact that the ESDP invokes application in lieu of the,
amongst planners more common concept of implementation is good enough.
The ESDP further distinguishes between levels of application, from the
Community to the transnational to the level of cross-border and interregional coop-
eration. There is a section on application in Member States and at pan-European
level, the Council of Europe.
The ESDP warns that, in applying the stipulated policy aims and options, conflicts
between sectors and spatial conflicts and timing difficulties will arise, the occasion for
recalling the competence issue: ‘This requires new ways of cooperation, which accord-
ing to the ESDP’s principles should be on a voluntary basis. The application of the
policy options is based on the principle of subsidiarity’ (CEC 1999: 35–45). However,
the ‘main focus of the ESDP’s application … is at Community and transnational levels.
Priority should be given to issues which cannot be dealt with in an appropriate way by
one or two Member States but, instead, require the cooperation of several countries’.
The learning machine 127

The Commission in particular is called upon to ensure policy coherence,

thereby paying regard to the ESDP. The text reports on an inter-service group
for investigating relationships between Community policies and spatial develop-
ment. It was assisted by an omnipresent international consultant and delivered
its one-off report at the last transnational seminar on the ESDP held at Brussels
in February 1999. There would be a follow-up co-authored by the same consult-
ant, and a range of studies on the impact of specific Community policies were
conducted under ESPON.
The next recommendation deserves to be quoted in full. It concerns the for-
malisation of the CSD and the Ministerials and thus the institutional set-up for its
further elaboration:

The meetings of the Ministers responsible for spatial development and those
of the Committee on Spatial Development (CSD) play a central role in the ap-
plication and further development of the ESDP. However, the informal character
of these arrangements does not allow the taking of decisions or making of
recommendations. For this reason, European institutions such as the European
Parliament and the Economic and Social Committee support a formalisation of
these arrangements, whilst maintaining the principle of subsidiarity. Member
States have different opinions on this.
(CEC 1999: 37)

This is followed by the recommendation that ‘Member States examine the sug-
gestions of the European institutions to formalise both the Ministerial meetings on
spatial planning and the CSD, while maintaining the principle of subsidiarity’. I shall
show that the Finnish Presidency was trying to tackle this issue but in the end the
Commission declared the ESDP process dead.
Further down, Member States are asked to consider another follow-up, which
is to ‘regularly prepare standardised information on important aspects of national
spatial development policy and its implementation in national spatial development
reports, basing this on the structure of the ESDP’. If so, then this would have
strengthened the planning discourse but this idea has never been accepted.
There are further recommendations concerning setting up ESPON and a whole
paragraph is devoted to INTERREG IIC and IIIB, the latter at that time already on the
horizon. I discuss INTERREG shortly and ESPON in the chapter which follows.
Another paragraph in the relevant chapter of the ESDP concerns the applica-
tion in Member States, culminating in a passage about a desirable ‘Europeanisation
of state, regional and urban planning’. The ESDP does not elaborate, but according
to Bas Waterhout (2008) Europeanisation stands for the complex and sometimes
contradictory facets of European integration impacting upon planning practice.
128 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

There can be no doubt that the makers of the ESDP took application seriously.
The conclusions of the German Presidency – as indicated the only way of putting
the sense of such meetings on record – confirm this. First of all they give the reas-
surance that the makers of the ESDP in no way clamour for new responsibilities at
Community level. This is no surprise since the makers were the Member States,
but to the extent that the Commission, too, can be regarded as one, this seems
odd. Interviewed after she had left, the Commissioner for Regional Policy during the
ESDP process, Monika Wulf-Mathies, seemed frustrated about the Member States.
So was her senior strategist. The Commission had started the process with a view
of gaining a foothold in spatial planning. The Member States had denied it this privi-
lege, and so the irritation was understandable.
The Conclusions of the German Presidency then specify other follow-ups.
Thus, the German and the Finnish Presidency would forward the ESDP to European
institutions and the German Presidency would inform candidate states and other
members of the Council of Europe. Further addressees were the sectors and
regional and local authorities. The ESDP was to be presented at international meet-
ings and conferences. It should also be taken into consideration in implementing the
new regulations for the Structural Funds and in revising the TENs.
The Commission was asked to report on the spatial impacts of sector policies
at Community level, eventually a task for ESPON. The latter – still going under the title
of European Spatial Planning Observatory – rather than, as presently, Observation
– Network should be established speedily. To this end, the CSD should prepare
an application for INTERREG III funding. Eventually, ESPON was indeed financed
under INTERREG.

The Tampere action programme

The Finnish Presidency prepared – as the Finns had promised long before Potsdam
they would – an action programme and a document on the future of the CSD. The
programme consisted of twelve actions promoting a spatial dimension in policies at
Community and national level and to improve knowledge, research and information
on territorial development as well as to prepare for enlargement. Coordination and
monitoring were to be tasks for the CSD. Lead partners should coordinate projects,
with, this being a novelty, funding coming directly from the participants.
Some actions were already in the pipeline. Thus, holding the CEMAT Presidency,
the Germans prepared the ‘Guidelines for the Sustainable Development of the
European Continent’. The French were producing a school book on Europe and its
territory (Bailly and Frémont 2001). The Commission published the study, as indicated
with the involvement of the same consultant who had helped the inter-service group
in 1999, on ‘Spatial Impacts of Community Policies and Costs on Non-Coordination’
The learning machine 129

(Robert et al. 2001). ESPON was put on the rails later and INTERREG was a going
concern anyhow. In general though, with the demise, to be reported shortly, of the
institutional infrastructure of the ESDP the programme petered out.
The Finnish document concerning the future of the CSD received hardly any
mention in the Presidency Conclusions. This hot potato, implying some form of reso-
lution concerning the status of European spatial development policy, was passed
on in the hope that, by the time of the French Presidency in late 2000, it would be
resolved. By that time, though, Michel Barnier was already Commissioner for Regional
Policy. He was also responsible for liaising with the Intergovernmental Conference
that would lead to the Nice Treaty. He did not, and the French Presidency wanted
neither to burden the negotiations with a nebulous issue such as an EU competence
in the matter. As I show below, he was a proponent of that other concept, territorial
cohesion, replacing the ill-fated spatial planning/spatial development.
DG REGIO thus announced officially in its work programme that the
Commission would cease supporting the intergovernmental ESDP. This spelled the
end of the CSD whose meetings had of course been financed by it. Ministers met
once more under the Belgian Presidency in 2001, but the topic was the financially
speaking more relevant regional policy and not planning. It would take until 2004
before there was another Ministerial to produce, this time without Commission sup-
port, what would become the Territorial Agenda of the European Union.
All this notwithstanding, the application of the ESDP progressed. Next I dis-
cuss the chief avenues of application.

INTERREG
The Commission had invested in the ESDP in the expectation that this would gain
it the trust of Member States. This was also why halfway through the program-
ming period 1994–1999 it added strand IIC to the existing Community Initiative
INTERREG. The latter had been introduced in 1990 to support cross-border coop-
eration for several reasons.
One reason was that there had been many bottom-up initiatives for such coopera-
tion, some of them supported by national governments and/or the emergent regional
lobbies, with as indicated the Council of Europe the arena for articulating their con-
cerns. The second reason was that border areas were perceived as, on the one hand,
having frequently been marginalised by national governments, whilst, on the other, they
seemed to hold the promise of forming object lessons for the benefits of European inte-
gration. A third reason was that, as discussed in Chapter 6, impressed by the Integrated
Mediterranean Programmes, the Commission under Delors betted on the mobilisation
of local stakeholders. Promoting cross-border cooperation by directly assisting those
concerned suited the programmatic approach which it was promoting.
130 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

INTERREG was followed by INTERREG II in 1994–1999, one of a whole range

of Community Initiatives commanding between them a fair share, give-and-take 10 per
cent, of the ERDF. Importantly, as the name suggests, the Commission has more
influence than in the mainstream programmes. INTERREG IIA continued to support
cross-border cooperation and, to the present day, this strand receives the lion share
of the budget allowing it to finance hardware – projects – alongside with the software
of cooperation. In areas eligible for Objective 1 funding, this represents a substantial
addition to the already large allocation from the Community budget.
There was a programme also for promoting energy networks dubbed INTERREG
IIB, to which as indicated INTERREG IIC was added to promote transnational
cooperation and spatial planning. Of course, this is the strand that is most relevant
here. After all, as indicated, and as the regulations spelled out, INTERREG IIC was
set up with the explicit intention of spreading the ESDP message.
In terms of European planning, INTERREG IIC was a success. By way of indica-
tion, four cooperation areas, the North-West Metropolitan Area, the North Sea Area,
the Baltic Sea Area and the so-called CADSES Area (Central European, Adriatic,
Danubian, South-east European Space) accounted for no less than 180 projects (by
coincidence forty-five in each). In the North-West Metropolitan Area alone, no fewer
than 369 partners participated. In the five (out of thirteen) cooperation areas in which
Germany participated under INTERREG IIIB 2000–2006, there were, as of mid-2005,
about 400 projects involving 5,000 partners. ‘With further participation in projects this
means that networks with more than 10,000 actors have evolved, which specifically
shape and experience European integration processes’ (Müller et al. 2005: 1). This is
certain to have contributed to the formation of a European planning community.
Importantly, some INTERREG projects entered areas where the ESDP had not
dared to tread. Thus, in each of the cooperation areas in north-west Europe under
INTERREG IIC (but apparently not all the others) a spatial vision has been prepared,
including amongst others policy maps. A good example was the map illustrating the
spatial vision for the North-West Metropolitan Areas (Figure 8.1).
Today, INTERREG has been mainstreamed under European Territorial
Cooperation as the third objective of the Structural Funds 2007–2013. Although no
longer a Community Initiative, informally, this is called INTERREG IV. Anyhow, under
the European Territorial Cooperation flag INTERREG has become a fixture in the
landscape of European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy. At the same time,
the emphasis is less on planning. Indeed, already in INTERREG III, the emphasis
shifted and Strand B was expected to focus much more on hardware, development
projects, than on the software of spatial planning. This had everything to do with the
Commission’s disappointment with the Member States respectively with their plan-
ners and also with the EU agenda shifting towards growth and employment issues,
a shift discussed in Part IV.
The learning machine 131

Global cities and gateways – cities of major Eurocorridors.

economic importance for north-west Europe/
rest of the world with high level of access to Corridors/transport axes to be strengthened.
and from them.
Strategic polycentric areas – cluster of Communication bottlenecks.
cities, high level of economic activity, key role
in inward investment to north-west Europe.
Enhanced external connections.
Strategic centres – monocentric, high level
economic activity, key national/regional role Counterweight global gateways and
and focus for inward investment. economic centres.

Figure 8.1 The Spatial Vision for the North-West European Metropolitan Areas. (Source: NWMA
Spatial Vision Group (2000))

Somewhat awkwardly labelled ‘interregional cooperation’, Strand C to some

extent counterbalances this shift towards issues also dealt with in other mainstream
programmes under the Convergence and the Competitiveness and Employment
objectives. Importantly, ESPON is being financed under this heading. ESPON is,
132 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

of course, another spinoff of the ESDP and as such a major institutional innovation
designed to put learning about the territory of the EU on a more secure footing. As
will become evident, the availability of an ‘evidence base’ would contribute to the
momentum for formulating the Territorial Agenda of the European Union.
Throughout its chequered history, INTERREG has been based on the assump-
tion that cooperation strengthens cohesion and with it European integration. So
learning is an essential part of INTERREG. The role of spatial planning in this has
been variable, though. At the time and in the immediate aftermath of the ESDP, it was
stronger than at present but ESPON at least is a lasting ESDP legacy. Significantly,
as the European Spatial Planning Observation Network, it still has spatial planning –
a term that has otherwise fallen out of use in Community speak – in its name but, as
will become evident, under ESPON 2013 spatial planning as a concept is no more
than a distant memory.

Application by the Commission

As reported, no sooner had the Germans brought the ESDP into port, the
Commission opted out. Subsequently, many CSD members found themselves sit-
ting on a subcommittee for Spatial and Urban Development of a new Committee for
the Development and Conversion of Regions, with the Commission and not, as on
the CSD, one of the Member States chairing.
Interestingly, the Commission kept on invoking the ESDP. Communications
relating to transport and to the urban initiatives referred to it even before Potsdam.
The Guidelines for the Structural Funds 2000–2006 requested programming docu-
ments to do the same, which brought it close to introducing the ESDP into the
acquis communautaire by the back door. Successive Cohesion Reports, too, men-
tioned the ESDP, and a Communication on Integrated Coastal Zone Management
announced the intention of working with Member States on the application of the
ESDP. The Strategy for a Sustainable Development of the European Union referred
to it, too. The most gratifying mention was in the Commission’s White Paper on
European Governance where it held up the spatial approach in the ESDP as an
example of good governance.
A Communication relating to services of general economic interest invoked
it in the context of Article 16 of the Treaty of Amsterdam. Lastly, the Green Paper
on Territorial Cohesion, too, recounted the main proposals of he ESDP. The ESDP
thus belongs to the Commission’s repertoire where matters of spatial planning/
territorial cohesion policy are concerned. As mentioned, it is still available on the
europa.eu website.
The learning machine 133

Application in the member states

Considering German enthusiasm for the ESDP, I start with this country. Unfortunately,
there seems little appetite for applying its messages. This is a reflection of the situ-
ation as described in Chapter 5. The representation of the German position in the
European arena is a matter for the federal government but planning as such is for
the Länder. So ESDP messages were meant for them, writes the main German
representative on the CSD (Selke 1999), but the Länder do not have ownership
of the ESDP. For the rest, the Federal Republic continues to give priority to practi-
cal cooperation, mainly with Poland and the Czech Republic and also the Russian
Federation. In terms of topics, the federal government sets priorities as regards the
types of projects that it wishes to co-finance under INTERREG and there are mul-
tiple and thorough evaluations of the programmes with Germany participation, with
the BBR as usual a focal point.
As with the Federal Republic, so with the UK: the context shapes the ESDP
application. However, at least as regards the profession, the effect was the opposite:
professionals became enthusiastic. This was a reaction to constraints imposed by
the Conservatives. I have shown that, in 1997 at Noordwijk, a new Labour minister
declared himself unreservedly in favour of the ESDP. There was particular enthusi-
asm for the ‘spatial approach’, in terms of this book the efforts to achieve coherence.
UK planners saw this as a break with the Conservative insistence on restricting
town and country planning purely to land use management to the exclusion of social
and economic concerns. As reported, spatial planning is now popular as a concept
amongst UK planners.
Dealing with economic development, the figure of a regional development guid-
ance introduced under the Conservatives became the vehicle for applying ESDP
messages. Each region needed to submit a draft explaining amongst others how it
proposed to apply certain ESDP messages. In addition, the ESDP was a source of
inspiration for New Labour in modernising planning. It goes without saying that UK
partners participated in INTERREG projects. The UK belonged to three cooperation
areas under IIC, with Scotland having the distinction of having a share in all of them:
the North-West Metropolitan Area, the North Sea Area and the Atlantic Arc.
With the Germans and the French, as is well known, the Dutch had taken a
strong hand in the ESDP. The National Spatial Planning Agency devoted one of
its yearbooks wholly to European spatial development, translating it into English
(National Spatial Planning Agency 2000). However, the draft Fifth National Spatial
Planning Document 2000/2020 made only scant reference to the ESDP. One
of them was where it identified national urban networks, including the ‘Delta
Metropolis’, better known under its former name as Randstad. The Delta Metropolis
was presented as a node in the European polycentric system of cities. There would
134 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

be further improvements also to the infrastructure links with the Flemish cities and
the Ruhr Area. For this and for other purposes the government wanted to intensify
coordination with the neighbours. It announced the intention also of strengthen-
ing the spatial dimension of Community regional policy, which would eventually
become the platform for starting the Territorial Agenda. In general though, the role
of the ESDP in the Fifth Report was below expectation. Anyhow, as reported, even
before being adopted, the Fifth Report was replaced by a new-style strategy docu-
ment. With Europe being unpopular in a Netherlands turning Eurosceptic, that
document is even more inward looking, but I already registered my disappointment
about Dutch planning.
Besides, having seen to it that the ESDP incorporated their planning ideas,
its novelty value for the Dutch was admittedly limited. However, they were and are
participating in INTERREG. This country, too, had a share in three cooperation
areas under INTERREG IIC, including the special case of the catchment areas of
the Rhine and Meuse where flood prevention required cooperation. The Dutch were,
and continue to be, lead partners for other projects, including the one producing a
spatial vision for the North-West European Metropolitan Area.
As indicated, Belgium had been through a radical devolution of powers to the
regions. Application of the ESDP was no longer a matter for the Belgian state. The
Walloon Region was the only one inspired by the ESDP, which is not surprising since
the very idea had been formulated at Liège in 1993. Concurrently with the ESDP, a
strategic document analysed the Walloon position. The Walloon Region resented
being branded a European nature reserve and recreation area. Being bypassed by
Euro corridors, it felt its suspicions confirmed.
Until the ESPON study 2.3.1 on the application of the ESDP throughout the
EU to be discussed soon, information on other Member States was patchy. Kai
Böhme (2002) reports on the members of the Nordic Council having been touched
by the European discourse. Their professionals became part of the European
planning community. Otherwise Eurosceptic Denmark had made the greatest con-
tribution of the three to the ESDP, positioning itself also as the ‘green room’ in
the European house. Publishing a national spatial policy reflecting ESDP themes,
‘Denmark and European Spatial Planning Policy’, this country had taken the lead
in its application. Denmark had played a role also in bringing Baltic Sea coopera-
tion about. The ‘Visions and Strategies around the Baltic Sea’ (VASAB) had in fact
pointed the way for the ESDP. The Baltic Sea is now one of the cooperation areas
under INTERRREG in which the ESDP is being taken further. It is the object also of
a macro-regional EU strategy adopted in 2009.
Finland, too, participated in VASAB. In addition, Finland injected the ‘Northern
Dimension’, a mixture of geo-politics and spatial planning, into the discussion. In the
The learning machine 135

ESDP process its role had been to prepare the Tampere Action Programme. Within
Finland itself, the ESDP and more generally speaking EU regional policy generated
adaptation pressures resulting in the first ever strategic planning document, ‘Finland
2017’. Finland also adapted polycentricity to fit the situation in the thinly northern
periphery of Europe, thus demonstrating the quality of polycentricity as a ‘transdis-
cursive’ concept, one capable of adapting to different national and macro-regional
contexts (Eskelinen and Fritsch 2009).
Sweden kept its distance. It had difficulties, already discussed when relating
the names of the ESDP in various Community languages, with accepting planning
at a level above its communes. The latter are large and well-endowed with planning
and other powers.
There were more examples of the application of the ESDP. Luxembourg for
instance published planning guidelines reflecting ESDP principles. The Austrian
Spatial Development Perspective 2001 made an honest effort to put the ESDP on
the national agenda. The Republic of Ireland published a National Spatial Strategy
soon after the ESDP had come out. Italy never took a consistent approach, but
what has been said about other Member States applied there, too: Cooperation in
the framework of INTERREG and innovative actions under Article 10 of the ERDF
Regulations attracted attention. The same learning effect occurred in other Member
States from Southern Europe.
Finally, France is a special case. It had of course taken the initiative in the
ESDP process and, under the French Commissioner for Regional Policy Michel
Barnier, France played its part in the further development of the discourse. To under-
stand why, we need to go back in history. As discussed in Chapter 5, DATAR had
perceived the need for a spatial strategy to underpin European regional policy. This
was why France organised the first Ministerial. The Commission appointed a French
official to coordinate the work. Had Germany not objected, this would have led,
much as the Gendebien Report had proposed, to a variation of aménagement du
territoire at the level of the Community.
When the ESDP came out, it was therefore keenly applied. During the French
Presidency of 2000, DATAR presented a study on polycentrism (Titecat et al.
2000) and worked on a strategy, ‘France 2020’, in which the preferred option was
‘networked polycentrism’ (polycentrisme maillé) (Guigou 2002). DATAR also com-
missioned a comprehensive polycentricity study (Baudelle and Castagnède 2002).
In addition, it published a short version of the ESDP with comments added (Peyrony
2002). In the 2000s, France developed the policy of polycentrism further in the
direction of more emphasis on competitiveness, encouraging territories to identify
and enhance their territorial potential (Geppert 2009). This became a trend through-
out Europe to be discussed in the next chapter.
136 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

What, despite the fact that at Tampere it had been asked to look into the mat-
ter, the French Presidency of 2000 did not do was to tackle the competence issue.
Soon, DATAR would recommend to the Commission to promote territorial cohesion
being put into the draft Constitution, so maybe this is why it did not pursue this, what
by that time had become a lost cause.

Shaping minds
The application of the ESDP led to learning, was the message at the beginning of
this chapter. Here I give examples. Thus, tracing ‘Nordic Echoes of European Spatial
Planning’, Kai Böhme (2002: 233) draws attention to the emergence of a new dis-
course in Nordic planning circles:

Indeed, we have seen that national discourses or policy networks have na-
tionally put forward single issues coming from European discourse and to a
certain extent the European discourse also provided an input to restructuring
processes of the national planning systems. The most obvious examples are
recent approaches aiming at spatial cross-sectoral planning and develop-
ment policies and policies covering not only certain areas but the national or
regional territory as such.

Böhme portrays the ESDP as the eye-opener, contributing to overcoming the

separation between physical planning and regional-economic policy. The ESDP had
thus inculcated the spatial planning approach into Nordic planning.
ESDP messages percolating through to national and regional planning is, as
the reader knows, also true for the UK. The ‘spatial planning approach’ caught the
imagination and the planning frameworks for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales
drew inspiration from it. I hasten to add that the enthusiasm was limited to profes-
sionals, with, as indicated, the RTPI embracing spatial planning as a broad approach
of factoring social and economic considerations into the equation. There was even a
suggestion of a spatial framework for the UK capping these initiatives, with the RTPI
a sponsor. Because of continued opposition to cohesion policy in its present form,
the UK government keeps its distance.
Planners from Member States in the south were keen on applying the ESDP.
In a book published in Italian under the English title of ‘European Spatial Planning’,
Umberto Janin-Rivolin (2004) points to a hidden success story in terms of innova-
tions in governance. Similar claims have been made of Mediterranean INTERREG
programmes instituting new ways of cooperation otherwise uncommon in Southern
Europe lacking such a tradition in territorial and spatial planning (Pedrazzini 2005).
More generally speaking, the ESDP has been
The learning machine 137

at the origin of a series of transformations in the domestic patterns of

southern European planning systems. These transformations are not the
product of a forced compliance of domestic structures to EU models, since
there is no Community competency …. However, they can be read as a
process of cultural innovations… that promote European integration by
accommodating national diversity.
(Giannakourou 2005: 322)

The underlying mechanism is ‘framing integration’ designed to change

domestic values. This is part of the emergence of multi-level governance ‘where
potential channels of transformation and ultimately Europeanization can be
established through progressive socialization and complex learning processes
that accommodate national diversities’ (Giannakourou 2005: 329) The literature
on European integration underlines the importance of learning, and thus of the
framing of future policies.
There has also been distant learning about the ESDP in some of what are
now the new Member States. They had of course been no part of the proceed-
ings, but the Germans in particular kept key experts informed. As will become
evident, in their reactions to the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion some of
them are now more positive about the ESDP than the old Member States. In one
instance, Hungary, there is even the suggestion for the ESDP process to be
revived.
Based on a detailed case study of INTERREG, Kai Böhme points out that
learning is indirect. Trying to identify actual learning in transnational cooperation
in the North Sea Cooperation Area, he differentiates between individual and
organisational learning, the latter addressing ‘the question of how learning that
has taken place at the trans-national and national/regional levels is translated
from the participants in the project to their home-organisations’ (Böhme 2005:
697). Thirty per cent of project participants reported changes in their working rou-
tines, with 20 per cent assuming their peers to have benefited as well. However,
he also reports difficulties in spreading the message beyond the inner circle and
recommends projects to explore from the start ways of securing organisational
learning and social capital building. Such social capital is said to generate trust,
‘cement’ networks and improve collective learning. ‘Considering organisational
learning and social capital building rather than standard ERDF evaluation criteria
[oriented towards concrete output], it can be shown that trans-national coopera-
tion projects have effects that extend beyond the fulfilment of formal program or
project aims, with a wider range of achievements’ (Böhme 2005: 699).
138 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

ESPON Project 2.3.1: application and effects of

the ESDP in the member states
The most recent and comprehensive assessment of the application of the ESDP
is ESPON Project 2.3.1. The final report reminds us that ESDP guidelines are very
general and therefore difficult to apply:

One observation that comes through at all geographical levels is that the appli-
cation of policy aims and options is not a linear process. The ESDP itself mirrors
the professional discourse in the countries most active in the drafting process.
The influence it has had after publication depends in the main on the various
circumstances pertaining in the policy fields, countries, and Regions in question.
When arguments taken from the ESDP are regarded as being useful, they are
used, though this is often done without reference to the ESDP. The application
of the ESDP is thus rather difficult to trace, as it is usually indirect and implicit
rather than direct and explicit in nature.
(ESPON 2007: 5)

This is in line with my view of the application of the ESDP as a diffuse process with
effects difficult to pin down, but in-depth research consistently reveals learning effects.
The ESPON study included the application, already discussed, on EU level.
The impact on sector policies was limited. INTERREG IIIB, as against this, was
following the ESDP agenda in that the priorities of most of the programmes were
coherent with it.
Most effort was expended on researching the application at national level.
Here, too, the study gives a similar picture to the one above: In the EU15, the impe-
tus to apply the ESDP diminished over time, as indicated, especially amongst those
who originally took an active part. By way of contrast, new Member States were
greatly influenced by it. However, here, too, it was the planners that took heed from
the ESDP, not the sector policy makers. Effects on the planning discourse related
to ways in which the spatial representation of a country’s position in a wider Europe
should take place. According to the study, polycentricity was the most important
substantive ESDP principle and a collaborative and integrative style the most impor-
tant procedural lesson. Selective and diffuse applications of substantive themes,
combined with sustained improvements to territorial governance were also reported
from the cross-border and transnational cases:

The cases of trans-national/cross-border spatial planning addressed here thus

present a rather mixed picture in terms of the implicit or explicit application of
the ESDP. On one level it can be argued that all of the cases contribute to the
The learning machine 139

application of the ESDP as they are concrete examples of actors and institutions
heeding the ESDP’s call to, ‘overcome any insular way of looking at their terri-
tory’ taking into account ‘European aspects and interdependencies right from the
outset’. The cases therefore suggest a strong degree of implicit application ….
It should also be recognised that a number of the initiatives above predate
the publication of the final version of the ESDP and thus the cases can also
be seen to illustrate the importance of local contexts and issues as well as
pre-existing links and cooperation arrangements in stimulating cross-border and
trans-national cooperation.
(ESPON 2007: 165)

Nobody said that studying the application of the ESDP was easy.

Outlook
In a study already quoted reporting a massive impact of INTERREG IIIB in the five
cooperation areas in which Germany participated, the authors add a cautionary
note. In terms of ‘Community Added Value’, they admit that the evidence is vague,
emphasising at the same time ‘that the programmes have considerable integrative
effects in the Regions and for Europe as a whole, and that they contribute to a har-
monization of working methods and working processes, statutory obligations, etc’.
(Müller et al. 2005: 9).
The overall picture of the application of the ESDP is thus perhaps not brilliant.
In particular, the ESDP has done little to improve the position of planning vis-à-vis the
sectors. However, there is evidence of learning, at least in the inner circle of planners
concerned. Raising their awareness of the European dimension of their work and in
this way penetrating their discourses means progress in the Europeanisation of plan-
ning. Such expert learning is important. What remains is for politicians and the public
to also appreciate that European integration and the spatial or territorial challenges it
poses are of a permanent and fundamental nature, requiring new ways of thinking and
acting. Following the message of deliberative learning in the quote at the beginning of
this paper, this would be important. Clearly, there is still some way to go!
PART IV

CRISIS
This is not about the financial and economic crisis hitting in 2008 but about the crisis
of confidence in a Europe not yet recovered from the shock of the Treaty of Maastricht
creating the EU and the euro and pointing the way to political union. The nation-state
is put into question. At the same time, rather than as a response to globalisation,
Europeanisation is identified with its real or imagined evils and as an affront to deep-
seated beliefs. Not only governments clinch to the nation-state. We all have difficulty
thinking about ourselves and society in any other than in national terms. However, to
say that they are the products of history and thus subject to change surely does not
mean denying national culture and values. At the same time one must recognise that
what we are going through is a drawn-out and possibly painful process and certainly
not a one-way street towards any European or cosmopolitan ideal.
As regards European spatial planning, I have recounted that the Commission
more than ten years ago ceased supporting the ESDP. Territorial, alongside with eco-
nomic and social cohesion in the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was
to give it the right of initiative. With this in mind, the French and the Dutch rallied the
ministers of Member States to consider their future role. For some time, their position,
let alone that of other Member States at a greater mental distance from Brussels, had
no longer been one of unquestioning support for the Commission. During an interview,
a French Commission official recounted an episode during the ESDP process. To his
surprise he was challenged by his own French national counterparts for forgetting
that there was no Community competence for planning! At the beginning there had of
course been an unspoken accord between France and the Commission on the matter
but manoeuvring around the competence issue had left its mark.
With territorial cohesion appearing on the horizon, as will become evident
soon the result of yet another French initiative, the issue was ripe for reassessment.
Member States feared to find themselves at the receiving end of Commission-led
territorial cohesion policy. The strategy became one of redirecting the discussion
towards influencing sector policies at whatever level. In other words, coherence
became an even more central issue. Based on the work of ESPON, a series of
Ministerials produced an ‘evidence-based’ document underscoring the spatial or
territorial impacts of sector policies. I have misgivings about the pretence of plan-
ning being based on evidence, and nothing but evidence. However, leading to the
Territorial Agenda of the European Union as it did, this initiative instilled new vigour
into European planning. I discuss this in Chapter 9.
 With hindsight, the rejection by Danish voters of the Treaty of Maastricht
until Denmark received opt-outs and the narrow approval given by French voters
can be seen as warning shots. The eventual rejection of the Treaty establishing
a Constitution for Europe by the voters of the very countries – no causal connec-
tion! – promoting European planning, France and the Netherlands, eventually threw
not just European planning but also and in particular the European project as such
into disarray. Before, my concern had been that DG REGIO might invoke the new
competence without due consideration of the essential role of Member States. So
my preference had become the open method of coordination. This method applies
in areas where there is no EU competence. Since territorial cohesion was slated
to become such a competence, recommending the open method of coordination
thus seemed counterintuitive but my concern was that the Commission lacked the
capacity for conducting territorial cohesion policy. For this, and so as to maintain
their commitment, it would continue to have to rely on Member States, even after
territorial cohesion had become a competence. Subsequently my concern became a
different but no less urgent one. It became how, the conundrum of the Constitution
notwithstanding, European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy might be car-
ried forward. It is in this context that the Territorial Agenda signalling a new beginning
assumed importance.
Concurrently with the ups and downs of the Constitution, net-contributors to
the EU budget mounted their attack on cohesion policy. In reaction, the Commission
reinvented cohesion policy as a mainstay of the Lisbon Strategy. In the Community
Strategic Guidelines for Cohesion, territorial cohesion forms an element of the
equation. The Commission also published a Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion
in late-2008. As is well-known, I hold that the added value of territorial cohesion
lies in its governance dimension: strengthening the coherence, in a spatial or ter-
ritorial sense, of policies. In this guise, spatial planning could become a platform for
‘place-based’ policy as advocated in the Barca Report. This is what Chapter 10 is
about. The Conclusions will pursue this line of reasoning further and I have added
an Epilogue.
CHAPTER 9

RENEWED EFFORT

In France [territorial cohesion] is familiar for us because it refers, in albeit differ-

ent terms, to the policy of aménagement du territoire.1

In Chapter 7 I related that the makers of the ESDP hoped for Commission
support for generating Europe-wide data sets. Without an EU competence, there
was no budget line, the Commission retorted. When it eventually came to setting up
ESPON under INTERREG, the Commission had already invoked territorial cohesion
as a concept. What does it mean? Rather than giving a definition outright, in the
Introduction I suggested that the thing to ask was: who has invoked the concept,
when, and why? Below I answer these questions followed by an account of ESPON
and the Territorial Agenda of the European Union (TA 2007), the Member State
reaction to the rise to prominence of territorial cohesion.

Territorial cohesion
There was a brief mention of territorial cohesion in Dutch memos preparing the Treaty
of Maastricht in 1991 but it was the Assembly of European Regions that launched the
concept for good. In 1995, its Vice President Robert Savy, until 2004 President of the
Limousin Region and at times presiding over the French Comité interministériel de
l’aménagement du territoire, presented it in a survey of the AER members. As French
Minister of European Affairs, the future Commissioner for Regional Policy Michel
Barnier saw to it that territorial cohesion received a mention in an article on services
of general economic interest in the Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997. The intention was
to moderate the effects of the liberalisation of public services. Germans articulate the
same concern under Daseinsvorsorge but do not look for EU support in ensuring equi-
table provisions. Such concerns continue to figure in French thinking.
That territorial cohesion seemed an evocative term to Savy and Barnier is
no surprise. Recall the connotations in French of words such as cohesion and

1 ‘En France, [la cohésion territoriale] nous est familière, car il s’agit, en d’autre terms, de la
politique d’aménagement du territoire. (Guellec, A. 2009. Préface: Aménagement du terri-
toire et cohésion territoriale dans l’Union européenne. In Y. Jean, G. Baudelle, eds. L’Europe:
Aménager les Territoires. Paris: Armand Collin. p. 7.)
144 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

coherence in the context of an ethics of solidarity, of ‘republican equality’, a sense

of mutual obligation central to notions of citizenship that the French also project
onto Europe where it is now held that ‘people should not be disadvantaged by
where they happen to live or work’ (CEC 2004: 27). Delors had already argued in
this way, invoking his ‘European model of society’, a notion also to be found in the
explanatory text accompanying the introduction of territorial cohesion into the Treaty
of Amsterdam. The Barca Report (2009: viii), to be discussed later, talks about a
territorialised social contract guaranteeing standards, adding that, by reducing fear,
in the long run this would encourage mobility, presumably in this way increasing the
competitiveness of the labour force and thus of Europe.
To return to the beginning of this debate, Savy was disappointed by the men-
tion of territorial cohesion merely in relation to services. In a book written on behalf
of DATAR, ‘L’europe sans territoire’ – a spirited defence of the need for attend-
ing to territory in European integration – his collaborator Claude Husson (2002)
relates how in the run-up to the subsequent Treaty of Nice, Savy unsuccessfully
campaigned for a more prominent position for territorial cohesion.
Upon becoming Commissioner, Barnier gave territorial cohesion its broader
meaning in the Second Cohesion Report and the Commission expunged spatial
planning from its vocabulary. Years later, the directorate general responsible for
maritime policy would publish a ‘Road Map for Maritime Spatial Planning’, thus dem-
onstrating that the meaning of concepts depends on who invokes them, when and
why. For Barnier and DG REGIO, invoking territorial cohesion was a way of distanc-
ing themselves from the ESDP where Member States had sidelined the Commission.
National experts keenly followed the rise of territorial cohesion. Old hands from
the CSD produced a document, ‘Managing the Territorial Dimension of EU Policies
after Enlargement’ (Expert Document 2003). I could observe the process first hand
in the margins of a Budapest conference where I was not welcome to join them over
breakfast since they were on business. The informality of working meetings, piggy-
backing onto events, is a characteristic of the processes I describe.
DATAR had been the one to propose to include territorial cohesion in the
Constitution and the group which included a DATAR staff member referred to it.
Eventually, it presented the document to the Spatial and Urban Development sub-
committee of the Committee on the Development and Conversion of Regions set up
under ERDF regulations.
Barnier’s other responsibility, next to regional policy, was institutional reform.
First he dealt with the Nice Treaty. Then he represented the Commission on the
Presidium of the Convention on the Future of Europe and seemingly without much
ado (Zonneveld and Waterhout 2005), the Constitution came to include territorial,
alongside with economic and social cohesion. The Lisbon Treaty follows the same
line. Spatial planning was no longer the theme; territorial cohesion was! Sometimes
Renewed effort 145

it is argued that there is a difference. As is well-known, my contention is that, as

far as land-use planning is concerned this is so but not for strategic spatial plan-
ning. Anyhow, the Territorial Agenda is full of territorial cohesion and by the time of
the French Presidency of late-2008, discussed in Chapter 10, Member States had
come to assimilate the concept.
Who has been responsible for invoking the concept is thus clear: a French
Commissioner pursuing French ideas. As regards why, not only the French context
is relevant but also the Commission having been kept at arm’s length by the Member
States. Here, their planning systems and policies discussed are relevant: Territorial
cohesion policy is close to aménagement du territoire. It is ‘Old (French) wine in new
bottles’ (Faludi 2004). Invoking the concept of ‘spatial quality’, Dutch national spatial
planning, too, has once been fairly close but there is now the unease reported about
European integration, so Dutch planners are less forthcoming. With few exceptions,
the German position is still that territorial cohesion means little.
The arrival of territorial cohesion forms the backdrop to the Territorial Agenda.
As indicated, invoking the Constitution, the Commission might turn the tables on
the Member States. However, the experts had already identified the problem as
not so much one of where the competence for spatial planning/territorial cohesion
policy rested. Rather, the problem was making sectors pay attention to the territorial
dimension of their policies; as the subsequent Barca Report would put it evocatively,
that they should not be ‘space-blind’. This was behind the Rotterdam Ministerial in
late-2004. Significantly, the meeting was styled as one of ministers responsible for
territorial cohesion and not spatial planning. Sidestepping the competence issue
on which they were about to loose ground, Member States argued that territorial
cohesion should not be a separate policy area but rather a concern for all sectors
with territorial impacts. Documenting such impacts, ESPON was expected to bear
fruit. Initially, DG REGIO viewed the initiative as yet more evidence of Member State
intransigence. Before describing this plot, I give an account of ESPON.

A new element in the equation

The availability of European-wide evidence provided by something like 600 ESPON
researchers was an incentive for producing an ‘evidence-based document’, one that
would speak for itself. The idea of adducing factual grounds for planning goes back to
Patrick Geddes and beyond. Its revival has been stimulated by ‘New Labour’ in the UK.
Advocates of evidence-based policy sometimes ignore methodological issues but could
well have meant ‘evidence-informed’ planning, according to Simin Davoudi (2006) the
best one can hope for. Accounts by participants point in the same direction of an interac-
tive rather than linear relation between evidence and policy (Böhme and Schön 2006).
146 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

ESPON had been set up to provide the analytical base for amplifying the ESDP
agenda. However, it did not get off the ground before 2002, by which time the ESDP
process had stopped dead in its tracks. Retaining an acronym that had become, as
some such acronyms tend to, a brand name, the programme presently goes under
the name ‘Observation Network for Territorial Development and Cohesion’. Spatial
planning is a distant memory. Be that as it may, the well-oiled ESPON machine is a
mainstay of European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy.
Previously, under ESPON 2006 as it was called because it operated under
the Financial Framework 2000–2006 projects came under four categories: thematic
studies relating, even though the process had ended, to ESDP themes, from poly-
centric development to natural and cultural heritage; impact studies of EU-sector
policies to demonstrate that, given their territorial impacts, sector policies had to be
coordinated within some kind of spatial framework; coordinating, so-called cross-
thematic studies including the formulation of spatial scenarios; and a mixed category
of studies including scientific support projects. In terms of geographic detail, the
studies in general went no further than the regional level. There was concern, for
instance in the northern Member States about the appropriateness of indicators
derived from the European core.
ESPON has a Managing Authority, a Paying Authority – both at the Luxembourg
Ministère de l‘intérieur et de l’aménagement du territoire – and a Monitoring Committee.
Supported by the Coordination Unit and composed of representatives of the Member
States and importantly the Commission, the Monitoring Committee is in charge. To pro-
vide access to data for the transnational project groups, there are ESPON Contact
Points in each of the countries participating. They now form part of the emergent institu-
tional infrastructure of European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy.
Large research institutes from north-west Europe were over-represented among
the candidates tendering for projects. Procedures were cumbersome and there were
complaints about interventions and additional demands imposed upon researchers.
The Commission representative on the Monitoring Committee apparently wielded much
influence. Many of the members were old hands, having participated not only in the
ESDP process but continuing to meet in the framework of CEMAT. This is an example
of overlapping networks being the life blood of European planning. Indeed, the ESPON
Monitoring Committee and the Committee of Senior Officials of CEMAT now seem to
form platforms for European spatial planner in the classic sense of the word. Territorial
cohesion policy as such draws in new sets of experts without a planning background.
ESPON 2006 had created value for the scientific community – thirty-four
projects with spinoffs in terms of publications – but less so for practitioners. Having
said this it is interesting to know that national planners commissioned studies syn-
thesising the results pertaining to their countries, for instance the study ‘Deutschland
in Europa’ (BBR 2009). Anyhow, its successor ESPON 2013 addresses practical
Renewed effort 147

concerns but one should bear in mind that research often has a long gestation
period. In policy, as against this, events of the day are of great influence so conflict is
endemic. Also, and this is the fundamental problem, evidence is never a self-evident
basis for action. Undeniably though ESPON took great strides towards underpin-
ning European planning with types of evidence that previously had been lacking. For
researchers, the experience was no doubt exhilarating. ESPON is thus part of the
‘learning machine’ as which I characterise European spatial planning.

The making of the Territorial Agenda

A Ministerial at Rotterdam in 2004 led to the Territorial Agenda. I gave an earlier blow-
by-blow account (Faludi 2009a). There were two more Ministerials: Luxembourg
in 2005 and the crowning event, Leipzig, in 2007. Decisions were pre-cooked at
directors-general meetings preceding each of the Ministerials, with an additional one
during the Finnish Presidency. There was neither a Ministerial nor a directors-general
meeting during the UK Presidency but a ‘working level meeting’. Experts frequently
met in other constellations, with a Coming Presidencies Group coordinating.
Above I recounted the rise of EU territorial cohesion policy based on French
thinking. No sooner than the enlargement of the EU had taken effect, in May 2004,
DATAR convened a meeting of directors general from all 25 Member States responsi-
ble for territorial cohesion policy. The French did not hold the EU Presidency, but they
combined this meeting with a conference. In an atmosphere of optimism as regards
enlargement and the Constitution, the aim was to prepare the Dutch Presidency.
The Dutch held a directors-general meeting in October and Rotterdam was
in November. Being experienced in such matters, they sent their minister on a
European tour, including a session with the new Polish Commissioner for Regional
Policy, Danuta Hübner, so Rotterdam went quite well. And the Dutch knew that there
would be a Luxembourg follow-up. Within its means, the Grand Duchy was, and still
is, supportive of European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy, with a small
but high calibre group of experts working on the issues.
With a brief to elaborate on Rotterdam, a handful of experts, including a
member of the ESPON Coordination Unit produced a scoping document: ‘The
Territorial State and Perspectives of the European Union: Towards a Stronger
European Territorial Cohesion in the Light of the Lisbon and Gothenburg Ambitions’
(Luxembourg Presidency 2005). It argued for territorial development policies to help
areas enhance their ‘territorial capital’, a concept drawn from the Territorial Outlook
of the OECD (2001). Evoking memories of the ESDP, the priorities were strength-
ening polycentric development and urban–rural partnership, promoting clusters of
competitive and innovative activities, strengthening the TENs, trans-European risk
management, trans-European ecological structures and cultural resources.
148 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

I mentioned already that the UK Presidency did not hold any official meetings. The
UK was, and still is, a net-contributor wishing for cohesion policy to be replaced with
transfers to new members – the policy of renationalisation to be discussed. However,
the UK organised a Ministerial on sustainable communities (Office of the Deputy Prime
Minister 2006) which fed into the Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities
(Leipzig Charter 2007) adopted alongside with the Territorial Agenda. Official scepti-
cism notwithstanding, the UK also held the working level meeting mentioned. This is
where the decision was taken to produce, not only the evidence-based Territorial State
and Perspectives of the European Union (TSP 2007) but also the shorter Territorial
Agenda (TA 2007). Ministers could not, or so it was argued, be asked to consider a
lengthy document. Above all, the experts wanted to avoid the fracas over maps in the
ESDP, so the Territorial Agenda is devoid of any and short. Clearly, this being normal
practice, the experts were thus pre-empting their ministers.
From then on, attention shifted to the Territorial Agenda intended to be a stra-
tegic document with concrete proposals for contributing to the dominant discourse
of the 2000s, the Lisbon Strategy. The broader document underlying receded into
the background.
The Commission had reason to be gratified. Member States had apparently
come to accept EU territorial cohesion policy and this irrespective of the fate of the
Constitution in its present or amended form — surely a moot point after the negative
referenda. Successive drafts of the Territorial Agenda suggested that the Slovenian
Presidency of 2008 should put territory on the agenda of the European Council. As
the paragon among the new members, Slovenia was ideally placed for this and even
a cursory mention in the conclusions of the European Council would be a bonus.
Another ambition was to enter into a dialogue with the Commission. Remember
that DG Regio had been frustrated with the Member States and was initially sceptical
of the Territorial Agenda. Sometimes, the effort to involve the Commission went as
far as imploring it to come up with a White Paper or a Communication on territorial
cohesion. With the Constitution in abeyance, the Deputy Director General responsible
rejected this. The Commission had been shocked by the rejection of the Constitution
but was hoping for its resurrection. Anticipating upon its resurrection might have been
counselled prudence in the matter. However, the brisk rejection of a White Paper in
late-2006 may also have reflected the personal disappointment, ever since the mid-
1990s, of this long-time strategist in matters of cohesion policy with the Member
States. Personal attitudes count, even in something as grand as European integration.
Talking about something that happened in late-2006, I am getting ahead of
myself. After the decision one year earlier to prepare the Territorial Agenda, a new
working group started formulating drafts. Now that things became ‘political’, the
ESPON Coordination Unit bowed out. National experts produced ‘guidance notes’.
Meanwhile, the Austrian Presidency organised, neither a Ministerial nor a director’s
Renewed effort 149

general meeting but a seminar providing an opportunity for informal soundings with
the Germans due to take over in 2007.
The Finnish Presidency put itself at the service of completing the process.
It organised the directors-general meeting where the Deputy Director General
rejected the request for a White Paper. Prior to it, two drafts of the Territorial Agenda
had seen the light of day. Coordination continued to be in the hands of the Coming
Presidencies Group which, however, was not highly formalised, meeting as often
as not in the margins of other events. Experts from countries holding future EU
Presidencies, such as Portugal, Slovenia and France participated. Representatives
of Poland and Hungary were occasionally also present.
Germany had presided over the finalisation of the ESDP. This was once more
the case with the Territorial Agenda. As indicated, the venue was to be Leipzig
where the German minister about to chair had been the mayor.
A constant throughout was the regard for the Lisbon Strategy. The added value
of territorial cohesion was the attention to the needs and characteristics, specific geo-
graphical challenges and opportunities of regions. The OECD had done the same:
pleading, in terms of the Barca Report, for strategies to be ‘place-based’. The World
Bank Report 2009 would add weight to this argument in favour of attending to territory.
In January 2007, a preamble in the draft thus stated that territorial cohesion
had become a politically accepted EU objective and that the ministers regarded
it as a prerequisite of sustainable economic growth and job creation. To this end,
the draft reiterated the need for integrated territorial development policy, reflecting
the identities, needs and characteristics of regions and cities, very much along the
lines of what the Community Strategic Guidelines requested: that National Strategic
Reference Frameworks and Operational Programmes should pay attention to territo-
rial cohesion. The draft then focused on territorial trends and driving forces, putting
climate change, a German forte, at the top of the list of challenges, followed by rising
energy prices and, unusually only in third place, the geographical concentration of
activities. I have shown in Chapter 7 that to counteract such a concentration in the
‘Pentagon’ had been a key ESDP policy.
The list continued with globalisation, enlargement, the interdependence with
EU neighbours and the wider world, demographic change and migration, growing
social imbalances and disparities and unsustainable development. Although having
moved to third place, the concern with geographical concentration of activities came
through in the emphasis on untapped potentials of regions and cities outside the
core. This is a constant refrain ever since competitiveness has become a topic.
The next section outlined priorities for strengthening the structure of the EU ter-
ritory. Previous drafts had started with strengthening polycentrism and urban–rural
partnership, but now the promotion of transnational competitive and innovative regional
clusters was the first priority. New forms of territorial governance between rural and
150 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

urban areas, the promotion of ecological structures and cultural resources, the strength-
ening of trans-European technological networks and the promotion of trans-European
risk management and only in last place the promotion of polycentric development com-
pleted the list. Things were evolving beyond the ESDP.
The draft also included a work programme, with the promotion of more territo-
rially coherent EU policies, the well-known rationale for spatial planning, at the top
of the list. It reiterated the request for the Slovenian Presidency to take this to the
European Council. Other proposals were the provision of European tools for territo-
rial cohesion, from EU comitology to territorial impact assessment, and the demand
for more focus in the ESPON 2013 programme, then under active consideration, on
issues in the Territorial Agenda.
Other messages were for the Member States. Territory should play a role in cohe-
sion policy as well as in National Reform Plans under the Lisbon Strategy. The intention
must have been to strengthen the hands of planners in their confrontations with sectors.
By this time, ideas as to where the process was heading had firmed up. The
Portuguese Presidency would take care of the First Action Programme under the
Territorial Agenda, and the ministers would seek to influence EU debates on key
dossiers, including the review of the EU budget. I have made some play of ear-
lier drafts having invited the Commission to publish a Communication on territorial
cohesion, an idea rejected by the Deputy Director General. As from January, the
documents no longer referred to it.
There were two more drafts and the German Presidency put great store by
stakeholder involvement. This had already started with a stakeholder conference
at Amsterdam in June 2006. Later, an invitation went out asking for submissions
in respect of the Territorial Agenda, and a series of events took place in Germany,
apparently with the participation of some captains of industry.
As to Leipzig itself, Germans always pay attention to central and eastern
Europe, including the EU’s neighbours, many of whom were present among the
forty-seven delegations, including one from the Russian Federation due to take the
three-year rotating CEMAT Presidency.
After Leipzig, polished versions of the document appeared in German, English
and French on the internet. The Territorial State and Perspectives appeared in the
same languages. The Germans also published their own maps. The stated reason
was that the evidence generated by ESPON, reflecting as it did concerns of the early
2000s, no longer matched priorities. Indeed, the relation between evidence and politi-
cal choice is more circular than the term ‘evidence-based’ suggests but there was also
pride involved. Germany had always made major professional contributions.
I end this account with changes as against the ESDP and also between drafts.
As regards the ESDP, recounting its three policy guidelines — a polycentric urban
system and urban–rural partnership, access to infrastructure and knowledge and
Renewed effort 151

the prudent management of the natural and cultural environment — the Territorial
Agenda positions itself as its follow-up. However, it does not conceptualise the
shape of Europe. With no maps at all, it would have been difficult to do so. This hav-
ing been said, the Territorial Agenda does not contradict the centre-periphery view
in the ESDP either.
As regards changes between drafts, in the final version, the list of challenges
was more or less the same as in the March draft but where in that draft it came third,
the geographic concentration of activities caused by market forces and its dislocat-
ing effects had disappeared. However, the emphasis continued to be on making
use of regionally diversified territorial potential. Maybe the most important change as
against previous versions was that the evergreen notion of strengthening polycen-
tric development and urban–rural partnership returned but in combination with the
promotion of innovation through networking of city regions and cities. This was not
unlike the promotion of global economic integration zones in the ESDP but without
mentioning the latter concept. This was followed by new forms of territorial govern-
ance between rural and urban areas, somewhat faint echoes, thus, of the ESDP.
The third priority was the promotion of regional clusters of competition and
innovation specifically across borders, followed by the extension of the TENs, the
promotion of trans-European risk management and the strengthening of ecologi-
cal structures and cultural resources. Risk management, including the impacts of
climate change — the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ had been discussed at least once
— received attention. This reflected German policy and also the EU focus on climate
change. Having said this, it is worth mentioning that climate change and energy
occupied a less prominent position on the list of priorities. There was much ado
about competitiveness but this was not new. The ESDP had discussed European
competitiveness even before the Lisbon Strategy.
The Territorial Agenda was addressed to European institutions as well as to
Member States. I noted above that earlier versions had supported the inclusion of
territorial cohesion in the Constitution but at the time of Leipzig the debate on this
had become heated. The Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel had laid her reputa-
tion on the line in trying to resolve the conundrum of the Constitution. It must have
seemed unwise for spatial planners to meddle in high politics.
The final document reiterated the demand for more focus in the ESPON 2013
programme, including the formulation of operational indicators but there was no
agreement on territorial impact assessment. Some Member States were apprehen-
sive about yet more requirements, like under strategic environmental assessment.
Other recommendations concerned cooperation between the Commission and
the Member States. Previous drafts had requested the establishment of a territo-
rial cohesion contact point in the Commission. The final version merely committed
ministers to set up a Network of Territorial Cohesion Contact Points (NTCCP). The
152 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Portuguese Presidency would draw on them, and this has become standard prac-
tice since. NTCCP meetings replace those of the CSD of old, but not all delegations
are staffed with planners. DG REGIO, too, set up a new unit, ‘Urban Development,
Territorial Cohesion’. Out of the blue, but presumably not without prior consultation
with the Commission, the German Presidency Conclusions invited the Commission
to publish by 2008 a ‘report’ on territorial cohesion which was to become the Green
Paper on Territorial Cohesion.
As far as the Member States were concerned, they were asked to observe
the priorities in the Territorial Agenda. Earlier versions had noted that territorial
issues should play a role in the implementation of the National Strategic Reference
Frameworks, but the opportunity for this had slipped.
The longest list of follow-ups was for future EU Presidencies to act upon,
including the request for Slovenia to consider the Territorial Agenda when preparing
the Spring European Council of 2008. The wording did not necessarily imply that
the European Council should discuss the Territorial Agenda as such, merely that it
should acknowledge the role of territory.
The ministers also intended to facilitate debates, from a territorial point of view, on
a list of EU dossiers. The list kept changing. Up to and including the January draft, the
Territorial Agenda had mentioned the National Reform Plans under the Lisbon Strategy
but they no longer figured. In addition, the list had included the review of the EU budget
but there was no reference to this in the final version. The renewed list would become
a structuring element in the follow-up to the Territorial Agenda. It included the mid-term
review of cohesion policy and of rural development policy, both scheduled for 2010,
the redevelopment of the European Sustainable Development Strategy in 2011, and
others, including the 7th Environmental Action Programme. The changes as between
drafts cast light on the process being one of constant negotiations between many
actors, this being the nature of policy-making and even more so of European policy.
In pursuance of what may have been a last-minute decision, the Territorial
Agenda announced that the Hungarian Presidency of 2011 would overlook its
review, a process that in the meantime is under way with, amongst others, the
Belgian Presidency due to precede and the Polish one due to follow the Hungarians
each lending a hand. This is becoming standard practice reflecting the emerging
idea of ‘team presidencies’.

The First Action Programme

The Ministerial in the Azores was preceded as usual by a directors-general meeting
and two working meetings. Two sections of the same Portuguese ministry played
to different audiences. The regional policy makers were dealing with the Structural
Funds important to Portugal. They coordinated their work with the Ministry of Finance
Renewed effort 153

and with a team dealing with European research policy – an important aspect of con-
temporary regional policy. They looked after the second day on cohesion policy. The
first day concerned the First Action Programme (2007) and was the responsibility of
old hands animated by a junior minister with an academic background. By undertak-
ing a major effort, this team may have hoped to bolster their domestic position – not
uncommon as a strategy. International recognition forms a resource in bureaucratic
politics. They also mobilised for the first time the NTCCP.
After four drafts, the First Action Programme re-stated the political commit-
ments entered into. What followed was an outline of the evolving context, including
the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty due only days after the Ministerial, in December
2007. The second section identified guiding principles for the implementation of the
Territorial Agenda: Solidarity between territories; multi-level governance; integration
of policies; cooperation on territorial matters; subsidiarity. The third section dealt
with the purpose, the time frame and scope of the programme and reviewed the list
of EU dossiers according to the Territorial Agenda, adding three more and remov-
ing others. Regarding the territorial impacts of climate change, one of the themes
included, the meeting made an immediate input by adopting a contribution to the
discussion on the Green Paper ‘Adapting to Climate Change in Europe’. Based
on the above, the fourth section specified five lines of action. Under each came a
list of concrete actions for which responsibilities were allocated. Annex 1 included
more than a dozen action templates with lead partners, with some spaces left blank.
Under the Slovenian Presidency more working groups became active.
The Conclusions of the Portuguese Presidency (2007) approved of territorial
cohesion in the Lisbon Treaty. There is some discretion as regards the phrasing of
such conclusions, and Portugal, a cohesion policy client, may stand to benefit from
strengthening its territorial element, but this had raised some eyebrows. In her inter-
vention, discussed in the next chapter, Commissioner Hübner, too, welcomed the
Lisbon Treaty and the conclusions recalled the commitment to deepen the partner-
ship with the Commission. This may have been a claim for a continuing presence in
territorial cohesion policy, the Commission’s eventual right of initiative notwithstand-
ing. I did say that one of the motives for the Rotterdam Ministerial at a time when the
Constitution was still alive had been to stake out precisely such a claim. Now history
seemed to repeat itself.
For the rest, the conclusions recalled the commitment to foster ‘network
creating environments’ at all levels, and they welcomed the establishment in the
comitology system of the expert committee under regulations pertaining to 2007–
2013, ‘Territorial Cohesion and Urban Matters’ with its thematic working groups.
There were mentions of the EU-wide consultation process on the future of cohesion
policy and of the National Reform Plans under the Lisbon Strategy. The Portuguese
kept close to the Commission’s agenda.
154 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

In more robust language than the Territorial Agenda, they thanked Slovenia
for promising to integrate the Territorial Agenda and the Leipzig Charter into their
preparations for the Spring European Council. There was a vote of thanks also for
the Czechs and Swedes due to hold the Presidency in 2009 for unspecified com-
mitments to support the deepening of territorial cohesion. France made a last-minute
announcement of a Ministerial in November 2008, the topic of the next chapter.
The reference to territorial cohesion in the Conclusions of the European Council
with Slovenia chairing was one bland sentence reiterating what is in the Lisbon
Treaty. The overall Slovenian priorities had been: the future of the Lisbon Treaty; the
Western Balkans; the Lisbon Agenda; the energy-climate package; and stimulating
intercultural dialogue. To relate these to territorial cohesion had been difficult and
suspicion as regards its implications for fund allocations was ripe. The planners
were not in charge of cohesion policy, so when it came to preparing the European
Council at the Permanent Representatives Committee (COREPER for Comité
des représentants permanents), the antechamber of the Council of Ministers where
ambassadors of the Member States to the EU sit in almost permanent session – the
planners were not involved. Rather, their depositions had to go through the sieve of
interdepartmental negotiations, not only in Slovenia, but – had it been put forward
at COREPER with sufficient force – subsequently in all Member States. Time was
short for this and so the Territorial Agenda did not really reach the European Council.
Getting the First Action Programme off the ground was the achievement of
the Slovenians. They themselves chaired one working group, ‘Coordination between
Urban and Territorial Development’. This mirrored the dual concern of the new unit,
Territorial Development, Urban Matters, at DG REGIO. In September, and thus
after the end of its presidency, Slovenia hosted a workshop on further action. The
final report with recommendations was distributed at Marseille in late-2008. The
extension of the life of working groups beyond presidential terms could mean a sea
change in the institutionalisation of European planning (Faludi 2009b).
There was, of course, the usual set of meetings of directors general and others:
the NTCCP, ESPON seminars and ad-hoc groups. Discussions were far-ranging, cover-
ing the concept of territorial cohesion, the spatial or territorial impacts of sector policies,
their connections with EU dossiers and the role of spatial planning in climate change
policy. Some of these debates were to be taken further under the French Presidency.
There were differences also as regards the previous Portuguese and, as will
become evident, the next French Presidency. Like the Germans, the Slovenians
were keen on spatial planning as such, whereas the emphasis of the two others was
on cohesion policy and the role of territorial cohesion in strengthening it.
At the end of its term, the Slovenian Presidency issued a report. It had
achieved much besides the meagre outcome of the European Council. Most
working groups under the First Action Programme were on the way. There was
Renewed effort 155

exchange of information and cross-referencing to the thematic groups set up by

the Territorial Cohesion and Urban Matters sub-committee, which the Commission
chairing, however, appeared not to pay much attention to. There was coordination
also with ESPON in the sense of looking for financing elements of the First Action
Programme.

Outlook
The activation of the NTCCP as a sounding board and the formation of working
groups to deal with the actions listed in the programme were innovative measures.
What was becoming evident was that the groups were unlike the ad-hoc arrange-
ments characteristic of the Territorial Agenda process. Rather, one is reminded of
the ESDP days when the CSD met, generally twice per presidential term, with ad-
hoc events in between. A difference has already been indicated: membership was
wider and, unlike with the CSD, progress no longer depended on Commission sup-
port. Member States were able and willing to send delegations to meetings. The
working groups were thus well attended, if not by representatives of all, then at
least of a number of Member States, with, depending on the topic, some sending
more than one representative. So, other than at the time of the Tampere Action
Programme, when the future of the ESDP process was up in the air and commitment
to pursue agreed lines of action patchy, the Territorial Agenda did have an impact.
Arguably, this was less because of its substantive content which, as compared with
the ESDP, was meagre. The incentives were rather the expectation of the Lisbon
Treaty being ratified and of the Commission’s Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion.
CHAPTER 10

AT THE CROSSROADS

Space is reconstituting itself – as part of a Europe devoid of national hegemony,

as a Union without clearly defined national centre which could dominate an
equally clearly defined periphery. What is sometimes described simplistically as
‘Brussels’ is a complex puzzle formed by the most diverse interests. The new
Europe is certainly not the instrument of one single – and above all not a single
national – interest.1

These lines were written on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the
fall of the Iron Curtain, resulting in a new constellation, not only of European space
but also at the Commission. With each Member State old and new having one
each, the number of Commissioners increased and important posts went to the
new Member States, the Commissioner for Regional Policy amongst them. Thus,
Danuta Hübner from Poland already mentioned took office in late-2004, imme-
diately before the launch of the Territorial Agenda process. By the time she left,
European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy had arrived at a crossroads.
I begin with the development of cohesion policy since the turn of the mil-
lennium. Then I discuss the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion (CEC 2008),
a Communication from the Commission. It builds on the ESDP identifying, it will
be remembered, polycentrism, urban–rural partnership, access to infrastructure
and knowledge and the prudent management of natural and cultural assets as
issues. Next I report on the French Presidency bearing witness to continuing
French proactive behaviour. The next section reports on the consultations on the
Green Paper. The last one is about the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region
(CEC 2009a) coinciding more or less with the Barca Report (2009) which I also
discuss. The chapter ends with exploring what this all may mean for European
spatial planning.

1 ‘Der Raum konstituiert sich neu – als Teil eines Europas ohne nationale Hegemonie, als Union
ohne klar definiertes Zentrum, das über eine ebenso klar definierte Peripherie herrschen kön-
nte. Was vereinfacht “Brüssel” genannt wird, das ist ein komlexes Puzzle, gebildet aus den
verschiedensten Interessen. Das neue Europa ist ganz bestimmmt nicht das Instrument eines
einzigen – und schon gar nich eines einzigen nationalen – Interesses’. (Pelinka, A. 2009. ‘Vom
Wegfallen alter und der Errichtung neuer Grenzen: Die Mitte Europas – neu konstituiert’. Raum
75/09. p. 28.)
At the crossroads 157

Cohesion policy in the 2000s

Cohesion policy as originally conceived compensated for disadvantages suffered in
the Single Market. It came under fire in the Sapir Report claiming that this did not
help with increasing Europe’s competitiveness and that it was bureaucratic (Sapir
et al. 2004). Accepting the principle of solidarity, net-contributors wanted to replace
cohesion policy with transfers to national governments. This went at the jugular vein
of Commission-led cohesion policy within EU multi-level governance. The com-
promise was for the Financial Perspectives 2007–2013 to be cut in size, but for
cohesion policy and also the controversial Common Agricultural Policy and the UK
budget rebate to continue with a commitment to review them in time for the next
round. The threat of what has been termed its renationalisation forms the backdrop
to all discussions since of cohesion policy, and with it of territorial cohesion.
Upon his appointment as Commission President in the mid-2000s, José Manuel
Barroso set his sights on reinvigorating the Lisbon Strategy, for which purpose he
brought out a Communication ‘Growth and Jobs’ (CEC 2005). DG REGIO scram-
bled to refocus cohesion policy. In fact it is one of the few instruments available to
the Commission. The Lisbon Strategy as such depends on voluntary compliance. All
that Member States are committed to is reporting on progress. The idea is that, find-
ing themselves at the bottom of the league table, underperformers will be shamed
into improving their performance. In cohesion policy, as against this, the Commission
is responsible to make proposals to the Council of Ministers. This the Commission
did in the ‘Community Strategic Guidelines on Cohesion 2007–2013’. They were
approved in 2006. Even in the absence of the Constitution, the guidelines invoked
territorial cohesion, saying the famous words ‘geography matters’. The proponents
of European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy everywhere now sing from
the same hymn sheet. With the Lisbon Treaty in the offing, and encouraged by the
Territorial Agenda, the Commission decided to publish the Green Paper.

The Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion

I distinguish four periods in the history of this document: until the Luxembourg Ministerial
of 2005; until the adoption of the Territorial Agenda; the actual preparation of the Green
Paper as such and the consultations. Here I discuss the first three periods. Having dis-
cussed the French Presidency, there will be a section about the consultations.
The Luxembourg Ministerial took place days before the referenda on the
European Constitution. The Commissioner announced the coming of a White Paper
on territorial cohesion. A White Paper, perhaps with some kind of legislative proposal
in its wake was logical. Why else lobby for territorial cohesion in the Constitution?
Preparing territorial cohesion policy figured in the work programme of DG REGIO, too.
158 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

When they came, the referenda cannot have been anything but a shock to the
Commission, but, as reported, drafts of the Territorial Agenda invited the Commission to
publish a White Paper and also to establish a contact point, requests that were turned
down. Maybe the experts from the Member States working on the Territorial Agenda
were unaware that expecting legislative proposals was what asking for a White Paper
suggested. Maybe they simply wanted clarity about Commission intentions but, any-
how, there was support for EU territorial cohesion policy with its promise to strengthen
the position of planners, always a consideration in favour of EU involvement.
However, new staff from the new Member States had arrived. When I dis-
cussed the Green Paper at Brussels, out of the handful of people present, one was
a Slovak and one a Pole. Of the others, two were National Detached Experts on
short-term contracts. Of those present, only one was an old hand. The brains behind
much of cohesion policy, the French Deputy Director General, had retired. The work-
ing language had become English. From casual remarks I concluded that legislative
proposals were no longer on the DG REGIO wish list. In fact, my mention of the
sheer possibility seemed to startle people unencumbered with past ambitions. The
idea of a strong stance on territorial cohesion had dissipated.
Preparing its response to the request at Leipzig for a ‘report’ on territorial
cohesion, rather than making a bid for its own ideas on territorial cohesion policy,
the Commission sent out a questionnaire to Member States eliciting their views. In
2004, before the French had assembled the directors general for the first meeting
ever within the EU25 which got the Territorial Agenda process rolling, there had
been a similar questionnaire administrated by the hosts. With by that time seventeen
replies in, Commissioner Hübner announced at the Azores Ministerial the Green
Paper. It would give an update on disparities of the European territory at various
levels and of territorial specificities; discuss the definition and use of territorial cohe-
sion on basis of both the questionnaire and of an analysis of the territorial dimension
in the National Strategic Reference Frameworks and Operational Programmes and
identify key questions for debate on a new multi-level governance system and on
integration between territories and policies. Such themes were nowhere new. This
was no Commission bid for intellectual leadership.
Ratification of the Lisbon Treaty was yet to start and experience could have told
that this would be a bumpy road – which it was until the very last moment. So why did
the Commission forge ahead? I conjecture that there has been a mixture of Danuta
Hübner seeing mileage in the notion of territorial cohesion, amongst others as a plat-
form for ensuring more coherence of EU policies and, like with the Constitution, the
idea that DG REGIO had to somehow capitalise on the Lisbon Treaty.
What was important in all this was to have the ear of Barroso said to exhibit
a ‘presidential’ style. So when there was a request to Barroso from the mountain
regions for a Green Paper, the request helped overcome aversion by the Secretary
At the crossroads 159

General against position papers with potential implications for the budget review. At
the same time the issue was broadened to include all areas with specific geographic
features receiving a special mention in the EU treaties. The condition for allowing the
Green Paper to go forward was that it should eschew any reference to the budget.
Preparation was put in the hands of the unit Urban Development, Territorial
Cohesion. However, there were the changes in personnel mentioned. This led to misun-
derstandings as regards the meaning of concepts and approaches to be taken. So the
Economic Analysis Unit was put in charge, but as soon as the Green Paper was on the
books, the dossier went back to the Urban Development, Territorial Cohesion unit.
As is common, the Green Paper was subject to inter-service consultations,
leading to a slight delay. Comments came from agriculture concerned about the
treatment of rural areas and the Secretariat General still worried about inference
with the budget review.
On a mere twelve pages, the Green Paper starts with an account of the diver-
sity in the EU underscoring the need for territorial cohesion policy. The emphasis
is on enabling territories to make optimal use of their assets through cooperation.
The paper argued for more integrated approaches – coherence – building bridges
between economic, social and environmental policy. The metaphor of ‘software’
rather than ‘hardware’ invoked before comes to mind.
Taking a leaf out of the book of the World Bank Report 2009 on how density,
distance and division affect economic performance, the Green Paper argues that
balanced and harmonious development requires concentration: ‘overcoming differ-
ences in density’; connecting territories: ‘overcoming distance’; and cooperation:
‘overcoming division’. Like the OECD’s reports, World Bank thinking thus became a
source of inspiration. Also, the Green Paper dutifully discusses regions with special
geographic features, followed by a section on the debate on, and practice of, territo-
rial cohesion policy.
The Green Paper was – this being its purpose – the subject of consultations,
so there is a list of questions, starting with one still asking – the questionnaire sent
out to Member States had already done so, apparently without the Commission
being able to distil the definite answer – for the definition of territorial cohesion. The
responses will be discussed later where I make it evident that some but not all reac-
tions argue for a White Paper implying that the Commission should take a stand.

The French Presidency

The Green Paper was published during the French Presidency of late-2008 and
drafts were made available to French officials. The move of what was soon to be
renamed again DATAR – but as indicated the acronym now stands for Délegation à
l’aménagement du territoire et à l’attractivité régionale rather than action régionale
160 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

– to a different, but huge ministry caused delay in preparing their input. The Azores
Ministerial had been told informally that there would be a follow-up at Strasbourg.
With the Mayor of Toulon in the south of France becoming minister, the venue became
Marseille. In terms of substance, it was clear that the French would plug into the ter-
ritorial cohesion debate against the backdrop of wider issues in cohesion policy.
With five working groups, the French Presidency strengthened the institu-
tionalisation of European planning that had set in under the Slovenes. They were
managed either by French or by trusted outside experts, like the Dutch polyglot
who had figured in the story of the ESDP. French officials were editing the reports
for the huge Paris Conference on Territorial Cohesion and the Future of Cohesion
Policy with well in excess of one thousand participants in October 2008. The reports
also fed into the Marseille Ministerial via the meeting of the directors general of the
Member States. Marseille itself was three meetings rolled into one, including the one
of ministers responsible for territorial cohesion and regional policy. The others were
of ministers of housing and of urban policy. Naturally, the agenda for the meeting on
territorial cohesion assumed that the ministers would wish to respond to the Green
Paper. I discuss the working groups, the preparatory meeting of directors general
and Marseille itself.
Four working groups discussed the future of cohesion policy, the Common
Agricultural Policy and rural development, the Sustainable Development Strategy
and the Lisbon Process after 2010, now dubbed ‘Europe 2020’. The fifth group was
on territorial cohesion and governance. The largest was the first with, including the
French hosts, sixteen Member States and the non-member Norway. The Presidency
invited representatives of both spatial planning and regional policy ministries, so
some Member States sent more than one expert. In addition, DG REGIO and the
Directorate General for Employment were present, along with the Committee of
the Regions and ESPON and also the OECD, the Association of European Border
Regions, the Association of French Regions and the oldest regional lobby, the
Conference of Peripheral and Maritime Regions. The other working groups were
smaller. Besides France, only Portugal, the Netherlands and DG REGIO, all with
recent involvement in the process, participated in all five groups.
The French compiled reports for Marseille, piloting them via the directors general
meeting. They asked the latter to recommend to ministers to come out with a power-
ful statement addressed to the sectors that territory mattered. The directors general
were weary of how sectors would react. With barely four weeks until Marseille, there
was yet again – the same had happened when the Slovenes tried to put the Territorial
Agenda before the European Council – insufficient time for consultations. Targeting
sectors had of course been the intention throughout, so the failure to have held prior
consultations indicates either a lack of initiative or of political clout or both. The French
planners themselves had cleared their position with relevant ministries.
At the crossroads 161

Instead of a strong message, the directors general recommended another

round of studies. Not to be discouraged, the French prepared documents for
Marseille on territorial cohesion and on the future of cohesion policy, alongside with
a progress report on the First Action Programme.
Meanwhile it had become clear that the Commissioner was keen to be seen
to respond to the economic and financial crisis. So there were four sessions at
Marseille. The first was on territorial cohesion which included a presentation of the
Green Paper and speeches by representatives of the European Parliament and the
Committee of the Regions followed by debate. After the obligatory group photo-
graph, the next session was on the implementation of the Territorial Agenda. After a
press briefing and lunch, the ministers discussed the future of cohesion policy, lis-
tened to Hübner on the crisis, got previews of the Czech and Swedish Presidencies
and heard a concluding speech by the French minister presiding.
According to the French summary, Hübner revealed the Commission’s road
map to a post-2013 regulatory framework, with Commission proposals due in
2011–12, outlined the essence of the concept of territorial cohesion and listed
issues for the Ministerial to discuss. The first two items I shall discuss shortly.
Under the third, Hübner talked about cooperation and coordination, presenting
the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, to be discussed separately as the
harbinger of things to come. She talked about cooperation with EU neighbours
and a more strategic role for European Territorial Cooperation, the third cohesion
policy objective. Hübner also reminded ministers of the availability of the figure of a
European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation as a tool-kit.
Concerning coordination between territorial and sector policies, her first topic,
Hübner agreed that this was difficult, both within the Commission as well as at
national level. She touched upon territorial impact assessment and aired a proposal
for more Member State input on territorial issues within the Council of Ministers. This
was the only occasion at which she referred to the Lisbon Treaty as creating the
possibility of a more formal political agenda for European cohesion policy. It will be
remembered that, contrary to what, given its share of the budget one might expect,
there is no dedicated Council for cohesion policy, let alone for territorial cohesion.
Rather, the General Affairs Council of foreign ministers deals with it.
The debate focused on questions posed by the Presidency regarding the con-
cept of territorial cohesion, its relation to cohesion policy and how to deal with the
sectors. It was agreed that territorial cohesion aimed at ensuring equitable access to
infrastructure and services, taking account of territorial diversity; that this was more
crucial than its classic redistributive rationale, and that, beyond the semantic discus-
sion, territorial cohesion should result in political priorities and ‘material projects’.
The endless quest for a definition of territorial cohesion – one that the Green Paper
did not resolve either – was frustrating people.
162 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

After making reference to the added value of territorial cohesion at the EU

level, there was mention of territorial governance. According to the French summary,
territorial cohesion policy should improve cohesion by targeting actions more effec-
tively. The summary confirmed that territorial cohesion concerned all policies with an
impact on territory, thus implying the need for coordinating sectors at all levels.
Concerning the future, the summary reported on Hübner presenting the study
‘Regions 2020’ identifying four challenges: globalisation, demographic change, cli-
mate change and secure, sustainable and competitive energy sources, and Gerardo
Galeton chairing the European Parliament’s Regional Development Committee – the
one that Hübner now presides over – underlining the importance of cohesion policy.
The tenor was that cohesion policy was not distributive but rather a pillar of the
Lisbon Strategy.
On the implementation of the Territorial Agenda, the ministers recommended to
consider the territorial impact of sector policies at the design stage; to improve coor-
dination and to prioritise territorial approaches and projects on a scale consistent with
their theme, geography or function. They invited France and also Germany, the latter
having chaired one on transport policy, to continue as lead partners for their working
groups. The summary also acknowledged the report of the working group chaired by
the Slovenes on the coordination of spatial and urban development policies.

The consultations
Under the Czechs in early-2009, the emphasis shifted to cohesion policy as such,
with territorial cohesion part of the equation. This tallied with views expressed at
Marseille of integrated territorial strategies being platforms for delivering cohesion.
The Commission also gave its first reaction to the consultations on the Green Paper.
At Marseille, Hübner had already outlined a road map and reiterated that territorial
cohesion was about harnessing territorial diversity for more competitiveness; that no
territory could be treated as an island; that there was a need for territorial coordina-
tion at all levels, leading her to embrace multi-level governance with an enhanced
role for regional and local authorities. Importantly, she had also emphasised what
territorial cohesion was not: an attempt to establish an EU competence for what she
called – disregarding the differences that I see between the two, ‘land-use and spa-
tial planning’, or a rationale for the automatic compensation of territorial handicaps,
let alone a brand new objective.
There were close to four hundred reactions to the Green Paper. A handful of
officials struggled to digest them, an illustration of something that I keep on reiterat-
ing: the strain on Commission resources. The Eurocrats are few in numbers and hail
from modest offices. Working against tight deadlines, they pore over submissions,
correspondence, drafts and endless requests for speech writing.
At the crossroads 163

Reactions were coloured by positions taken in the wider debate on cohesion

policy and by past attitudes towards EU spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy.
Naturally, EU institutions were supportive of territorial cohesion and opposed to the
renationalisation of cohesion policy. They have the staff resources to follow debates
and put the Commission on the spot for inconsistencies with its previous state-
ments. In this spirit, the European Parliament and the Committee of the Regions both
argued for a White Paper. The Economic and Social Committee suggested a road
map with immediate actions to be followed with measures to be taken post-2013.
There was impatience with the Green Paper leaving the definition of territorial
cohesion in abeyance.
All EU institutions reiterated concerns such as balanced and sustainable devel-
opment, the need for a proper regard for regional and local diversity and access to
services. Some underlined the importance of solidarity and sustainability. Territorial
governance – improving coherence through cooperation – could render policies
more effective. The European Parliament saw this as a pillar of cohesion policy. The
Economic and Social Committee, too, saw territorial strategies as platforms for good
governance, calling also for an EU-wide vision or territorial strategy. Other recom-
mendations were of a concrete nature, arguing for territorial impact assessments:
looking at the map before implementing policies, as the Committee of the Regions
put it, drawing attention to relevant experiences in spatial planning.
The NGOs I take into account are those that have been active in the past.
The Assembly of European Regions, of course, had coined territorial cohesion as a
concept, a fact which it recalled. It emphasised territorial governance, in particular
sector coordination, but it was not keen on preferential treatment for regions with
specific features. Territorial cooperation received approval. There was mention of
difficulties posed by inconsistent national rules.
The oldest regional lobbyist, the Conference of Peripheral and Maritime Regions,
too, welcomed the Green Paper, in particular its reassertion of solidarity and cohesion
as enhancing Europe’s competitiveness. Territorial cohesion was a political concept
requiring a Europe-wide debate on a White Paper. The submission outlined an ambi-
tious proposal of a European Territorial Pact, a concept to be developed in the White
Paper. The submission then went into detail as regards the application in EU poli-
cies, regretting at the same time that the external borders had received little mention
and pointing out the geostrategic importance of the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the
Mediterranean and the outermost regions, the playgrounds of this NGO.
Naturally, the Association of European Border Regions focused on cross-
border cooperation. Border regions should be treated on a par with regions with
special geographical features. It rejected the renationalisation of EU cohesion
policy. Territorial cohesion policy should reduce disparities and promote harmoni-
ous development by means of polycentrism, a revised rural policy and cross-border
164 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

cooperation. Territorial cohesion policy should address the configuration of European

space. There was endorsement of multi-level governance and criticisms of ‘out-
dated hierarchies’ standing in the way. Cross-border structures such as European
Groupings of Territorial Cooperation were smart.
Member State reactions were diverse. I have selected France and Germany,
opposites as regards territorial cohesion, adding the UK as the key advocate of
renationalisation and the Netherlands as one of the trailblazers of old. New Member
States may be unencumbered by the competence issue and also sympathetic to
cohesion policy, so I included Hungary in charge of the review of the Territorial
Agenda and the largest one, Poland.
Predictably, the French reaction was positive but critical, nevertheless, of the
focus in the Green Paper on the definition. The meaning of territorial cohesion could
not be captured in one succinct formula. It should assist territories realising their
potential, reducing spatial disparities, improving coherence of sector policies and
reinforcing territorial integration – coherence – by means of cooperation. Territorial
cohesion was relevant to all Community policies with territorial impact, above all
cohesion policy. The submission then dealt with various spatial categories from
ultra-peripheral to frontier regions and restated the frequently invoked dual rationale
for territorial cohesion policy: the Single Market exacerbating regional imbalances,
and sector policies sometimes being at cross-purposes with each other.
Infra-regional and supra-regional territories – soft spaces – required tailor-
made arrangements. There was support for multi-level governance, with special
attention for key Community policies, including services of general economic inter-
est. Territorial aspects should figure in the General Impact Assessments, standard
for all EU legislative acts since 2005, and rules and regulations should be simplified.
As reported, there had been talk at Marseille of a Council formation for cohesion
policy, but the French view was that the General Affairs Council should continue to
be responsible. Twenty years earlier, before Nantes, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
had already outlawed a Council formation for regional policy, so this figures.
The German reaction coming from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and
Technology and recounting separately the opinions of the Länder was mooted.
The preamble emphasised subsidiarity and stressed that regions themselves
needed to identify their strengths and that spatial development was a Member
State competence. In lieu of a definition, the Germans identified the elements of
territorial cohesion: balanced development; territorial integration; networking, all
of them already covered by cohesion policy. Territorial cohesion was thus not new
and, as far as spatial development was concerned, the ESDP and the Territorial
Agenda and the Leipzig Charter, all of them intergovernmental, were appropriate
frameworks for Community, national and regional policy. Top-down strategies let
alone EU legislation were rejected.
At the crossroads 165

As regards areas with specific geographic features, the Germans were

lukewarm. Benefiting from the Structural Funds, they wanted to stick to present
allocation criteria. While sharing the concerns of the federal government, the Länder
were more sympathetic to territorial cohesion.
In keeping with its well-known predilection for renationalising cohesion pol-
icy, the UK kept its distance. The UK already practised territorial cohesion under
the flag of a ‘place-based’ approach, combining integrated policies with a focus
on the endogenous potential of every spatial unit or place. Decisions should be
taken at the right level, the submission said, admitting, though, that this sometimes
required crossing boundaries. Key elements were a sound evidence base, clear,
spatial strategies, flexible and strong governance and sustainability policies under
which the UK appraised proposals, also as regards effects on climate change.
With others, the UK pointed out that the definition of territorial cohesion had
already been settled. The consideration should be how the EU could help Member
States deliver on it.
Like Germany, the UK seemed to want to pre-empt any suggestion of the
Community Method being invoked. The EU should restrict itself to providing consist-
ent evidence, promoting good practices and capacity building. Coherence, too, was
primarily an issue for the Member States. The UK exuded confidence in the own
capacity to handle any issues arising.
The Dutch reaction was low key, underlining the confusion about the mean-
ing of territorial cohesion. There was a need to take account of diversity and for
increasing the effectiveness of EU sectoral policies by introducing territorial impact
assessment, a topic on which the Dutch had chaired a working group under the
First Action Programme. On this basis, there could be more synergy between sec-
toral and spatial or territorial policies. In Dutch planning this goes under the flag of
gebiedsgericht beleid: coordinating policies per functional area and not necessarily
per jurisdiction.
Turning to the newcomers, Hungary had absorbed territorial cohesion as a con-
cept, applying it to its National Strategic Reference Framework and its Operational
Programmes. There is a handbook available in English (Péti 2009). The Hungarians
were not taken by the attention for regions with specific geographic features. There
was insufficient attention to how sectors should take into account territorial aspects
and of the comprehensive and integrated management of territorial cohesion, in
particular at EU level. The reaction betrayed familiarity with relevant discussions.
Going beyond economic and social cohesion, territorial cohesion was relevant to
all sectors, requiring – in so many words – spatial planning! Indeed, the Hungarians
wished the Commission to be in the driving seat of producing a spatial development
concept, like the ESDP, for the whole of the EU. The reaction stressed the need for
cooperation, also and in particular at Brussels.
166 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Like the Hungarians, the Poles drew a line from the ESDP to the Green Paper
and the Lisbon Treaty. They welcomed territorial cohesion, emphasising the territorial
integration of Community policies. Given the unevenness of its territorial impact, the
financial crisis suggested strengthening cohesion policy. Hübner, too, had empha-
sised the role of cohesion policy in facing the crisis. Against this backdrop the Poles
criticised the lack of a definition. They themselves defined territorial cohesion as a state
of territorial development in which economic and social transactions achieve socially
and economically effective outcomes and as optimising, by means of integrated devel-
opment plans, the unique potentials of territories. Rather than jurisdictions, what the
Poles meant were functional areas, but defined from an overall Community perspec-
tive; in my terms soft rather than hard spaces. Territorial cohesion applied at all levels.
Policies should be implemented in an integrated way, but Member State competences
for spatial planning and development remained unaffected.
Being a beneficiary, Poland wished eligibility criteria to remain. The instruments
were multi-level governance reflecting a new balance between the Commission, the
Member States, regions, local players and other interested parties. Surprisingly,
since this sounds like it, the open method of coordination was however rejected
in favour of the Community Method. The Poles thus asked for a White Paper and a
joint political document of the EU and the Member States concerning the territorial
development of the EU, something like the ESDP. The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea
Region in which Poland was of course participating was described as a pilot. The
submission also asked for an inter-sectoral coordination body within the Secretariat-
General of the Commission or a directorate general with coordinative and executive
powers. It has transpired since that during the Polish Presidency of 2011 there may
be a Council of Ministers on cohesion policy. Whether the format will be any differ-
ent from the informal Ministerial on Cohesion Policy in Spain in February 2010 or
whether this will indeed be a step towards formalisation remains to be seen.
The Commission could be satisfied. Hungary and Poland nailed their flag to
its mast, as did EU institutions. In general, reactions were coloured be attitudes
towards cohesion policy as such. The fate of European spatial planning/territorial
cohesion policy is linked to its future.
There was discussion at DG REGIO as to how to respond. Eventually, the Sixth
Progress Report on Cohesion no more than summarised the discussions with no indica-
tion as to future intentions. The Commission was on the way out, with Commissioners,
including the President, eying their future. With no immediate prospect of returning
Danuta Hübner could be expected to be concerned about her political legacy and
her chances to be elected, as was her ambition, to the European Parliament – which
she was with flying colours. Fittingly, now that the European Parliament is exploring
its newly won powers under the Lisbon Treaty, she chairs the Regional Development
Committee. Meanwhile, the Fifth Cohesion Report is in the making, a High Level Group
At the crossroads 167

on cohesion policy is meeting and the Europe 2020 Strategy, successor of the Lisbon
Strategy, is being discussed. Even before officially appointed, the new Commissioner,
Johannes Hahn made his voice heard in this discussion.

The EU strategy for the Baltic Sea region

Concurrently with discussions of the Green Paper a new venture gained momen-
tum, one that might form a pointer to the future, the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea
Region. Neither Hübner nor, indeed, the Commission were the initiators; the inter-
Baltic group at the European Parliament and the Swedish government including the
then prime minister were. The Swedes wished for more coherence of policies con-
cerning the Baltic Sea. Weaker than the Nordic Council, the Council of Baltic Sea
States was also involved. There were further contacts on ambassadorial level pre-
paring the decision by the European Council in late-2007 inviting the Commission
to prepare this strategy, held at that time to be mainly about environmental problems
in and around the EU’s one and only inland sea.
Several directorates general were in the market for coordinating the strategy.
Eventually, DG REGIO was given the lead with the competitors forming a steering
group. A score of directorates general were contributing, but some did not have
regionalised data at their disposal. In some quarters, there was resistance to macro
regions rather than the Single Market as a whole being targeted. Interested in mari-
time spatial planning (sic!), the relevant directorate general and also that responsible
for transport, were perceiving opportunities to improve policy making and delivery.
DG REGIO’s position was that there was a need for increasing the visibility of its
cooperation programmes. Within the Territorial Cooperation Unit, one of the horizontal
units, three people were working on the programme, a National Detached Expert from
Sweden being one of them. The unit director frequently spoke on the strategy.
As regards Member States, Sweden was of course taking an active part.
Denmark was not involved in any major capacity. Poland was a latecomer but then the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs became interested, an important fact in view of the Polish
Presidency of 2011. In Germany, the Länder with Baltic coastlines were partners. The
Russian Federation was being updated at steering group meetings of the Northern
Dimension, but the Baltic Sea Strategy as such remained an internal EU matter.
After some stakeholder conferences and numerous working meetings, the
outcome was a Communication and an Action Plan specifying responsibilities and
clarifying governance of the strategy. It was presented at a meeting of ministers
from the Member States concerned: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Letland,
Lithuania, Poland and Sweden and adopted by the European Council – the one
preparing the Climate Conference at Copenhagen whilst biting its nails over the sig-
nature of Czech President Vaclav Klaus under the Lisbon Treaty – in October 2009
168 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

(CEC 2009a). Follow-ups are scheduled when Member States involved hold the EU
Presidency: Poland in 2011 and Lithuania in 2013, with Latvia in 2015 the last one.
The Baltic Sea Strategy holds promise. The Danube Strategy initiated by
Romania in cooperation with Austria has already been launched. Macro-regional
strategies refer to ‘soft spaces’ (Figure 10.1), a concept to be elaborated in the
Conclusions. An evaluation of the lessons for the institutional architecture of future
macro-regional strategies confirms this (CEC 2009b). Macro-regional strategies fire
the imagination. The Spanish Presidency has proposed one for the Atlantic Arc,
and more suggestions have been floated during the consultations, to be discussed
briefly in the Conclusions, on the ‘Europe 2020’ strategy.

Figure 10.1 The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region and the Danube Strategy portrayed as
‘soft spaces’. (Source: OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment inspired
by: Österreichische Raumordnungskonferenz. http://www.oerok.gv.at/raum-region/
europaeischeraumentwicklung/makroregionale-strategien.html)
At the crossroads 169

A farewell present
Shortly before resigning, Danuta Hübner received the Barca Report (2009) which
she had initiated. Fabrizio Barca, Director General at the Italian Ministry of Economy
and Finance had been given a free hand and resources to convey a team of experts
and hold hearings. The idea was to answer the challenge to cohesion policy posed
by Sapir and the renationalisers. André Sapir spoke at one of the hearings.
Barca does not address territorial cohesion as such. His refers to a ‘place-based
development approach’. Accordingly, development policy need take account of the
characteristics of the locations where it is to be implemented, a reaffirmation of the
Community Strategic Guidelines saying that ‘geography matters’. The objective is to
reduce inefficiency caused by the underutilisation of resources as well as social exclu-
sion caused by excessive numbers of disadvantaged people in specific places. What
is a place, though? Barca sees it as being defined through a political process, an
area where conditions conducive or detrimental to development apply. This is like
the Polish preference for functional areas rather than jurisdictions being the object of
territorial cohesion policy. It is also like the Association of European Border Regions
arguing for smart cross-border cooperation areas. The French concept of projets ter-
ritorials is also similar. In my terms, the place based development approach refers to
soft planning for soft spaces defined in accordance with the problem at hand.
Places may be trapped in vicious circles because of a lack of appropriate
economic institutions. The EU must thus tailor interventions and economic institu-
tions to local conditions. Somewhat incongruously, though, in operationalising the
place-based approach, Barca thinks of the Member States and subnational authori-
ties. They should formulate place-based development strategies. This sounds like
the Dutch planners’ worst-case scenario of regional planning being given to the
municipalities concerned in the 1920s. According to Barca, though, this is the only
policy model compatible with the EU’s hybrid form of government. It also reminds
of the report ‘Regional Planning a European Problem’, although reluctantly agreeing
that administrative regions were the most likely candidates for dealing with plan-
ning, actually talking about functional regions. Be that as it may, this perpetuates the
ambivalence inherent to the institutional architecture of European spatial planning/
territorial cohesion policy.

Outlook
A new Commission took office in early-2010. Barroso is once more at the helm. It is
said he has no particular feel, neither for regions nor for the territorial dimension of
policy. A draft leaked even whilst the old Commission was still in office seemed to sug-
gest that he was sympathetic also to the renationalisation of cohesion policy. So the
170 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

effect of the Hübner legacy remains to be seen but the first utterances of her succes-
sor Johannes Hahn showed that he was willing to mount a spirited defence. Anyhow,
there is the experience of the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region to assimilate.
So the patient territorial cohesion policy is alive and benefiting from the atten-
tion given to it but a crisis cannot be excluded. The problem is not the lack of a
definition. Definitions are the outcome of a process. The Green Paper was such
a process but to say that there is a common understanding would be claiming too
much. This is unsurprising. Previous chapters have related who had invoked territorial
cohesion, when, and with which intentions. This is tantamount to asking who wanted
to solve which problem by proposing to do what, and whether outsiders subscribed
to the concept and the concept was capable of absorbing other meanings.
The owner of the concept is of course DG REGIO. In the 1990s, Member
States refused to grant it a role in spatial planning. DG REGIO held that such a
role was implied in EU economic and social cohesion policy. To reiterate, it relates
to the fact that geography matters. So one needs to attend to where policies are
implemented. There is the additional need to understand the wider spatial context.
So conceived, European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy promises more
coherence, and thus more effectiveness and efficiency. This is the message also of
Barca and his concept of a place-based strategy.
Seen in this light territorial cohesion is not about asking for more resources.
Rather, it is about improvements to territorial governance, from the EU to the local
level. This is the chief consequence of territorial cohesion as an objective of the
Union. The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Area is an example of arrangements tailor-
made for this purpose.
The above leads to what may count as a definition. With a nod in the direction
of the Polish reaction to the Green Paper defining territorial cohesion as a state in
which EU policies achieve effective outcomes and optimise, by means of integrated
development plans, the unique potentials of all of the EU’s territories, I suggest
that territorial cohesion refers to a situation whereby policies to reduce dispari-
ties, enhance competitiveness and promote sustainability acquire added value by
forming coherent packages, taking account of where they take effect, the specific
opportunities and constraints there, now and in the future. Territorial cohesion policy
refers to measures promoting good territorial governance with the aim of achiev-
ing coherence as described. European territorial cohesion policy more in particular
refers to such measures taken by EU institutions. This means striving for coherence,
from a spatial point of view, of relevant policies, requiring – like in spatial planning –
spatial analysis and imagination and also cooperation between actors concerned.
There may be resistance, though, either against the substantive policies which
territorial cohesion supports, or the requirement of territorially integrated strategies.
Sectors may deem such strategies counterproductive and, in any case, a nuisance.
At the crossroads 171

This is why giving anything more than a roadmap for the future of territorial cohesion
would be in vain. As always, much depends, not only on the new Commissioner
and whether he gains the ear of Barroso; the constellation of forces between
Eurosceptics and the increasingly bedazzled troop of enthusiasts is also relevant.
In all this, there is one fixture: the need to have a new Financial Framework in place
for after 2014, at which point the future of cohesion policy, and with it of European
spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy should be settled. In the Conclusions, this
will be my starting point.
CONCLUSIONS
IF EUROPEAN PLANNING HAS A FUTURE, THEN IT IS
SOFT

‘Lisbon’ is far from perfect; and it is only a framework. But this is what treaties
are for. The content of policies can only be decided later, and of course will
depend on those who will occupy the posts created by the treaty.
(Tsoukalis et al. 2009: 6)

The posts referred to in this quote from a discussion document on the future of
the EU are those of the President of the European Council and the High Representative
of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. In trade policy, financial services,
energy and climate change, the global EU role will be crucial, says the same report,
raising also the need for a new socio-economic settlement. Nonetheless, the docu-
ment pays scant attention to cohesion policy, viewing it as an integral part of the
European internal bargain, but not necessarily as an element of the new deal to make
the EU ‘fit for purpose’ (Tsoukalis et al. 2009: 6). No large Member State seems to
have made a bid for the post of Commissioner for Regional Policy, possibly because
of the challenge to it. Naturally, there is a question mark hanging over the future also
of European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy. If the cohesion policy arena
were to be closed for it, this would have consequence, but even if not, can spatial
planning promote, as is its calling, the coherence of policies? I briefly discuss the
source of the uncertainty surrounding cohesion policy, about which planners can do
little. Thereafter, I focus on what planners could do for more coherence of policies with
a spatial impact.

Cohesion policy up in the air?

EU cohesion policy as we know it may be decommissioned. The emphasis is on ‘as
we know it’. Being a treaty commitment, it will of course continue, but will it remain
the vehicle of Europeanisation as which I have identified it? The UK and partners have
suggested that the second objective, Regional Competitiveness and Employment,
applicable where the Convergence objective is not – and thus in relatively ‘richer’
regions – should be rescinded. And as regards the first and major objective,
Convergence, the proposal is to give the funds to national administrations, a return
to the situation before Delors when the EC already gave funds to Member States to
spend according to national preferences. This could amount to no less than the dis-
mantling of a pillar of the European construct, if not the construct as such.
Conclusions 173

Why is cohesion policy unpopular with some net-contributors? To get back a frac-
tion of the funds they pay into Community coffers, they have to put up with what they see
as Commission interference. Thus, they have to get approval for their National Strategic
Reference Frameworks and Operational Programmes showing that they intend to use
the funds to pursue set Community objectives: the ‘pumping around of money’.
Anyhow, does cohesion policy work? National economies have benefited and
jobs have been created. Molle (2007) is positive but there are of course also down-
sides, like the internal distribution and the management of funds but this is not what
I focus on. Cohesion policy is unpopular because of its intangible effects. The archi-
tecture of cohesion policy being one of multi-level governance, by definition national
governments are loosing and subnational authorities and other stakeholders gaining
influence. Conceivably, therefore, the animosity of national governments – some of
them in any case – is due to its very success in bringing these actors and the EU
together. Cohesion reverting to Member States would roll back the Commission
influence, hence the use of the term ‘renationalisation’ for this policy. That this would
close avenues for Europeanisation seems to be accepted. Maybe this is the purpose.
There is a silver lining. Even the UK admits that capacity building and cross-
border planning might require common action. Otherwise leaning towards the
position of economising on support for so-called ‘richer’ regions, the Commission
‘non-paper’, or internal draft already mentioned for having been leaked in October
2009, also embraces cross-border cooperation. Here, the third objective, European
Territorial Cooperation, comes into the picture.
What is relevant is the discussion on the follow-up to the Lisbon Strategy,
the ‘Europe 2020’ strategy. A Commission Working Document (CEC 2009c) was
made subject to consultations, resulting in a Communication from the Commission,
‘Europe 2020: A Strategy for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth’ (CEC
2010). The first document made scant reference to territorial cohesion. Maybe in
reaction to the consultations and/or to Johannes Hahn making his influence felt, the
Communication makes more of it. Perhaps more importantly, the Communication
makes great play of cohesion policy as a mainstay of EU policy. How this bid for
removing its renationalisation from the agenda will play itself out remains to be seen.
This is because, after a preliminary discussion at the end of March, this suc-
cessor to the Lisbon Strategy is due to be adopted by the European Council in June
2010, to be followed by definite decisions on the future of cohesion policy. The
Financial Perspectives 2014–2020 scheduled to be adopted in 2011 will be deci-
sive. As Iain Begg (2009: 12) concludes in his study for DG REGIO on ‘The Future
of Cohesion Policy in Richer Regions’, in the end this ‘will be a political judgement
that takes account of, on the one hand, constitutional factors and the realities of a
politicised EU, and on the other, of the diverse economic and administrative argu-
ments that bear on the case’.
174 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

I have no crystal ball. Going by the example of the Treaty of Nice and the
Financial Perspectives 2007–2013, the political judgement, also according to
Begg, may well be, not on this single issue but on a package of such issues, with
the final decision taken in the early hours of the morning by wary Heads of State
and Government, maybe in late-2011. Rather than speculate, I therefore withdraw
to somewhat safer ground and reflect on what, given the chance, European spatial
planners could and should do to improve territorial governance. I argue that this
requires reflecting on the European construct in relation to the nation-state, on the
nation-state itself and its territory, and on what spatial planning is about. As the
title of this concluding part of my book suggests, the passionate argument is that
European spatial planning must be soft.

Europe – what is it?

I plead guilty of identifying Europe with the EU. The EU is, after all, the most out-
spoken exponent of Europe as something identifiable, something tangible. Also, it
does not really end at its external borders but, projecting what is sometimes called
its soft power, it reaches beyond. At the same time the EU is an enigma, Delors’
‘unidentified political object’. Jeremy Rifkin has been quoted as describing it as the
first postmodern governing institution, but what does this mean?
The Brenner Pass connects North and South Tyrol, Alto Adige to Italians. To
them the border separating the two has been the fulfilment, in the wake of the Great
War, of national ambitions. To the people of Tyrol the border is a historic injustice.
However, like elsewhere, border guards and customs officials have disappeared.
Not that a Europe without borders is unproblematic. There is the effect on the liv-
ing environment in the Alpine valleys of mounting north-south traffic. When Austria
joined, the EU promised to do something about this and, indeed, as part of the TENs
it is helping to promote what on some counts will be the longest tunnel in Europe,
the competitor being the Gotthard Tunnel in Switzerland.
One day a sign went up at the pass advising the southbound traveller: ‘South Tyrol
is not Italy’. Predictably, soon, ‘not’ was painted over, presumably by an Italian availing
him/herself of the freedom to go north. It read: ‘South Tyrol … is Italy’ (Sauer 2009). In a
Europe where North and South Tyrol between them have set up a European Grouping
for Territorial Cooperation, this seems quaint. Admittedly, many regimes remain national,
land-use regulations not the least important amongst them. Making use of any differ-
ences, there have been attempts to set up cross-border business parks giving firms the
option to locate on whatever side of the border the package is more advantageous, this
obviously being prefaced upon national regimes continuing to exist.
Other regimes, though, are European. As its citizen, I can take up residence
anywhere in the EU and, if so, have the active and passive right to vote in local as
Conclusions 175

well as European elections. German ‘pensionados’ thus sit on Spanish local coun-
cils. The about 30,000 Dutch citizens that, whilst continuing to work and socialise in
their country, have made their home across the German border and a similar number
who live in Belgium are another example. So, new patterns of interaction emerge.
The same is true in the Rhineland-Palatinate and in the north of Lorraine where com-
muters settle because housing is cheaper and more plentiful than in Luxembourg
where they work. The economy there fuelled, not only by the banking sector but
also by the presence of European institutions thus casts a long shadow. The small
Austrian community of Wolfsthal is another example of daily cross-border commun-
ing. It is even served by Bratislava buses taking its new Slovak residents to their
nearby capital across the border. Similarly, Poles are moving into the borderlands of
the Federal Republic where the population is declining.
Many a European citizen also owns vacation property in another country. The
footprints of their home countries thus extend beyond their borders and there are
concentrations of second homes, with positive or negative, as the case may be,
local and regional impacts. The list could be continued talking about expats and
provisions for them, about European and international civil servants, about immigra-
tion and so forth. One could also talk about lifestyles, outlooks and impacts of the
international class, as well as the, legal and illegal, flotsam of globalisation. What, for
instance, do the 16 per cent international marriages in the EU mean? What is the
identity of the offspring? Where does this all leave the nation-state?
I am not talking about the demise of the nation-state, rather about the unbun-
dling of regimes and practices that used to be contained within its borders. What
does all this mean for Member States having united in the EU? Is this EU the site for
bringing the various regimes together, a superstate?
Not really, but where the EU is headed is unclear. Efforts to conceptualise the
EU abound, with authors talking about a new middle-ages, an empire characterised, as
empires apparently are, by soft borders, as well as about the need for a new cosmopoli-
tanism reaching even beyond Europe. I make no attempt to summarise this literature. All
that I suggest is that there are issue here that European spatial planners cannot ignore.
Even if there were no EU, soft border would be with us because the EU is
not the only cause for the unbundling of regimes and the concomitant changes to
institutions and to geography. There are other well-known international institutions,
and there is an emergent international civic society, the likes of Green Peace,
Médicins sans Frontières and the World Wildlife Fund wrestling ideological
power from states. And there are of course international corporations. In all this,
the relationship of the nation-state to the area over which it claims jurisdiction
is up for discussion, which provides the entry point for discussing space as in
spatial planning.
176 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Space?
Are nation-states islands and are national spaces or territories fixed? Are regions
and/or local authorities similar but only smaller? Or must spaces rather be disentan-
gled and redefined to make them fit for purpose? I invoke two metaphors: that of a
set of containers in which a well-organised handyman puts screws, nails and bolts,
with these containers tucked away in a box and that of the bundle of entangled elec-
tric wires in which I keep them for future use.
Like with the European construct, the literature on space is huge, reflecting
successive ‘spatial turns’ in the social sciences leading to distinct spatial lexicons:
territory, place, scale, and networks (Jessop et al. 2008: 390). For discussing space
in relation to the EU, territory, more in particular the territoriality of the nation-state is
a good starting point. Sack (1986: 19) defines territoriality as ‘a spatial strategy to
affect, influence, or control resources and people, by controlling area’. Traditionally,
the territoriality of the nation-state has been considered as hard, reminding of my
container metaphor. Control over its territory, an area within borders recognised
under international law, is one of its defining characteristics. Clearly, though, the
permeability of borders in Europe as described puts hard territoriality into question,
but there is more. Hard territoriality requires spaces, too, to be conceived as neatly
circumscribed, as hard. Spaces thus become rarefied, as if their boundaries were
objective facts rather than historic constructs.
Thinking about spaces as definite objects to be marked, administered and
defended applies not only to state territories but also to the territories of subnational
authorities. At least on the Continent of Europe, but not in the UK, they enjoy auton-
omy within the law. Unsurprisingly, they behave like mini-states with responsibility to
defend their borders and optimise their resources.
National space is indeed figured as many small containers fitting seamlessly
into larger ones that in turn fit into one overall container forming the outer limit of
order, a line of defence against the anarchy of interstate relations. Here we are back
to asking about the nature of the EU. Is it yet another container with hard bounda-
ries? This idea attracts some and scares others. It is the model of a federal Europe,
to some a superstate. Thinking in these terms is however prefaced upon the idea
of spaces being hard. Leaving the container model behind and thinking in terms of
soft spaces, of the bundle of electric wires which I keep, helps arriving at a better
appreciation of Europe. It points to functional areas to be determined from case to
case, like me extracting – with difficulty, I should add – a wire from the bundle as and
when needed. Before discussing this further, it is time to discuss the territoriality –
its relation to its space – of the EU.
In terms of Sachs quoted earlier, it is clear that pursuing an, albeit implicit spatial
strategy, EU cohesion policy is a form of territoriality. It is after all seeking to influence
Conclusions 177

the distribution of resources and people. However, this is not the territoriality of the
ideal-typical nation-state ultimately relying on the monopoly of the use of physical
force. The EU exercises no such force. It is national courts that enforce, for instance,
the Habitat Guidelines. As against the territoriality of the nation-state, the territorial-
ity of the EU is thus ‘qualitatively different … in part precisely because it does not
have the option of physical force. It is marked, rather, by the aspirational sense of the
production of a space where inequalities are evened out’ (Bialasiewicz et al. 2005:
345–346). This space is one where, in the words of the Third Cohesion Report,
people should not be disadvantaged by where they live. So it is necessary to think
outside the box of territoriality associated with nation-state control over hard spaces
within hard borders. Land-use planning, as against this, does relate to hard spaces,
but being strategic, European spatial planning pursues ‘aspirational’ territoriality.
From here we can have another look at the unhelpful debate about whether the
EU does, or should have, a spatial planning competence. This is but a reflection of
control over territory being regarded as a defining characteristic of the nation-state
and that relinquishing it would undermine its sovereignty. It is this view that turns
the competence issue into a zero-sum game. However, the metaphor of the nation-
state, or indeed of any territorial entity, as a container enveloping a hard space with
hard borders no longer reflects reality. If indeed they ever were, nation-states are
no longer autonomous. Firms may threaten to locate or relocate beyond the appar-
ently hard borders of jurisdictions, causing the authorities concerned to reconsider
regulations. A return to a situation when authorities were in control is inconceivable.
What the concept of governance stands for is the diffusion of control, and the need
to cooperate across levels and sectors and borders. State authorities and the EU
institutions alike are merely nodal points in a complex network.
What follows from these considerations is, once again, the need to rethink
space. Although jurisdictions continue to be the objects of statutory land-use
planning ultimately relying on the police power of the state, they are no longer the
exclusive reference frameworks. Rather, the reference frameworks for planning are
what, with a term speaking to the imagination Graham Haughton, Phil Allmendinger,
David Counsell and Geoff Vigar (2010: 52) call soft places. They say:

1 Soft spaces represent a deliberate attempt to insert new opportunities for

creative thinking, particularly in areas where public engagement and cross-
sectoral consultation has seen entrenched oppositional forces either slowing
down or freezing out most forms of new development.
2 The ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ spaces of governance are mutually constitutive … The aim is
not to replace ‘hard’ institutional spaces …, rather to create complementary and
potentially competing opportunities for developing activities to focus around,
whether at some kind of ‘sub’ regional or ‘sub’ local government scale.
178 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

3 The soft spaces of governance are becoming more numerous and more impor-
tant as part of the institutional landscape of spatial planning … .
4 Soft spaces often seem to be defined in ways that are deliberately fluid and
fuzzy in the sense that they can be amended and shaped easily to reflect dif-
ferent interests and challenges.

One can imagine the Dutch-German, Luxembourg-German, Luxembourg-

French, Austrian-Slovak and German-Polish border areas described as such soft
spaces: configurations within which real and shifting processes are taking place.
Such soft spaces are ubiquitous.
The EU space itself is soft, a space beyond the sum total of the hard spaces
of its members. There is the European Economic Area where EU law applies; there
is Switzerland which is constantly negotiating its participation in the EU space; there
is a de-facto Eurozone which includes Kosovo and Montenegro, neither of which is
an EU member; there is the Schengen Area of 28 states: the EU members minus
the UK and Ireland plus the non-members Norway, Iceland and Switzerland; there
is the EU31 of ESPON: the Member States plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and
Liechtenstein; there are association treaties and candidates accepting EU law, in the
process becoming part of a soft EU space; and there is the multi-faceted global EU
reach, the softest of soft spaces analysed by Didelon, Grasland and Richard (2008).
This reach of the EU is something the new Barroso Commission wants to address.
At this point it is relevant to say that Bialasiewicz, Elden and Painter, on whose
distinction between hard and aspirational territoriality I draw, relate the latter to the
ambiguous – soft – external territoriality of the EU. Any delimitation runs the risk of
excluding potential Europeans. ‘To reflect its “aspirational” understanding, Europe’s
territorial limits must also be … open to those who might become Europeans’
(emphasis in the original) (Bialasiewicz et al. 2005: 349).
Aspirational territoriality also applies to those in-between, soft spaces reflect-
ing the real-life experiences of people who habitually cross boundaries. Think about
French-speaking suburbanites in the narrow strip of Flanders wedged between the
Brussels Capital Region and the Walloon Region. Surely, they think of Brussels as
reaching beyond its jurisdiction ring-fenced by a cordon sanitaire agreed in tough
negotiations between the three Belgian regions where the Flemish concern was that
the bilingual Brussels where French nevertheless dominates should not be contigu-
ous with the French speaking Walloon Region.
What this discussion shows is that space, in particular when it is soft, is no
easy concept which is why planners are notoriously vague about this their object.
They seem to prefer space to be hard. It makes life easier to think in terms of con-
tainers but surely, between them, the many overlapping spaces in which we conduct
our lives are more like my bundle of electric wires: Each time I need one, I have to
Conclusions 179

disentangle it from the rest. So with space: dealing with it, you need to extract the
specific aspect you need from the bundle. Space does not come ready-made.
The discussion of space in planning is under-developed, but planners are per-
haps weaker still on the concept of planning.

Spatial planning?
Planners of a strategic persuasion should rid themselves of the fixation on strictly
delimited sections of the surface of the globe, on containers to be filled to the rim
with ‘functions’. In a formal sense, of course, authorities do exercise jurisdiction over
areas and have the right and even the obligation to consider how to allocate the
scarce resource land to its various uses. Hard planning for hard spaces continues.
Jurisdiction, however, is not at the core of neither the problem nor the solution.
In Chapter 1 I showed Dutch planners of the 1920s referring to a ‘regional
gap’ between local and provincial jurisdictions. This is symptomatic for the mismatch
between spatial incidences of problems and provisions for dealing with them. To put
it differently, if ever they did so, the containers given to planners no longer fit. They
are overflowing, or they can no longer be filled, as the case may be.
Dutch planners at the time did not, however, draw the conclusion that soft
spaces needed soft planning. Instead they clamoured for yet another hard container,
a special purpose authority for planning. However, if ever it succeeds, the search for
other containers only gives temporary relief. Activity patterns overflow, defining new
spaces and seemingly requiring new territorial realignments. Rather than searching
for the holy grail of adequate boundaries and an appropriate division of responsibili-
ties, planners should accept the mismatch between hard and soft spaces as a fact
of life. The bunch of entangled wires is the metaphor.
Thus, in Chapter 5 I related how the French are coping with their 36,000 plus
communes by means of ad-hoc arrangements for each of the functional areas that
can be identified:

A good communication is more important than the establishment of new institu-

tional realities and administrative perimeters. France has chosen to begin by the mo-
bilisation of informal bodies … without changing the institutional setting. In a second
step, local authorities themselves established legal entities according to their needs.
(Geppert 2009: 263)

In their reaction to the Green Paper, the Dutch, too, pointed at a new practice
of formulating policies for spaces criss-crossing jurisdictions. Similar arrangements
exist in border areas. Planning solutions must be smart: packaging funds, spatial
concepts and images, trust, and so forth. To reiterate, the planning envisaged is soft.
180 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

If at all, the formation of ‘legal entities’ may be the outcome of the process, but not
its starting point.
In practicing soft planning, tools like spatial analysis and spatial positioning con-
tinue to be of relevance. Witness the multitude of innovative concepts and approaches
in ESPON. Spatial strategies or visions, like the Northern Way in the UK linking hith-
erto disparate English parts, the ‘European Boomerang’ defining a potential core area
in central and eastern Europe (Pallagst 2006: 261) and the European Green Belt ini-
tiative, the backbone of an ecological network that runs along the former Iron Curtain
from the Barents to the Black Sea point the way. So does a rather fictitious – but then,
visions are fictitious – Vienna-Bratislava-Győr Triangle (Tatzberger 2008) and the some-
what less fictitious configuration called ‘Centrope’, the amalgam of regions comprising
Brno, Bratislava, Vienna and Győr in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Hungary
respectively. They all reflect an, albeit partial vision, but, then, as a matter of course visions
are partial. There is no Archimedean Point. Formulating multiple visions – visioning – is
the contribution of strategic spatial planners to a future ‘place-based’ cohesion policy.
Ironically, I became a planning theorist because of the lack of intellectual rigour in
my architectural and urban design education. My asking for strategies, or visions, may
thus be unexpected to whoever knows my work. If you have visions, you should see the
doctor, it is sometimes said. When DG REGIO was still DG XVI, its Director-General
is said to have referred to those involved in the ESDP as the ‘dreamers of DG XVI’. A
hard-nosed Eurocrat once described the one-time délégué of DATAR with ambitions
to give a vision of France as a ‘poet’. The designations did not seem appreciative.
Contrary to what these critics seem to imply, there is more to planning,
though, than spatial analysis, an evidence-base, financial incentives and responsible
accounting. Invoked, albeit briefly, in the introduction, planning theory ‘mark 3’ says
that planning is communicative, that discourses or doctrines play a role. So what is
needed are story-lines about space and spatial development. There is creativity and
feel for the situation involved.
Scenarios, strategies or visions playing a role is not new. The difference is that
I am not talking about exclusive visions for hard spaces, visions that translate one-to-
one into action: hard planning. Rather, there can and should be many spatial visions
for many soft spaces, varying perhaps according to the stakeholders involved. These
visions should be allowed, indeed encouraged, to rub off on each other.
So the plea is for European spatial planning to be conceived as soft. The
visioning asked for is a process. As any such process, it is pluralistic. Between them,
the visions reflect, and at the same time give expression to, the subjectivity of our
experience of space. Graham and Marvin (2001) talk about what amounts to the
same: our environment splintering.
This is of course problematic. A splintering reality with many overlapping soft
spaces is difficult to grasp and to relate to, let alone to handle, but we cannot wish
Conclusions 181

complexity away. Admittedly, it makes it challenging for planning to help reducing,

as it might, the ‘identity deficit’ of the EU undermining integration (Tsoukalis et al.
2009: 21). It would be easier if we could think of the EU as one stable and coherent
territory, but it is nothing of the kind. It is a collection of overlapping soft spaces.
The task of comprehending this reality cannot be left to the Commission.
Planners from all corners of Europe need to be involved. In EU spatial planning,
the Commission should be the play master rather than the paymaster with overall
responsibility for overseeing the operations as which it tends to be seen. Funding
is not the key issue. Spatial planning – territorial cohesion – is about how to use
funds in coherent fashion. Maybe at the end of the day, there will be the need for
reallocating funds and/or for more resources. The point is, if so, then, much as the
formation of any new jurisdictions, this should be the considered outcome and not
the primary aim, let alone a condition of planning. European spatial planning is not
primarily about funds! It is about software.
Nor does the EU need to immediately exercise the shared competence which
it now has. The fact that the shared competence is on the books legitimises the
modest initiatives needed: encouraging the making of spatial visions, ensuring that
there is an arena in which they rub off on each other, and relating these visions to EU
policies with tangible effects on space or territory.
I am reminded of some conclusions, already referred to, in ‘Planning Theory’.
Needless to say, when discussing multi-planning agency, concluding that the top
should get involved as little as possible in matters of which it necessarily knew
little, I did not have the EU in mind. Anyhow, I concluded that the top should
practice the ‘planning of planning’, or meta-planning, requiring the continuous
monitoring of the performance of the whole system. In so doing, I said that meta-
planning needed to take account of limited resources: cash, land, environmental
goods and personnel.
In this light, maybe the newly won competence should be invoked after all,
but only for meta-planning. Reluctant about an EU role as they have been in the
past, now that the Lisbon Treaty is on the books, even German experts come to
the conclusion that some regulations of a procedural kind, for instance requiring
Member States to engage in a form of spatial planning, might be needed (Ritter
2009). At this point it is worth recalling that the ESDP already asked Member
States to regularly report on spatial development. Under the shared competence,
this could become a requirement, setting topics and procedures. The point would
be to enhance capacity for European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy.
This is of course prefaced upon the EU itself, more in particular the Commission,
increasing its capacity for meta-planning.
182 Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Planning Coming of Age?

Institutional architecture
Based on the above and on the experiences with the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea
Region (CEC 2009a) discussed in the previous chapter, I end by reflecting on the
institutional architecture of European spatial planning.
With a Commission discussion paper offered at the Kiruna Conference on
Cohesion Policy and Territorial Development under the Swedish Presidency (CEC
2009d) I argue that the lessons of the Baltic Sea Strategy are, of course, relevant to
other macro-regional strategies, but there is more. The strategy is an exemplar of soft
planning for soft spaces: unlike a binding scheme, it relates, not to a neatly defined
space but to a series of overlapping spaces, each delineated according to the reach
of the issue at hand, but all of them loosely grouped around the Baltic Sea.
European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy should take a leaf out of
its book. Soft planning for soft spaces as exemplified there could even be a way to
sustain cohesion policy as such.
There is more, though. It will be remembered that Barca suggests a place-
based approach. He shows that, in order to be effective, developmental and social
policies must attend to where they take effect, the simple truth expressed in the
Community Strategic Guidelines for Cohesion saying that ‘geography matters’.
This is true for all EU policies and not just cohesion policy. It thus seems logical to
suggest that European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy should become a
vehicle, not only for cohesion policy, but EU policy in general.
This would be true, also and in particular if cohesion policy post-2013 were no
longer to apply to ‘richer’ regions in net-contributor countries. Firstly, arguments for a
place-based approach – territorial cohesion policy – also apply to policies under the
Convergence objective there to stay. Secondly, Barca talks about all developmental
and social policies, and not just cohesion policy. They all need to be integrated, or
‘place-based’. So there would be scope, indeed a need for European spatial plan-
ning/territorial cohesion policy, even if cohesion policy as such were to be curtailed
by removing the Competitiveness and Employment objective.
The general applicability of Barca-type arguments for policy to be place-based is
why the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region is the more significant. As indicated, it has
been formulated by a score and more directorates-general, with DG REGIO the modera-
tor, an exemplar of the institutional architecture for pursing a place-based approach. This
architecture applies wherever challenges cut across boundaries; wherever there are
soft spaces demanding joint action. As with the Baltic Sea Strategy, it requires no new
funds, legislative measures or new formal institutions. It respects existing responsibili-
ties whilst providing tools for better multilevel territorial governance. The architecture is,
indeed, ‘soft’, respecting the responsibilities of those that take action under the strategy,
but creating feedback mechanisms, with the Commission the moderator. This can be
Conclusions 183

applied in any configuration of territories affected by, and thus in need of responding to,
common problems. The only ‘investment’ needed is the will to cooperate, and to con-
tinue to cooperate. In the terms as set out at the beginning of this section, it requires the
willingness to participate in the building of informal institutions: meta-planning!
So the proposal is to generalise the approach in the EU Strategy for the Baltic
Sea Region. Cross-border regions recommend themselves for this purpose. As
areas where the added value of integration should become apparent, they are the
darlings of the Commission. The same institutional architecture can be invoked in all
sorts of other soft spaces criss-crossing jurisdictional boundaries. Where this is the
case, though, the Commission needs to be involved. As in the Baltic Sea Strategy,
this should result in the identification of EU actions needed, including, but not limited
to, actions financed under the European Territorial Cooperation objective.
This does not come without its administrative costs. So soft planning may have
to be employed selectively, which does not change the fact that soft planning for soft
places is the avenue to take.

An EU spatial strategy?
In the fullness of time, many criss-crossing strategies would raise the issue of an inte-
grated strategy or vision for the whole EU territory, including, because it cannot be
ignored, its neighbourhood. Naturally, this could never be a final product but should form
an input into discussions about the EU territory. Indeed, and perhaps paradoxically, the
pursuit of soft planning for soft spaces will bring the overall shape of the EU territory into
focus. The Commission with experience as the mediator will be the obvious candidate for
managing the process. The outcome will not be an authoritative strategy, though. Once
again, there is no Archimedean Point, only a vanishing point that changes depending on
where one is heading. The outcome will be yet another stage in forming an understand-
ing the ever changing, fascinating reality of the EU, including its neighbourhood.
Work on EU strategies as described, involving flexible groupings of directo-
rates general, Member States, regional and local, public and private stakeholders
should generate awareness of major territorial issues, like climate change, energy
security and Europe’s position in the world. From this, we may expect a feedback
effect on our understanding of the European construct as such.
So conceived, EU spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy is about the coher-
ence of policies taking account of where they take effect and the opportunities and
constraints there. Such a policy must be based on an understanding of the EU terri-
tory. It does not cost any extra money but holds the promise of funds being spent more
wisely. And, although it sprung from cohesion policy, it is not wedded to it. Rather, it
relates to all EU policies with a spatial or territorial impact. Conceivably, it could thus
exist even outside, or altogether without cohesion policy in its present form.
EPILOGUE

After forty years of service, retired General Sir Rupert Smith wrote a book, The
Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. War no longer exists, is his
opening sentence. He invokes Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions not-
ing that all scientific communities – in his case military thinkers – ‘practice within a
set of received beliefs that are rigidly upheld, to the extent of suppressing novelties
that are subversive to them’ (Smith 2005: 2). He continues discussing the notion
of paradigm shifts, or scientific revolutions, well known to readers of the planning
theory literature. These shifts necessitate reconstructing cherished assumptions.
The shift he talks about began with the introduction of nuclear weapons, something
that Martin van Creveld (1991) in his ‘The Transformation of War: The Most Radical
Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict since Clausewitz’ pointed out even before the
definite end of the Cold War. What van Creveld, a frequent speaker at military
academies, had termed ‘low intensity war’, Sir Rupert Smith identified as his new
paradigm of ‘war amongst the people’.
The last tank battle, the epitome of interstate industrial warfare in which armed
formations manoeuvre against each other supported by artillery and air forces, he says
took place in 1973 on the Golan Heights and in the Sinai Desert between Arabs and
Israelis. Since then, there are no secluded battlefields, and it is not always armies that
do the fighting, and where armed forces are involved, they are often multi-national. The
levée en masse, the civic duty to come to the defence of revolutionary France which
became the model of conscript armies, makes room for professional and sometimes
mercenary forces. The composition, even of national units, can be very multi-national.
The commander of a British regiment in Iraq, Tim Collins (2005: 25) counted nineteen
nationalities on its establishment. By coincidence, General Sir Rupert Smith com-
manded the same number of forces at NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation,
and at UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia.
What is the message? That nation-states are losing their grip on the, argu-
ably most potent expression of their sovereignty: national armies deployed on their
national territories defending national interests. Not that there are no armed conflicts
any more! However, they are not – the evidence so far is overwhelming – conflicts
between nation-states. And, without going into details, they are difficult to under-
stand, which is why military thinkers are searching for new paradigms.
Why bother in a book about European spatial planning/terriotial cohesion pol-
icy? One consistent theme in my account of its development has been the pressure
Epilogue 185

which its established paradigm wedded to the nation-state is under. I have drawn
attention to the ambivalence also of the European construct, like when Member
States agree to common policies, only to worry about ‘just return’ to the point where
they are willing to fight a guerrilla against the EU.
I wished I could formulate the alternative paradigm, like Sir Rupert’s ‘war
amongst the people’. I am not even sure that something like Kuhn’s scientific revo-
lution is in the offing. When reflecting on Dutch doctrine and its perhaps equally
precarious future, thanks to work done with Willem Korthals Altes, now my col-
league, an alternative to Kuhnian scientific revolutions caught my attention. After a
critic of Kuhn, Larry Laudan, it is called the Laudanian model of evolutionary change.
It suggests that even the most cherished principles – like national sovereignty – can
make way for new ones, without necessarily causing any major upheavals. On the
premise that change continues, that the existing paradigm based on the container
view exposed in the Conclusions is untenable, because inconsistent with reality, this
is what I hope for. The alternative, the continuation of what, to once more stick with
the military analogy, might be called a low intensity war between the Member States
and the EU, is unsavoury, and a cataclysm, outright conflict leading to a breakup
even more so. No, it’s all hens on deck to think of a way out, of a new deal, a new
paradigm. European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy will not be the only
one to benefit.
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INDEX
Abercrombie, Patrick 17
actor-centred institutionalism 6, 7
Adams, Thomas 19
Adenauer, Konrad 33, 38
AESOP – Association of European Schools of
Planning xiii, 60
Allmendinger, Phil 4, 177
Alsace 82
Alvergne, Christel 79
aménagement du territoire 27, 63, 75, 79–84,
87, 117; essence of 108, européen 38,
118, 135, 143; meaning of territory in
107; minister of 117–18; stakeholder
participation in 101; territorial cohesion
equivalent of 143, 143n, 145
America 2050 xii
Amsterdam 18, 19, 26, 150; Amsterdam
General Extension Plan 19
Anglo-Saxon model 88
acquis communautaire 132
ARL (Akademie für Raumforschung und
Landesplanung – Academy of Spatial
Research and Spatial Planning) 53
ASEAN – Association of Southeast Asian
Nations 10
Assembly of European Regions 65, 143, 163
Association of European Border Regions 160,
163, 169
Association of French Regions 160
Atlantic Coast (France) 81, 118
Atlantic Seaboard of the US 25, 81
Austria 168, 174, 175, 180
Austrian Conference on Spatial Planning x
Austrian-Slovak border 178
Austrian Spatial Development Perspective 135
Azores 8; venue of Ministerial 152, 158–60
Bachtler, John 114
Bailly, Antoine 128
balanced development I, 2, 59, 66, 164
Baltic States 89
Barca, Fabrizio, 13, 169, 182; Barca Report
142, 144–5, 149, 156, 169–70
Barlow Report 20
Barnier 1, 129, 135, 143–4
Barroso Commission 12, 99, 178
Barroso, José Manuel xiii, 157–8, 169, 171
Battis, Ulrich 93, 121
Baudelle, Guy 135, 143n
Bayrou, François 102
BBR (Bundesamt für Bauwesen und
Raumordnung – Federal Office for
Building and Regional Planning) 90, 92
133, 146
BBSR (Bundesamt for Bau-, Stadt- und
Raumforschung – Federal Institute for
Research on Building, Urban Affairs and
Spatial Development) 90
Begg, Iain 173–4
Belgium 18, 28, 33, 35, 78, 85, 89, 96, 175
Benelux (Benelux Economic Union) 89; cradle
of international planning 34; Committee
on Physical Planning 35, 54; countries
members of the ECSC and EEC 9, 31,
46; favouring political integration 32–3;
planners participating in Conference of
Regional Planning in North-West Europe
39; Second structural outline sketch 29
Beyen, Johan Willem 28, 32
Bialasiewicz, Luiza 177, 178
Black Sea 25, 163, 180
Blue Banana 25, 49, 81, 82, 111–13, 118
Böhme, Kai 108, 134, 136, 137, 145
Bosnia-Herzegovina 60
Bratislava 175, 180
Brittany 38, 64, 83
BosWash see Atlantic Seaboard of the US
Brno 180
Brunet, Roger 49, 81–3, 118
Brussels ix, x, 35, 178; shorthand for EU
headquarters xi, 7, 46, 62, 117, 120,
121, 158, 165; coalition with national
sector ministries 96, 110; complex
puzzle 156; accumulation of power 101;
French influence 84; German distance
77; 90, 93; National Detached Experts
at ix–x, 118, 125, 158, 167; source
of funding 64; unquestioning support
dissipating 141; suspicion of German
Länder of 89; treaty-drafting convention
(1956) 35; Conference on Regional
Index
Economies (1963) 41; transnational
seminar on ESDP (1999) 127
Budapest 144
CADSES (Central European, Adriatic,
Danubian, South-east European Space)
130
Canary Islands 8
Carbonell, Armando xii
Casseres, Joël M. de 17, 17n, 18, 19, 20, 24,
24n
Castagnède, B. 135
CEMAT (Conférence Européenne des
Ministres à l’Aménagement du Territoire
– European Conference of Ministers
responsible for Regional Planning) 45–6,
55, 58, 60, 83; arena for continued
discussion of European spatial planning
61, 146; German Presidency 128;
Lausanne meeting 73, 118; President
speaking at European Parliament 72;
Russian Presidency 150
Ceuta 8
Channel Tunnel 39
centre-periphery model 106
Centrope 180
Chandernagor, André 62n
Chérèque, Jacques 117–18
Chirac, Jacques 81
Churchill, Winston 17, 28
CIAM – Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture
Moderne 19
climate change 84, 149, 151, 153, 154, 162,
165, 172, 183 Climate Conference 167
co-decision making 43, 63, 66
coherence 2–4, 11, 48, 66, 94–6, 97, 159,
167; ambivalence of cohesion policy 103;
between national and EEC policies 15, 36,
103; cohérence (French meaning) 2, 83,
122, 144; Commission role 127; outcome
of debate 123; rationale of spatial planning
37, 47, 50, 57–8, 67–9, 106, 109,
110, 123, 133, 141, 142, 172; role of
spatial planning 3–4, 30; role of territorial
cohesion 158–9, 163–4, 170, 183
cohesion countries 94–5
Cohesion Fund 11, 94
cohesion policy 36, 41, 63, 92, 94–7, 121,
124–5, 154, 156–7, 177, 180; arena for
pursuing European spatial planning 75,
87, 99, 172, 183; central to European
project 1, 93, 173; Council of Ministers
164, 166; Delors x, 1, 75, 99–105;
197
financing TENs 36; form of territoriality
176; French influence 80, 83; future 13,
160–7, 169–73, 182; German attitude
89–90; mainstay of Lisbon Strategy 142;
opposition xiii, 88, 136, 142, 148, 163–5,
169, 173; review 152–3; territory, place
as basis 150, 180, 182
Cohesion Report 95, 132; Second xiii, 144;
Third 177; Fourth 104; Fifth 166 see also
Sixth Progress Report
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 102
Cold War 184
Collins, Tim 184
Collège de l’Europe 25
College of Commissioners 6
Colomb, Claire 5
Coming Presidencies Group 147, 149,
Comité interministériel de l’aménagement du
territoire 143
comitology 121, 150, 153
Commissioner for Regional Policy 2, 95, 121,
172
Committee for the Development and
Conversion of Regions 132
Committee of Senior Officials (of CEMAT) 55,
58, 146
Committee of the Regions 12, 46, 65, 160,
161, 163
Committee on Regional Policy and Regional
Planning (European Parliament) 64, 67,
72; see also Regional Development
Committee
Common Agricultural Policy 3, 41, 63, 96, 109,
157, 160
Common Foreign and Security Policy 10
Common Market 8, 15, 65, 67, 99; impetus
for political integration 33; regional policy
complementary 31, 35–7; uneven effect
38, 96; see also Single Market
Compendium of EU Planning Systems and
Policies 77
Comte, Auguste 47
communicative planning theory 7
Community Added Value 64, 97, 139
Community budget 41, 93, 130
Community Method 10, 33, 120, 165, 166
Community legislation 63
Community Strategic Guidelines for Cohesion
69, 94, 103, 142, 182
competence issue 87, 106, 111, 120–3,
126, 136, 141; new Member States
unencumbered by 164; sidestepping
145, zero-sum game 177
198
competitiveness 94, 99, 144, 163, 170;
balance with equity 100; cohesion
policy unhelpful 157; ESDP 111, 151;
promotion of global economic integration
zones 114; territorial potential 135, 149,
162; see also Lisbon Strategy, Regional
Competitiveness and Employment
Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions
65, 163
Conference on Territorial Cohesion and the
Future of Cohesion Policy (Paris 2008)
160
Conference on the Regional Economies
(Brussels 1963) 37–8, 48
Conference of the Regions of North-West
Europe 31
Conservatives (UK) 100, 108, 133
Convention on the Future of Europe 144
convergence (objective of EU Cohesion policy)
95, 102, 104, 131, 172, 182
Contrats de plan Etat-région 80
Convention of Madrid 61
Copenhagen 41, 167
cosmopolitanism 141, 175
COREPER (Comité des représentants
permanents – Permanent Representatives
Committee) 154
Corfu Method 119, 124
Council of Baltic Sea States 167
Council of Europe x, 9, 43, 60–1, 72, 81, 83,
126, 128, 129; channel for planning
cooperation 28, 34, 41, 43, 45–7, 54–8,
60; formation 28; Gendebien Report
64–5, 67, 70; German preference as
planning arena 89; no executive authority
43; see also CEMAT, Regional Planning a
European Problem, Torremolinos Charter
Council of Ministers 35, 38, 94, 121, 157;
coaxing by European Parliament to accept
regional policy 62, 64; antechamber
154; no formation for regional planning/
policy 54, 118, 161, 166; representing
Member State governments 10, 12, 46;
unconcerned with planning 6; Informal
108, 121; Presidency of 117
Counsell, David 177
Creveld, Martin van 184
Croatia 60
CSD (Committee on Spatial Development)
108, 117–21, 127–9, 132–3, 144, 152,
155
Czech Republic 89, 133, 180
Index
Damette, François 107
Danube Strategy 60, 168
Daseinsvorsorge (safeguarding public
services) 143
DATAR (Délégation à l’aménagement
du territoire et à l’action régionale;
since December 2009: Délégation
interministérielle à l’aménagement du
territoire et à l’attractivité des regions) 38,
40, 79–81, 83–4, 118, 135–6, 144, 147,
159, 180
Davoudi, Simin 4, 145
Delft University of Technology i, xi, xiii, 19, 33
Delors, Jacques 1, 13, 41, 60, 69, 75–6,
94–105, 172, 174; cabinet x; European
model of society 1, 144; Nantes
Ministerial 117–18; revival EU 60, 68,
172; programmatic approach 64, 68–9,
97, 129
Denmark 41, 55, 63, 78, 142, 167
Denmark and European Spatial Planning Policy
134
DG REGIO (Directorate General for Regional
Policy, once also known as DG XVI) 2,
63, 152, 154, 180, 182; ERDF 95; EU
Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region 170,
182; defence of cohesion policy 157,
173; French influence 123; promoting
territorial cohesion 142, 144–5, 157–8;
relation with other DGs 3, 160, 167;
reluctance concerning Territorial Agenda
148; response to consultations on Green
Paper on Territorial Cohesion 166;
sponsor of ESDP 11, 129
DIACT (Délégation interministérielle à
l’aménagement et à la compétitivité des
territories, the name of DATAR from 2006
to 2009) 83–4
Didelon, C. 178
disparities 1, 20, 37, 46, 48, 102–3, 149, 158,
163, 164, 170
directives (as EU legislation) 10, 72,
Drake, Helen 98
Drevet, Jean-François 5, 24, 37–8, 41, 63–64,
80
Dubbeling, Dirk xiii
Dühr, Stefanie 5
EC (European Community) ix, 1, 10, 35, 43,
58, 75, 98–9, 109; cohesion policy 94;
enlargement 37; harmonious development
54; lack of representation of subnational
authorities 46; planning ministers 60;
Index
planning role 41, 45–6, 54, 58, 72–3, 84,
89, 121; regional policy 62, 64–5, 172;
revival 60; territory 106
Economic Analysis Unit (horizontal unit at DG
REGIO) 159
economic and social cohesion as a Community
objective I, 1, 94–5, 97, 109, 141, 144,
165, 170
Economic and Social Committee 12, 127, 163
ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community)
9–10, 15, 24, 28, 32, 35–6, 38, 43, 117;
institutional architecture 35; regional
policy 35
EEC (European Economic Community) 9–10,
15–16, 31–2, 43; foundation of, 28 39;
institutional architecture 35; planning role
31–2, 34, 36, 46; opposition from De
Gaulle 38; regional policy 37; Treaty 36
Eesteren, Cornelis van 19
EGTC (European Grouping of Territorial
Cooperation) 83, 161
Elden, S. 178
Environmental Action Programme 152
Environmental Impact Assessment 41
Eppink, Derk-Jan 11
ERDF (European Regional Development
Fund) 11, 43, 64, 94–5, 144; Article
10 financing studies 135; Gedebien
Report referring to ERDF 68; INTERREG
financed from ERDF as Community
Initiative 130; Regulations 106–7; result
of UK, Denmark and Ireland joining 63–4;
standard ERDF evaluation 137
Erhard, Ludwig 23, 38
ESDP (European Spatial Development
Perspective) xi, 57, 98, 106–23, 149,
155; absence of maps 114, 148;
application 83, 98, 109, 124–39; basis
for ‘Guiding Principles for Sustainable
Spatial Development of the European
Continent’ 60–1; case study 5;
Commission support 11, 141, 143; Dutch
support 87; German conditions and
achievements 89, 91, 149; Hungarians
wishing for follow-up 165; influence on
Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion
156, 165; influence on Territorial Agenda
150–1; intergovernmental document
1, 75, 91; local issues included 53;
model for American Spatial Development
Perspective xii; objectives 57; Poles
wishing for follow-up 166; resulting
in ESPON 145; revision 109; spatial
199
planning approach promoting coherence
103, 110–11; territorial cohesion
thinking 114, 144; use of Article 235 65;
vision absent 106; see also Pentagon,
polycentrism
Eskelinen, Heikki 135
ESPON (European Spatial Planning
Observation Network) 59, 89, 106, 109,
119, 145, 150, 154–5, 160, 178, 180;
basis for ‘evidence-based’ document
141, 145, 147; establishment under
INTERREG 127, 131, 143; Contact
Points 146; Coordination Unit x, 146–8;
ESPON 2006 Programme 146; ESPON
2013 Programme 132, 146; 150–1;
Luxembourg sponsoring 120; Managing
Authority 146; Monitoring Committee
146; Paying Authority 146; part of
learning machine 147; studies 127–9;
Study 2.3.1 134, 138–9
Estonia 167
EU (European Union) 1–3, 76, 96–7, 174–7
EU15 102, 138; EU25 158; EU 31
(ESPON) 178; agenda 130 ; budget
142, 150, 152; climate change policy
151; cohesion policy 94–5, 104, 121,
163, 170, 172–3, 176; consistency
of policies 103, 122, 150; comitology
150; competence for planning 110–11,
129, 142–3, 162, 177; core 100, 114;
dossiers 153–4; enlargement 109,
147; French influence 83–4, 87; funds
105; German attitudes 89–90, 93,
121, 181; global role 172, 178; hybrid
form of government 169; identity deficit
181; impact on Member States 175;
institutional framework 2, 10–12, 35,
84, 103, 110, 154, 163, 166, 170;
Maastricht Treaty 33; Member State
suspicion 13; models 137; multi-level
governance 157; neighbours 149–50,
161, 183; novel polity 124; opposition
from those with low-income and insecure
jobs 88; policies 3, 37, 103, 149, 158,
163, 170, 181–3; regional policy 5, 80,
135; regulations 78, 83, 178; sector
policies 146, 165; space soft 178; spatial
strategy 183; territoriality 176–8; territory
8–9, 106–7, 109, 111, 114, 132, 149,
170, 178, 181, 183; transport policy 69;
treaties 120, 159; see also European
spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy
200
EU Presidency 108, 112, 117, 121, 147, 149,
152, 168
EURATOM (European Atomic Energy
Community) 10, 43
Eurocrat ix, 93, 162, 180
EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region 11, 83,
161, 166, 167–68, 170, 182–3
EU territorial cohesion policy see territorial
cohesion
EU territory 8–9, 106, 111, 149, 176, 183,
Euro-English 2, 110
Europe 1992 xi, 87, 97
Europe 2000 91, 107, 118
Europe 2000+ 118
Europe 2020: A Strategy for Smart,
Sustainable and Inclusive Growth 160,
167–8, 173
European Agricultural Guidance and
Guarantee Fund 67, 94
European Boomerang 180
European Bunch of Grapes 113
European Commission ix–xi, 3, 16, 18, 66, 72,
113
European Conference of Ministers of Regional
Planning see CEMAT
European Conference of Regional and Local
Authorities 46
European Convention on Human Rights 46
European Constitution see Treaty establishing
a Constitution for Europe
European Council (of Heads of State and
Governments) xiii, 10, 33, 117 167, 172,
173; demanding EU Strategy for the
Baltic Sea Region 167; Territorial Agenda
on agenda 148, 150, 152, 154, 160
European Court of Justice 12, 37, 71
European Defence Treaty 32
European Economic Area 178
European Economic and Social Committee 12,
127, 163
European Environmental Agency 41
European Green Belt 180
EGTC (European Grouping of Territorial
Cooperation) 83, 161
European Investment Bank 36, 94, 109
European Landscape Convention 61
European Metropolitan Regions (Germany) 92
European model of society xii, 1, 75, 99, 144
European Monetary Union 100
European Movement 25
European Parliament 10–12, 73, 75, 98,
107, 161–2; Delors speech 99–100;
Gendebien Report 37, 56, 62–72;
Index
Hübner MEP 166; Parliamentary
Assembly forerunner 16, 32, 37; support
for European spatial planning/territorial
cohesion policy 43, 72, 96, 127, 163
European planning community 7, 130, 134
European planning programme 18, 31, 43–4,
62–73
European Regional Planning Scheme (as
proposed in the Gendebien Report) 66,
69–71
European Regional Planning Strategy 58–60
European Regional/Spatial Planning Charter
see Torremolinos Charter
European Social Fund 36, 94, 96
European spatial planning ix, xii, xiv, 90, 95,
99, 120, 124, 126, 156; cohesion,
coherence, cooperation 3, 37, 95;
Commission attitude 141; doldrums
41–73; Dutch role 86; French view
prevailing 40; institutional architecture
182; intergovernmental 77; German
concerns 90, 119; lack of political will
122; language issues 106–8; learning
machine 124–39, 147; managing urban
growth 75; opposition from sectors 120;
planning theory 7; rupture in development
13; soft 6, 174, 177, 180–1; see also
European spatial planning/territorial
cohesion policy
European Spatial Planning Concept 45
European Spatial Planning Strategy 46
European spatial planning/territorial cohesion
policy 1, 38, 61, 65, 104, 108–11, 120–
1, 130, 142, 163, 166, 181, 183; EU
Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region 182;
capacity 181; coherence 170; consensus
157; crossroads 156; Delors 105;
ESPON future 171; mainstay 146–7;
institutional architecture 169; lobbies for
72; question mark 172; rationale for 63,
95; vehicle for EU policy in general 182,
185
European Territorial Cooperation 93, 100,
124–5, 130, 161, 173, 183
Europeanisation 10, 88, 127, 143, 172–3;
Europeanisation of (state, regional and
local) planning 127, 139
Eurosclerosis 43
Evers, David xiii
evidence-based (document, planning, policy)
141, 145, 148, 150
Index
Faludi, Andreas xiii, 5, 6, 7, 114–15, 118, 120,
122, 124, 145, 147, 154
Federal Europe ix, 176
Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and
Technology (Germany) 87, 90, 164
Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and
Urban Development (Germany) 90
Ferrera, M, K. 75
Fifth National Planning Report (Netherlands) 86
Financial Framework 80, 104, 146, 171
Finland 114, 119, 134–5, 167; Finand 2017
135
First Action Programme (under the Territorial
Agenda) 152–5, 161, 165
first official draft (of the ESDP) 125
Fishman, Robert xii
Flanders 178
Fortuyn, Pim 85–86
Fourastié, Jean 48
France ix, 64, 77–84, 87, 149, 154, 160,
162, 179, 180, 184; aversion against
foreign influences 89; DATAR 38;
decentralisation 101, 107; Delors 94,
98, 101; founder member of EEC 9, 39;
overseas possessions 8; Paris dominant
27; planning 23, 39–40, 93, 107, 135;
resistance 32, 38, scepticism about
integration 93, 101; service provision
92; source of inspiration for Europe and
European planning 63, 76, 135, 141–2;
territorial cohesion 143, 143n, 164
framing 1, 58, 137
Frémont, A. 128
French Revolution 80, 83, 98
Fritsch, M. 135
functional areas, functional regions 165–7,
169, 176, 179
Galeton, Gerardo 162
Gallo, Max 32, 79, 81, 85
Garden cities 19, 26, 113
Garden Cities and Town Planning Association
18
Gatawis, Siegbert 107, 121
Gaulle, Charles de 13, 32–3, 38–9, 63–4,
79–81, 85
GDP (Gross domestic product) 70, 94, 104–5,
111
gebiedsgericht beleid (coordinating policies
per functional area) 165
Geddes, Patrick 18, 145
Gendebien, Paul-Henry 37, 62–6, 68, 72, 80;
Gendebien Report 43, 71, 73, 75, 97,
103, 107, 122, 135
201
General Affairs Council 118, 161, 164
General Impact Assessment 122, 164
Generalplan Ost (General Plan East) 20
Geppert, Anna 135, 179
German Federal Republic see Germany
Germany 39, 76, 81, 87, 88–93, 150, 165;
CEMAT 55, 60; ESDP 112, 120, 149;
EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region
167; federal structure 46, 78; founder
member of EEC 9; German Democratic
Republic 91; German reunification
89, 91; INTERREG 130, 133, 139;
Netherlands 18, 20–2; planning 23,
56; scepticism about Commission-led
European spatial planning 75, 135;
rehabilition 32; Territorial Agenda 150,
162; territorial cohesion 164; planners
participating in Conference of Regional
Planning in North-West Europe 39
Giannakourou, Gina 137
Giolitti, Antonio 67, 69
Glasgow (venue of a Ministerial) 117, 120
globalisation 48, 75, 87, 89, 99, 141, 149,
162, 175
Gorcum, Claas Albertus van 20
Gothenburg Strategy 92, 147
Gottman, Jean xii, 25, 81
Goudsblom, J. 86
Graham, Stephen 180
grand theories 6
Granpré Molière, Marinus Jan 23, 29
Grasland, Claude 178
Gravier, J.F. 27
Greece 37, 45, 67–8, 94
Green Belt 7
Green Heart 7, 19, 27
Greenland 8
Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion 8, 84,
88n, 106, 132, 142, 152, 156–62, 170;
Consultations 122, 137, 162–7, 179
Green Paper Adapting to Climate Change in
Europe 153
Green Peace 175
Growth and Jobs (Communication) 157
Guellec, Ambroise 143
Guiana 8
Guichard, Oliviér 79
Guiding Principles for Spatial Development in
Germany 91
Guiding Principles for Sustainable Spatial
Development of the European Continent
60, 181
Guidelines for Regional Policy (Germany) 91
202 Index

Guidelines for the Structural Funds 2000–2006 Italy 1, 9, 25, 35, 38, 49, 63, 67–8, 78, 81,
132 135, 174
Guigou, Jean-Louis 107, 135
Jacobins 101
Habitat Guidelines 78, 177 Janin-Rivolin, Umberto 136, 141
Hahn, Johannes xiii, 167, 170, 173 Jean, Y. 107, 143n
Hainaut Region, Belgium 35 Jensen, Ole 5
Hajer, Maarten 6 Jessop, Bob 5, 176
Hallstein, Walter 33, 38 just return 63, 100, 185
hard spaces 5–6, 166, 176–80
hard planning 5–6, 179–80 Kaliningrad 9
Haughton, Graham 4, 177 Keeler, John 13
Healey, Patsy 110 Kersten, Jens 93, 121
Hemerijck, Anton 75 Klaassen, Leo 24, 38
Hexagone 80–1 Klaus, Vaclav 167
High Authority of the ECSC 15, 35 Klerkx, Erwin 15n, 34n, 35n
High Level Group on cohesion policy 166 Kohnstamm, Max 15
high politics 6, 33, 151 Kok, Wim 85
High Representative of the Union on Foreign Kormoss, Imre 25, 39
Affairs and Security Policy xiii, 172 Korthals Altes, Willem 185
Hix, Simon 11 Kosovo 178
Hooghe, Liesbeth 13, 97, 123 Krautzberger, Michael 5
Howard, Ebenezer 26, 113 Krugman, Paul 92
Hübner, Danuta 73, 147, 153, 156, 158, Kuhn, Thomas 184–5
161–2, 166–7, 169–70 Kunzmann, Klaus xi, 45, 57–60, 62, 71, 113
Hungary 137, 149, 164–6, 180
Husson, Claude 35, 37–8, 62n, 72, 102, Lademacher, Horst 21
102n, 144 Länder, German federal states 23, 46, 56, 88n,
89–91, 121–3, 133, 164–5, 167
Iceland 178 Languedoc-Roussillon 49
Informal Council (of Ministers responsible for Lausanne (venue of a CEMAT meeting) 73,
Spatial Planning) 109, 121 118
Integrated Coastal Zone Management 132 learning 6, 59; ‘learning machine’ 124–39,
Integrated Mediterranean Programmes 64, 147; see also ESDP
68–69, 75, 97, 129 Le Corbusier 19
Intergovernmental Conference 96, 129 League of Nations 18, 28
intergovernmental cooperation, bargaining x, least (less) favoured regions 36, 71, 102, 104,
54, 75, 77, 89, 89, 93, 97, 134 119
institutional context 6 Leipzig (venue of Ministerial) 147–51, 158
International Federation for Housing and Leipzig Charter (of Sustainable European
Planning 19 Cities) 148, 154, 164
International Industrial Relations Association 19 Leitbild (guiding principles) 91
International New Towns Association 19 Le Scénario de l’inacceptable (doomsday
International Planning Congress, Paris 19 scenario) 80
International Society of City and Regional ‘Les Trentes Glorieuses’ (the Glorious Thirty
Planners 19 Years) 48
INTERREG (one of the Community Initiatives; Letland 167
presently operating under the European Ley, Norbert 31, 31n, 39–40
Territorial Objective of cohesion policy) Liechtenstein 178
89, 98, 124–5, 127–30, 132–9, 143 Liège 51; venue of Ministerial 38, 119, 134
Ireland 4, 41, 63, 64, 102, 104, 135, 178 Lijphart, Ahrend 86
Irish Sea 114 Limousin Region 62, 143
Iron Curtain 81, 156, 180 Lincoln Institute of Land Policy xii
Index
Linthorst Homan, Johannes 28, 31, 33–5
Lisbon Strategy 99–100, 111, 142, 148–53,
157, 162, 167, 173
Lisbon Treaty see Treaty of Lisbon
Lithuania 167–8
Lohuizen, Theo K. van 19–20, 24
London xi, 21, 26, 28, 32, 81–2, 111–15
Lorraine 117–18, 175
low politics 6, 97
Luxembourg 15, 60, 109, 113, 120–1, 135,
146, 175, 178; venue of Ministerial 147,
157; Presidency 147
Luxembourg Compromise 38
macro-regional strategy 60
Madeira 8
Madrid (venue of Ministerial) 1
Mäding, Heinrich 18
Malta 12, 89; Malta Convention 61
Managing the Territorial Dimension of EU
Policies after Enlargement (Expert
Document) 144
Mannheim, Karl 19
Marjolin, Robert 18, 37–8, 54
Marks, Gary 13, 97
Massé, Pierre 48
Marvin, Simon 180
Mansholt, Sicco 52
Marseille (venue of Ministerial) 154, 160–2,
164
May, Ernst 19
Médicins sans Frontières 175
Mediterranean 49, 52, 82, 163; Mediterranean
INTERREG programmes 136;
Mediterranean Member States 1
megalopolis xii, 25, 27, 81, 111
mega-regions xii
Melilla 8
Member States 10–13, 41, 75, 102–4,
109, 111, 154–5, 178, 181, 183,
185; application of the ESDP 126–30,
133–8, 145; approaches to planning
77; attitudes towards territorial cohesion
143, 145, 148; conflict with Commission
ix, 10–11, 38, 43–4, 46, 63–4, 83, 91,
96–7, 100, 130, 141–42, 145, 148,
170; conflict with subnational authorities
70; Council of Europe 28; Green Paper
159, 164–7; EU Strategy for the Baltic
Sea Region 71, 166–8; Lisbon Strategy
157; negotiating Treaty of Rome 35–8;
planning ministers ix–x, 75, 117–23, 141;
renationalising cohesion policy 172–73,
203
175; role in ESDP 106–23, 144; role in
Territorial Agenda 151, 158; varying size
88–9; working groups under the First
Action Programme 158–9; see also new
Member States
MERCOSUR (Mercado Común del Sur:
Common Market of the South) 10
Merkel, Angela 151
Messina Conference 31, 33, 39
meta-planning 7, 181, 183
Métropoles d’equilibre (Counterweights to
Paris) 113
Meuse 134
Mezzogiorno 36–7, 63, 102, 113
MHAL: Maastricht-Hasselt-Aachen-Liège 51
middle-range theories 6
Milder, Jody xiii
ministerial: cohesion policy 166; ESDP
117–21, 127; Territorial Agenda: 141,
147–8, 152–4, 157–8, 160–1
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, France 118, 121,
164; Poland 167
Mitterand, François 33
MKRO (Ministerkonferenz für Raumordnung:
Standing Conference of Ministers
responsible for Regional Planning) 90–1
Moldavia 60
Molle, Willem 173
Momper, Nicolas 60
Montenegro 60, 178
Montpellier 18, 81–2
multi-level governance 97, 137, 153, 157–8,
162, 164, 166, 173
Müller, André 130, 139
Musso, Pierre 79–80
Myrdal, Gunnar 96
Nadin, Vincent xiii, 5, 77
NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Association) 10
Nantes (venue of Ministerial) 117–18, 120,
164
nation-state 5, 70, 94, 110–11, 141, 174–7,
184–5
National Detached Expert ix–x, 118, 158, 167
National Planning Commission (Dutch) 33
National Reform Plans (under Lisbon Strategy)
150, 152–3
National Spatial Planning Agency (Netherlands)
19, 32, 35, 41, 133
National Spatial Strategy (Netherlands) 86,
135
National Spatial Strategy (Ireland) 135
204
National Strategic Reference Frameworks 149,
152, 158, 173
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) 184
Netherlands ix–x, 78, 84–8, 142, 160;
Germany 20–2; pioneering European
planning 17–20, 31, 33, 39, 72; planning
7, 23–6, 35; scepticism about integration
93, 101, 134, 142, 164
Neuffert, Ernst 19
Neurath, Otto 19
New Deal 19–20, 37
New Economic Geography 92
New Labour (UK) 108, 133, 146
new Member States (see Member States) ix–xi,
84, 104, 156, 158; assimilating ESDP
137–8; in charge of review of Territorial
Agenda 164
New Towns Act, UK 27
New York 19, 95
NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) 39,
163
Nice Treaty see Treaty of Nice
Noordwijk (venue of Ministerial) 114, 120, 133
Nordic Council x, 54, 134, 167
Nordregio x
North Rhine-Westphalia 31, 39, 46, 55, 89
North Sea Area (INTERREG Cooperation Area)
114, 130, 133
North West Europe Area (INTERREG
Cooperation Area) xi; North West
Metropolitan Area (INTERREG
Cooperation Area) xi, 130, 133
Northern Ireland 45, 59, 132
Northern Dimension 134, 167
Northern Way 180
Norway 160, 178
NTCCP (Network of Territorial Cohesion
Contact Points) 151–5
NUTS (Nomenclature of Units for Territorial
Statistics) 104
Obama, Barak xii
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 148
open method of coordination 142, 166
Operational Programmes 149, 158, 165, 173
Ordinary legislative procedure 43, 62
Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development 17; Organisation
for European Economic Cooperation
(forerunner of the Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development)
17
OTB Research Institute for the Built
Environment xiii, 8, 9
Index
Painter, J. 178
Pallagst, Karina 180
Paris 17, 19, 27, 80–3, 111–14, 160
Pedrazzini, Luiza 136
Pelinka, Anton 156n
Pentagon (London-Paris-Milan-Munich-
Hamburg) 111–14, 116, 149
Péti, Márton 165
Peyrony, Jean xiii, 135
Pierret, Georges 38
place-based approach, policy, strategies 13,
142, 149, 165, 169–70, 180, 182
planning doctrine xi, 7, 85; European 7
planning theory ix, 5–8, 19, 47, 180–1, 184
Poland 73, 89, 133, 149, 156, 164, 166–8
polder model 86
Polverari, Laura 114
polycentric development 48, 106, 114, 126,
146–7, 150–1; Polycentrism 112,116,
135, 149, 156, 163
Portugal ix, 37, 94, 102, 149, 152, 153, 160
Potsdam (venue of Ministerial) 108, 117, 120,
128, 132
Presidency of the Council of Ministers see EU
Presidency
President of the European Council xiii, 117,
172
Principles for a European Spatial Development
Policy (Leipzig Principles) 119
Projets structurands (strategic projects) 100
Projets territorials 169
pumping around of money 173
Qualified Majority Voting 10, 12, 32, 35
Querschnittplanung (cross-section planning)
110
Raumplanung 4, 31n, 56,
Randstad 7, 19, 27, 85, 133,
Rational decision making 6–7
Raumordnungsbericht (Federal Spatial
Planning Report) 90
Regional Competitiveness and Employment
(objective of cohesion policy) 131, 172,
182
Regional Development Committee (European
Parliament) 162, 166
regional-economic development planning 79
regional gap 23, 30, 179
Regional Plan Association xii
Regional Planning a European Problem 43,
46–56, 62, 83, 97, 169
Regions 2020 162
Index 205

regulations (as EU legislation) 10, 64, 66, policies 30, 40, 54, 80, 122–3, 136, 141,
69–70, 72, 78, 164; ERDF Regulations 145, 161–4; hard planning 6; outcomes 3
106–7, 128, 130, 135, 144, 153 Selke, Welf 5, 133
regulative land-use planning 174 Serbia 60
Reichsstelle für Raumordnung (Reich Office Services of General Economic Interest 80,
for Spatial Ordering) 20 132, 143, 164
Reims 18, 33 shared competence 10, 181
Republican equality 80, 144 Siedentop, Larry 84, 101
Rhine 15, 25, 49, 134 Single European Act 1, 37, 73, 94–5, 100,
Rhineland-Palatinate 175 102–3, 122
Rhine-Main-Danube Canal 25 Single Market xi, 75, 87, 89, 96, 99, 102, 114,
Richardson, Tim 5 157, 164, 167; see also Single European
Rifkin, Jeremy 10, 174 Act
right of initiative of the European Commission Slovenia 148–9, 152, 154
12, 38, 120, 141, 153; of the European soft planning 5, 169, 179–80, 182–3
Parliament 37 soft space 30
Ritter, Ernst-Hasso 5, 93, 121, 181 Sombart, Nicolaus 47
Road Map for Maritime Spatial Planning 144 Soviet economic planning 19
Robb, Graham 80 Spaak, Paul-Henri 15, 41; Report xi, 15, 31,
Robert, Jacques 109, 129 35–7, 52
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 20 Spatial and Urban Development (subcommittee
Ross, Catherine xii of the Committee for the Development
Ross, George 94, 98–100, 105 and Conversion of Regions) 132, 144
Rotterdam (venue of Ministerial) 145, 147, spatial development 1, 4, 67, 78; Member
153; port of 25 State competence 164; replacing spatial
RTPI (Royal Town Planning Institute) xii, 136 planning 86, 90, 91, 107–8, 129
Ruhr Area 24–5, 27, 134 spatial development guidelines (in the ESDP)
ruimtelijke planning 4 111
Russian Federation x, 9, 60, 133, 150, 167 spatial impacts of Community policies 109,
128
Sabel, C.F. 124 spatial planning 1, 48, 56–7, 69, 87, 119, 146,
Sack, R.D. 176 165, 170, 172, 174, 181; approach 106,
Saint Simon, Claude-Henri de 47, 98 110–11, 132–33, 136; competence
Salez, Patrick xiii for 88, 118, 120–2, 128–9, 145; 166,
Sapir, André 157, 169; Sapir Report 157 170, 177; coordination, integration 1–3,
Sarkozy, Nicolas 85 65, 123, 172; EEC 31–5, 43; facet
Scharpf, Fritz 6, 89 110; INTERREG 130–2; maritime 93,
Schéma européen d’aménagement du 144, 167, 169; Member State traditions
territoire 37 77, 108, 136; ministers responsible 1,
Schéma de cohérence territoriale 2 75, 108, 121, 127, 145, 160; modes
Schéma prospectif de l’utilisation de l’espace 3–4, 108; national 87, 108, 145, 162;
communautaire 106 platform for ‘place-based’ policy 142;
Schengen Area 178 progressive meaning in UK 4, 133, 136;
Schiphol Airport 25 rationale 150; removed from Commission
Schön, Karl-Peter xii, 115, 145 vocabulary 144; soft 178; role in climate
Scholich, Dietmar 121 change policy 154; strategic 3–4, 15, 28,
Schuhmacher, Kurt 19 83, 111, 145; transnational and cross-
Schuman, Robert 15 border 138
Schuster Report 3–4, 110 spatial positioning 15, 180
Scotland 133, 136 spatial vision xii, xiv, 1, 4–6, 21, 58, 80, 91,
sector 90–1, 96–7, 110, 128, 138–9, 146, 106, 130, 180; of Europe 163, 183; of
154; conflict with planning 3, 11, 69, France 107, 180–1; of the North West
78–9, 87, 110, 126, 150; coherence of European Metropolitan Areas 131, 134;
of the Baltic Sea Areas 134
206
Spain ix, 37, 67, 78, 86, 94, 99, 102, 114,
119, 166
Stam, Max and Lotte 19
Stead, Dominic xiii, 77
Steigenga, Willem 27
Shetter, John 86
Sixth Progress Report on Cohesion 166
Slovakia x, 180
Smith, General Sir Rupert 184–5
Städtefünfeck see Pentagon
Strategy for a Sustainable Development of the
European Union 132, 152
Strasbourg 160
Strubelt, Wendelin 18, 91
Structural Funds 94–5, 109, 128, 130, 132,
152, 165; becoming serious business 99,
102–3, beneficiaries of 113–14, 165;
see also ERDF
structural outline sketch of north-west Europe
39–40
Study Programme on European Spatial
Planning 116
subsidiarity 59, 70, 121, 126–7, 153, 164
sustainability 2, 69, 93, 108, 111, 163, 165,
170
Sweden x, 78, 93, 108, 119, 135, 167
Switzerland 9, 34, 55, 82, 86, 174, 178
SWOT-analysis (Strengths-Weaknesses-
Opportunities-Threats) 103
Tampere (venue of Ministerial) 136
Tampere Action Programme 109, 124, 128–9,
135, 155
The Hague 19
TEN (Trans European Network) 36–7, 53, 69,
91, 95–6, 100, 109, 119, 128, 147, 151,
174
Tennessee Valley Authority 19
Territorial Agenda of the European Union
106, 117, 129, 132, 134, 156–8,
164; French role 84; German role 89,
120; implementation of 153, 161–2;
lack of maps 114; making of 147–52;
Portuguese role 153–5; Slovenian role
160; review 164; territorial cohesion 145;
see also First Action Programme
territorial cohesion x, 1, 3, 114, 123, 153;
added value 142, 162; concept 1, 13, 80,
129, 154, 161, 163, 165; Barca Report
169; Constitution 136, 157; definition,
meaning of 158–60, 163–6, 170, 181;
Dutch attitude 165; EU institutions
supportive 163; ‘Europe 2020’ 173;
European model of society xii; European
Index
Parliament 72; French influence 77,
80–4, 136, 141, 143–5, 147, 160–2,
164; future 11, 170–1; German attitudes
93, 121, 145, 164 Green Paper 157–9;
governance dimension 2, 142; Hungarian
attitude 165; ministers responsible 86,
145; policy 1–3, 5, 11, 77, 145–7,
158–9, 163–4, 169–70, 182; objective
of the Union 122, 170; open method
of coordination 142; Paris Conference
160; rationale 2; Polish attitude 166;
reach 2; shared competence 10, 120,
142; support from EU institutions 163;
Territorial Agenda 145–52; territorial
diversity 162; unique selling point 2; UK
attitude 165; see also Green Paper on
Territorial Cohesion; European spatial
planning/territorial cohesion policy
Territorial Cohesion and Urban Matters
(subcommittee of the Committee on
Coordination of the Funds) 153, 155
Territorial Cooperation Unit (horizontal unit at
DG REGIO) 167
territorial impact assessment 150–1, 161, 163,
165
Territorial State and Perspectives of the
European Union
territoriality 110, 176–7
Tinbergen, Jan 20
Titecat, M. 135
Torremolinos Charter 43, 45, 54–8, 60, 89,
103; product of voluntary cooperation
119; reference to in Gendebien Report
63, 66, 68
Town Planning Institute see also RTPI 17
Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe
86, 101–2, 141–2, 157
Treaty of Amsterdam 132, 143–4
Treaty of Lisbon xiii, 2, 10, 12, 43, 62, 73, 93,
102–3, 121–12, 144, 153–5, 157–8,
161, 166–7, 181
Treaty of Maastricht xi, 33, 141–3
Treaty of Nice 144, 174
Treaty of Rome 13, 15–16, 31–43, 54, 65,
67, 96
Tsoukalis, L. 88, 172, 181
Turkey 9
UK (United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland), 17–20, 72, 176, 180;
budget rebate 157; cannot profit from
Common Agricultural Policy 41, 63;
context shaping application of ESDP 133,
136; Europscepticism 100; holding EU
Index
Presidency 117, 120 147–8; membership
of the EEC of 32, 39, 41, 43, 63; national
spatial framework 136; opinion leader on
‘renationalisation’ of EU cohesion policy
88, 93, 136, 164–5, 172–3; outside
Schengen Area 178; participation in
INTERREG 133; planners embracing
spatial planning 4, 133; planning
discretionary 78; planning anathema to
Conservatives 108; positive attitude of
New Labour towards EU and planning
120, 145; south east of 25
UK English 4, 108
Ukraine 60
ultra-peripheral areas 8,
unbalanced development 47, 94
Unwin, Raymond 18
Upton, Robert xiii
Urban Development, Territorial Cohesion
(horizontal unit of DG REGIO) 11, 159
urbanisation, urban development 19–20, 23,
27, 47, 49, 51–2, 87, 113, 162
Urban Networks in Europe 119
US (United States) xii–xiii, 9, 17–20, 25, 32,
34, 63, 111–12
Valk, Arnold van der xi, 7
Vandermotten, C. 117
Vanhove, N. 24, 38
Vanier, M. 107
207
VASAB (Visions and Strategies around the
Baltic Sea) 134
Verantwortunsgemeinschaften (large-scale
alliances for joint responsibility) 92
Vienna-Bratislava-Győr Triangle 180
Vigar, Geoff 177
Vink, Jasper 22, 31, 34, 39–40
Wales 136
Walloon Region xi, 38, 62, 64, 107, 119, 134,
178
Waterhout, Bas xi, xiii, 2, 5, 114–16, 118, 127,
144
Wegener, Michael 113
Western Balkans 9, 154
White Paper on European Governance 132
Williams, R.H. (Dick) ix, 5–6, 15, 110
Witsen, Jenno xiii
Working Party on Regional Planning (of the
Council of Europe) 45–54
World Bank 159; Report 2009 149, 159
World Economic Planning Congress 19
World Wildlife Fund 175
Wulf-Mathies, Monika 1–2, 128
Yaro, R.D. (Bob) xii
Zeitlin, Jonathan 124
Zimmermann, Horst 92
Zonneveld, Wil xi, xiii, 15n, 85, 106, 144