Let’s Play Doctors of Space:

Strategic Spatial Planning as Spatial Play

First draft

Regional Growth Agenda (RSA)

28-31th May 2005, Aalborg, Denmark

Richard Ek

The Department of Service Management

Lund University, Campus Helsingborg

Box 882

S-251 08 Helsingborg

Sweden

Abstract

The ‘comeback’ of strategic spatial planning in Europe and elsewhere makes it urgent to deconstruct and analyse how spatial planners and policy makers do strategic spatial planning (strategic spatial planning as a verb, as performance), using specific spatial knowledge/power resources. In this paper, the first step towards a conceptual framework for the study of doing strategic spatial planning as spatial play is presented. The conceptual framework is built on the following theoretical sources: The IMAGES framework, the cultural sociology of space framework, different disciplinary perspectives on play, Louis Marin’s account on utopia as spatial play and, tentatively Jean Hillier’s recent work on planning fantasies. Special focus will be on what seems to be a crucial element in doing strategic spatial planning: the spatialisation of ideas.

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Introduction[1]

Cross-border regions (CBR) are currently very much on the agenda because, in different policy and planning discourses, they are regarded as laboratories for European integration.[2] Although not a new phenomenon, CBR are today an explicit strategic objective pursued by different social forces on different spatial scales and in circulation in different policy and planning networks.[3] As political projects, CBR are often technocratic in character,[4] forums for limited forms of participatory democracy[5] and governed by a network of opaque organizations that together constitute a cross-border regional elite.[6]

Partly due to the political relevance[7] and ideological character[8] of CBR, a critical, social constructivist body of literature on the political geography of CBR has crystallized.[9] Issues that have received attention include the social (sometimes neo-colonial) significance of borders,[10] cultural and institutional hindrances for cross-border cooperation,[11] CBR as glocal arenas for neo-liberal political strategies,[12] CBR and cross-border networking as competitive (geopolitical) strategies,[13] CBR as a new (visionary) scale of political space and governance building,[14] narratives and representations of CBR building,[15] and CBR political elitist tendencies.[16]

This paper is intended as a contribution to that field, and focuses on the possible institutionalization of a new spatial scale, namely the extra large cross-border region (here shortened to CBR XL).[17] As a discursive phenomenon within the contemporary European spatial policy and planning field, the CBR XL cannot be separated from the ambitions and attempts to create a Europe of flows through the trans-European transport network and other infrastructure investments in transport and communication.[18] Recently, the notion of mega-corridors or Euro corridors - massive infrastructure corridors connecting at least two urban agglomerations - has been launched.[19] However, in the spatial policy and planning field, these Euro Corridors are regarded and represented as more than infrastructure projects. They are European developmental corridors in a wider sense; extra large cross-border regions in the making. The CBR XL is a discursive interface between cross-border regional regimes (and their attempt to enhance ‘their’ CBR economic competitiveness through infrastructure investments) and transport and communication planners and policymakers (and their attempt to create the pre-conditions for a European monotopia[20]). ‘Region thinking’ and ‘infrastructure thinking’ are becoming interwoven to a greater extent than ever before in the field of European spatial policy and planning.

Further, the CBR XL phenomenon is being studied in accordance with the analytical and methodological framework labeled IMAGES (Integrated Multi-level Analysis of the Governance of European Space).[21] A call for a critical, integrated and value-based research agenda on the production of EUropean space, the IMAGES framework stresses the importance of ‘the spatialization of ideas’, i.e. “how spatialities, or framings of space and spatial relations, are ‘constructed’ in spatial policy discourses”.[22] In connection with this approach, I argue that the construction of spatialities, framings of space and spatial relations is based on a specific geographical imagination colored by an organic world-view and expressed through, for instance, organic metaphors. More particularly, I argue that a ‘sticky’ heritage of Malthusian, Social-Darwinist and Neo-Lamarckian thinking is clearly present in the European spatial policy and planning field, especially when it comes to how CBR are strategically represented as geo-economic ‘entities’ whose function is to secure economic lebensraum in contemporary Europe.

The thesis that the European spatial policy and planning field is characterized by an organic geographical imagination is illustrated by a case study of a CBR XL in the making: ‘The European Corridor’, a planned infrastructure corridor from Stockholm to Berlin that overlaps other CBR such as the Øresund Region and the cross-border cooperation project between the Øresund Region, Southern Denmark and Northern Germany known as STRING (Southwestern Baltic Sea Trans-Regional Area Implementing New Geography). This paper is therefore preliminary, as in order to do the IMAGES framework justice, more research needs to be conducted.

A theoretical framework is presented in the next section, in the form of a discussion as to how investment in communication and transport infrastructure slowly pushes European space towards something monotopic -, a concept that has been developed by Jensen and Richardson.[23] As infrastructure is prioritized, the urban landscape increasingly takes the shape of a ‘splintered urbanism’,[24] within the wider creation of new state spaces and the rescaling of urban governance into competition-oriented networks of city-regions.[25] As a specific state spatial strategy, the ambition to implement CBR XL or Euro corridors[SG1] is then presented and followed by comments as to how the CBR XL increases the relativization of scale.[26]

In the third section, the methodological framework of IMAGES is discussed in more detail, in combination with Richardson and Jensen’s call for a cultural sociology of space, i.e. an explicit sensitiveness towards space and spatiality that emphasizes the material dimensions of human agency, the significance of power, how meaning is attached to the spatiality of social life and how representations of space and spatial practices are created and enacted on particular spatial scales. At the end of this section, a sketch model is presented which analyzes the ‘spatialization of ideas’ and uses the concept of ‘spatial play’ as the main ingredient.

In the fourth section, the presence of Malthusian, Social-Darwinist and Neo-Lamarckian thinking in the European spatial policy and planning field is argued for. In section five, the European Corridor case study mentioned above is introduced and schematically analyzed in accordance with the IMAGES framework. Finally, the concluding argument is presented, namely that the CBR XL not only indicates a trajectory towards a monotopic splintered urbanism, but also a dromotopic splintered inter-regionalist condition in Europe today.

Monotopia, Splintered Urbanism and the Relativization of Scale

Within the contemporary European spatial policy and planning field, the notion of organizing the territory of the EU into a space of monotopia has increased in influence. Monotopia is a conceptualization of Europe as a transnational territory arranged in order to obtain a frictionless physical and non-physical mobility and make the highest possible speed in transport and communication possible.[27] Only a zero-friction European society based on an increasing harmonization of physical and non-physical mobility within the space of flows[28] will be able to successfully compete with other economic macro-regions like NAFTA - at least according to one of the discourses justifying monotopia’s story-lines.[29] An efficient and all-encompassing infrastructure is a specific requirement and therefore has great significance in the European spatial policy and planning field, as well as in other political-economic discourses of European integration in general. There are several reasons for this. One is that theories of European integration are based on different economic micro- and macro models that are essentially aspatial.[30] In order to create the conditions the models demand, the distance variable has either to be eliminated or reduced as much as possible. Another reason is that the notion of the economic usefulness of infrastructure in general, and transnational infrastructure networks in particular, has become an established and taken-for-granted part of European policy. As a consequence, the central importance of a strengthened infrastructure permeates, and even constitutes, strategic treaties, programs and policy documents such as INTERREG, ESDP and TEN-T; all important discursive cornerstones in the discourse of monotopia.[31]

The importance of infrastructure, sometimes per se, is not only manifested on the EU scale, but also at cross-border region level. CBR embody the European vision and ambition towards economic integration in that their political boundaries do not function as institutional barriers that prevent flows or transactions of any kind. ‘Peripheral’ areas have been encouraged by the EU to create cross-border cooperation in order to stimulate growth and increase competitiveness.[32] At the same time, ‘central’ regions, i.e. large city-regions, have initiated cross-border co-operation by following slightly different policy rationalities. For Brenner, in his investigation into the major role that urban regions have played as key sites of contemporary state institutional and spatial restructuring, metropolitan governance has intentionally been functionally re-scaled to something regional, in order to maintain or improve the position of big cities in the European urban hierarchy.[33] As a key focal point and target for territorial competitiveness strategies the regional scale has been consolidated and local economies have been amalgamated into regionally configured territorial units.[34] For instance, through an elevated collaboration with Scania in the South of Sweden, an area conceptualized as the Øresund Region, Copenhagen has attempted to enlarge its economic hinterland and become the main urban center in Northern Europe, in competition with Stockholm and Berlin.[35]

Brenner also mentions the expansion of cooperative relationships among geographically non-contiguous cities and regions. These inter-urban and inter-regional networks have emerged in three main forms: sectoral networks (e.g. localities that have specialized in similar industries), spatial networks (e.g. geographically similar cities and regions as CBR) and thematic networks (partly overlapping the aforementioned forms) with reference to specific policy issues such as urban decay or the promotion of small business infrastructures.[36] These initiatives introduce a new and more complex spatial referent: a multi-nodal network rather than a continuous region, and competition among individual geographical units that has become paralleled by these interurban and interregional networks[37] and that tries to ‘span space’ among spatially dispersed nodes in order to create selective ‘leapfrog’ geographies.[38] For Brenner this indicates that:

In effect, interurban networks have opened up an additional parameter of state space – defined by nodal connectivity rather than by territorial enclosure or interscalar articulation – within which state spatial projects and state spatial strategies[39] may be articulated. Contrary to some scholarly predictions (e.g. Castells 2004), networked forms of governance appear unlikely, at the present time, to supersede the territorialized institutional architecture of modern statehood. Nonetheless, governance networks are arguably being embedded within territorialized political spaces, and intermeshed with ongoing rescaling processes, in increasingly complex, conflictual, and contradictory ways.[40]

This tendency indicates an increased relativization of scale as the basis for organizing economic and political relations as the competition among different geographical units to become the new anchorage point of capital accumulation increases. New places, spaces and scales are crystallized, although few are explicitly institutionalized.[41] However, for Jessop:

…as new scales emerge and/or existing scales gain in institutional thickness, social forces also tend to develop new mechanisms to link or coordinate them. This generates increasing complexity of vertical, horizontal, diagonal, centripetal, centrifugal and vertical ways…we now see a proliferation of discursively constituted and institutionally materialized and embedded spatial scales (whether terrestrial, territorial or telematic) that are related in increasingly complex tangled hierarchies rather than being simply nested one within the other, with different temporalities as well as spatialities.[42]

Even if CBR XL do not become a new ‘anchorage point’ in the political and economic landscapes of Europe, they make up, according to Jessop, a spatial scale level that is part of the intertwined geographical hierarchy of European space, relationally constituting and constituted by other places, space and scales. The institutional and material ‘impact’ of CBR XL may well be considerable, since they are so closely tied to the issue of infrastructure and communication and transportation networks, or more precisely, the increased ambition to implement mega- or Euro corridors.

The corridor concept is an old planning concept that has been transformed into something multi-faceted in the European spatial policy and planning field. As early as 1882, the Spanish urbanist, Soria y Mata, designed an urban model based on the conviction that urban extensions had to be adjusted in a specific way in order to make efficient transport possible.[43] Today, the Euro corridors is defined as a combination of one or several main infrastructure axes that connects major urban areas with large flows of (usually) cross-border transportation and communication. The ambition is that these corridors will secure unhampered passage through institutionally and technically fragmented European territory and eventually contribute to the implementation of a monotopic Europe of flows. The Euro corridor is, however, regarded and represented as more than a bundle of infrastructures. The Commission of the European Communities (CEC) stated in the ESDP that they are developmental corridors in a wider sense:

These corridors can strengthen the spatial cohesion of the EU and they are an essential instrument of spatial development for the co-operation between cities. The spatial concept of Euro corridors [SG2]can establish connections between the sectorial policies, such as transport, infrastructure, economic development, urbanization and environment. In the development perspective for Euro corridors, it should be clearly indicated in which areas the growth of activities can be clustered and which areas have to be protected as open space. There are a great number of potential corridors in the EU. Some corridors are already well-developed. In other regions such corridors have to be developed and connected with existing ones. Important missing links and secondary networks should be established.[44]

The corridor is further functionally defined as an infrastructure axis (in terms of traffic engineering), an economic development axis and an urbanization axis (the basis for the direction of future urbanization). Infrastructure and traffic are not only regarded as being derived from social and economic processes generally, but also considered to have a significant influence on these processes, and in the continuation of spatial development and spatial pattern in general.[45] Since corridors are as much about economic development and urban growth as about infrastructure, every city and region tries - through strategic planning and policy making - be part of at least one major Euro corridor, and preferably several.[46]

In this strategic planning and policy making, ‘corridor thinking’ and ‘region thinking’ blend. As much of Europe has already been covered by variously desk-produced ‘super regions’ of different kinds and themes mainly based on urban clusters and distinctive geographical features,[47] the CBR XL indicates a new thematic ‘super-region’ based on (the vision of the) transnational premium networks.[48] However, in this ‘corridor’ thinking, as in the Western world in general, infrastructures are assumed to be integrators of space that bind cities, regions and nations into cohesive territories.[49] This assumption is problematic, according to Stephen Graham, who argues that there is an uneven emergence of ‘premium networked spaces’, that is ‘…new or retrofitted transport, telecommunications, power or water infrastructures that are customized precisely to the needs of powerful users and spaces…’[50] For Brenner, the constructions of these premium-networked spaces are state (spatial) strategies that promote a concentration of socio-economic activities and investments in order to agglomerate socio-economic assets and resources in particular locations.[51] The result is a ‘splintered urbanism’ or set of processes within which infrastructure networks are ‘unbundled’ in ways that fragment the social and material fabric of cities.[52]

To conclude this section, a step towards the realization of a European monotopia has been taken as current and future infrastructures have been conceptualized as societal developmental corridors and extra large cross-border regions, i.e. competition oriented networks of at least two city-regions.[53] The CBR XL, do, however, connect and integrate discontinuous city-regions [SG3]in a selective way, as the infrastructure that fabricates the new ‘super region’ also splinters the transnational space it is supposed to make territorially cohesive.

Studying CBR XL – Towards a Methodological Framework

Böhme et al argue that since new forms of governance based on explicit spatial ideas are perpetually initiated across the EU, the conceptual, semantic and discursive dimensions of the emerging field of European spatial policy need to be addressed. This is certainly not an easy task. Such an approach has to be taken within a critical, integrated and value based research agenda (IMAGES) – focusing on the deconstruction of the new rationality for organizing European space – since there is a lack of an analytical framework that probes the ways that the construction of new spatial agendas are taking place, and reveal if and how they reproduce and even increase inequalities and injustices.[54] In other words, there is a: ‘…need to focus on the spatial ideas that have become dominant in EU spatial policy, and…how these ideas are institutionalized in multi-level policy-making systems’ in Europe today.[55]

Six perspectives on European spatial policy constitute the analytical framework: the spatialization of ideas and the spatial ideas per se; creation of policy agendas and agenda-setting; the construction of new forms of policy knowledge intended to legitimate the spatial ideas; relations between scales and sectors in multi-level governance settings; the democratic and consensual nature of policy-making; and finally, the consequences of Europeanization on national, regional and local scales (investigations into the degree of homogenization and diversity through aerial comparison).