The Institutionalisation of European Spatial Planning

The Institutionalisation of European Spatial Planning aims to clarify the enterprise of European spatial planning. The emphasis of the book lies on the need for a better understanding of the process of European integration in general. It particularly points at the emerging middle range theories that used concepts that were showing similarity to those that academics –those writing about planning– were accustomed to, such as networks, discourses and governance. The focus of this book is mostly on the post-European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP)– the Committee of Spatial Development – from 1999 until now. As it is collection of articles, it has a different gestation process and does not tell a story from A to Z. What this book is about, however, is merely the issue concerning the institutional capacity of the ESDP and whether this has evaporated or not. The fact that this book exists at all suggests it has not

Closing the Gap: Territorial Cohesion through Polycentric Development

This article discusses and analyses national polycentric development policies aiming at cohesion. Due to its insertion in the 1999 European Spatial Development Perspective ‘polycentricity’ has become an important concept in discussions on Europe’s territorial and economic development. Its content remains however rather unclear. This paper contributes to the discussion on the meaning of polycentricity by looking at national polycentric development policies. These policies can be distinguished according to two types of disparities, or gaps, which they try to bridge. The first concerns the gap between different levels of the national urban hierarchy, the most common being the gap between a primate capital city and the next category of cities. The second gap is the one between cities located in regions with diverging rates of socio-economic development. On the basis of a conceptual and quantitative discussion of these gaps a basic definition is presented of what polycentric development policies are about: policies that address the distribution of economic and/or economically relevant functions over the urban system in such a way that the urban hierarchy is flattened in a territorially balanced way. A discussion of the polycentric development policies of France, Poland and Germany illustrates our findings. The article concludes that for the period 2007-2013 – the new EU budget period – a clear synergy is needed between EU and national policies and that without such synergy policies cannot be effective