European spatial planning as governmentality: An inquiry into rationalities, techniques and...

Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 2015, volume 33, pages 828 – 845

doi:10.1068/c13158

European spatial planning as governmentality: an inquiry into rationalities, techniques, and manifestations

Sami MoisioDepartment of Geosciences and Geography, PO Box 64, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland; e-mail: [email protected] Juho LuukkonenDepartment of Geography/RELATE Centre of Excellence, University of Oulu, PO Box 3000, FIN-90014, Finland; e-mail: [email protected] 6 June 2013; in revised form 25 September 2013; published online 14 February 2014

Abstract. As a governing process in which ‘European political space’ is dissected and regulated, the EU’s nascent spatial planning opens up a number of empirical and conceptual challenges for research. Even if the ‘governmentalization of Europe’ and the associated mechanisms, tactics, instruments, vocabularies, and technologies through which the power and rule of the EU are effected have been examined, the concept of governmentality offers a useful perspective to explicate European spatial planning. We analyze European spatial planning through the lens of governmentality and offer an ethnographic take on the issue of European spatial planning by problematizing the manifestations of the EU in spatial planning practices in northern Finland.

Keywords: governmentality, policy transfer, European spatial planning, European integration

1 IntroductionSince the late 1980s, establishment of Europe as a governable unit has taken place within policy sectors ranging from education to security. Since the deepening of integration from the late 1980s onwards, this process has been characterized by practices of the single market, the Eurozone, the Europe of regions and cities, the Schengen region of free movement, the European research area, the European education area, and the area of freedom, security, and justice (see, for example, Barry, 1993; Rosamond, 2002; Walters and Haahr, 2005).

Since the 1990s the EU has invested a notable amount of policy capital into the formation of EU-wide territorial ideas and corresponding agendas for effective policy implementation (cf Rumford, 2006; Williams, 1996). In its explicitly spatial terminology, establishing Europe as a governable unit is particularly straightforward in the field of so-called European spatial planning,(1) which gained strength in the 1990s. This has been a peculiar process, given that (1) We use the concept of European spatial planning with reference in particular to the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) and its follow-up documents, as well as to the related practices that have emerged since the turn of the century. Jensen and Richardson (2004), for instance, use the concept of European spatial policy with almost similar meaning. We underscore the fact that in the history of European postwar integration European spatial planning denotes a strategic (planning) attempt to reimagine Europe as a territory. One of our referees pointed out that there has been a significant change from a discourse in terms of spatial planning to one in terms of territorial cohesion or integrated territorial development and thus suggested that the role of spatial planning has diminished. We are well aware of this discursive change. However, the launch of a territorial agenda in 2007 rather strengthened the role of spatial planning for, whether understood as political goals as in the green paper on territorial cohesion (CEC, 2008) or as principal methods for applying spatial planning as defined by certain planning scholars (eg, Dühr et al, 2010), the political concepts of territorial cohesion

European spatial planning as governmentality 829

spatial planning has been one of the key constituents of state territoriality since the 19th century and thus what Foucault (1991) famously conceptualized as the “governmentalization of the state”.

The significance and effectiveness of European spatial planning as a form of policy or as a programme of regulation can of course be debated (see, for example, Kunzmann, 2006). In fact, studying European spatial planning from a sectoral policy perspective may make it difficult to approach the topic as a significant aspect of integration. This is also because there are no supranational institutions with formal competence in European spatial planning, and because spatial planning issues are rarely, if ever, considered at the high-level meetings of the EU. It can similarly be argued that the development of European spatial planning has been contradictory and hesitant.

In this paper, however, we do not study European spatial planning as a self-contained policy sector with its own profession, working procedures, principles, and temporal scales (cf Kunzmann, 2006). Rather than conflating it with ‘EU regional policy’, we treat European spatial planning as an arena of interaction which is guided by certain ‘planning principles’ set out in the supranational context, but which is not restricted to planning professionals only. Rather, it gathers thousands of regional developers and other spatial experts from diverse national, supranational, and transnational institutions with potentially competing visions, understandings, and desires related to the development of Europe. As such, European spatial planning forms one of the many “spaces of Europeanization” (Clark and Jonas, 2008) which make it possible to articulate the EU as a territorial polity.

A notable milestone in the development of an EU-wide spatial system was the publication in 1999 of a political document titled the ESDP. What one author calls the mother document of European spatial planning (Faludi, 2010), the ESDP sets as its target no less than to convey “a vision of the future territory of the EU” (CEC, 1999, page 11). The ESDP and its follow-up documents represented a spatial development and/or policy framework that involved a specific spatial planning approach, with its own principles, to be applied in different national contexts in different issues (Sykes, 2008, page 540). Since the turn of the millennium, the ideas of the ESDP have not only been developed in the central follow-up documents of the ESDP but also have been incorporated into the EU’s structural funds and spatial knowledge production. At the level of representations, rationalities, and techniques, European spatial planning displays a will to bring into being a rationalized political space which could serve as a framework for the EU’s balanced economic, social, and even cultural constitution. In short, it highlights a need to achieve particular objectives at the European level (see also Waterhout, 2008, page 12).

In scholarly literature, attempts to ‘rationalize’ political space at the level of Europe have been studied primarily from three perspectives. Firstly, planning scholars have examined the development of the EU’s spatial planning (eg, Faludi, 2010) and singled out the central features of its institutionalization (eg, Waterhout, 2008). Secondly, scholars have analyzed European spatial planning as a politics of scale, as a discursive and material practice which brings together the EU’s funding mechanisms, spatial rhetoric of scale, and associated spatial imaginaries, and the related practices of EU meta-governance of the new European capital accumulation regime (Jensen and Richardson, 2004; Jessop, 2005; Leitner, 2005; MacLeod, 1999; Moisio, 2011). Finally, researchers have explicated the adoption of the EU’s spatial policy principles and mechanisms in different member states and (1) (continued).

and integrated territorial development enable the European-level debate on territory. The three ‘fronts’ of action for achieving territorial cohesion as defined in the green paper (concentration, connectivity, and cooperation), for instance, explicitly draw a picture of ‘EU’rope as a uniform spatial entity (see CEC, 2008, pages 5–8).

830 S Moisio, J Luukkonen

scrutinized the effectiveness and operation of the EU’s regional policies (eg, Böhme, 2002; Giannakourou, 2005; Shaw and Sykes, 2004). Since Ladrech (1994) coined the concept of Europeanization, the Europeanization of regional policies has been studied across the EU (for an overview, see Luukkonen, 2011; Moisio et al, 2013). This kind of research has paid attention in particular to institutional change (see Börzel and Risse, 2012) and has developed the idea of multilevel governance which perceives the territory of the EU as a complex set of interorganizational relations [see, for example, Benz and Eberlein (1999) for a critique; see also Keating (2008, pages 74–75)].

As a governing process in which European political space is dissected, maintained, and regulated, the EU’s nascent spatial planning opens up a number of empirical and conceptual challenges for research. Even if the governmentalization of Europe and the associated mechanisms, tactics, instruments, vocabularies, and technologies through which the power and rule of the EU are effected have been fruitfully examined (see in particular Walters and Haahr, 2005), there has been fairly little research that has inquired into European spatial planning using the concept of governmentality (see, however, Gualini, 2006; Jensen and Richardson, 2004).

This paper proceeds through six sections. In section 2 we discuss the nature of the EU as a creative polity. In section 3 we conceive European spatial planning through the concept of governmentality. In section 4 we discuss themes which are at the core of European spatial planning if it is to be understood as an art of governing. In section 5 we examine the peculiar manifestations of the EU in spatial planning action in northern Finland. Finally, some conclusions are drawn in section 6.

2 The EU as a site of political creativitySince the 1990s, and with the new systems of governing, the EU’s impact on the content of policies has been wider than its impact on the political systems or institutions of the union’s member states (Bulmer and Lequesne, 2005). Policy harmonization is no minor dimension of integration but should be considered as a process whereby Europe is established as a governable unit (see Barry, 1993). During the past decades, this has included significant expansion of EU-driven regulative programmes, giving rise to the ‘regulatory state’ (Majone, 1994; 1999). The issue of policy harmonization is articulated in European spatial planning in particular through the idea of integrated spatial development policy. Accordingly, the application of the ESDP is based on voluntary cooperation between all kinds of policy makers, but the interaction between involved actors is guided by certain EU-inspired regulative ideas, such as the principle of subsidiarity, and extended throughout political spaces:

“There is thus a need for close co-operation amongst the authorities responsible for sectoral policies; and with those responsible for spatial development at each respective level (horizontal co-operation); and between actors at the Community level and the transnational, regional and local levels (vertical co-operation). Co-operation is the key to an integrated spatial development policy and represents added value over sectoral policies acting in isolation. Integrated spatial development policy at EU scale must, therefore, combine the policy options for development of certain areas in such a way that national borders and other administrative hurdles no longer represent barriers to development. The ESDP provides the framework for integrated application of the policy options. Its application is not the responsibility of one authority but of a wide range of spatial development (land use, regional planning, urban planning) and sectoral planning authorities” (CEC, 1999, page 35).European spatial planning epitomizes the fact that the EU can be regarded as a site of

political creativity which seeks to bring into being new ways of governing (Walters and Haahr, 2005, page 164). The creative aspect of European spatial planning stems from its


nature as an open field which not only brings together all sorts of actors, institutions, funding mechanisms, and spatial ideas but also makes it difficult for the involved actors to recognize the complex underlying power relations. The openness also enables the utilization of various governing techniques as well as the coexistence of different kinds of spatial ideas and interpretations of Europe. The same openness, however, makes it complicated to measure the overall ‘effectiveness’ of European spatial planning.

European spatial planning is in many ways attached to political innovations of governance such as the open method of coordination—which have been introduced as ‘new or soft EU governance’—and enabled by governing techniques such as performance indicators and policy reviews (see Faludi, 2004). These techniques have sought to enable effective policy evaluation and learning through peer review and peer pressure in a number of policy sectors at the European level. The governmentalization of the EU thus proceeds in particular through the invention of policy instruments which seek to foster policy learning.

Policy evaluation and knowledge formation in the EU context can be illustrated with reference to the Lisbon Strategy launched in 2000. Its implementation is premised on a number of governing techniques which seek to enable monitoring and guiding actions within the EU. These include regularly updated reform plans, regular setting of common political and ‘numerical’ goals, reciprocal learning, recognition of ‘best practices’, and ‘evidence-based’ reporting. The implementation of the Lisbon Strategy is measured through more than one hundred indicators and subindicators which together constitute ‘European competitiveness’ and the ‘European economy’ as calculable objects which can be measured and acted upon not only in individual member states but also on the level of the EU and subregions and places. The EU seeks to coordinate policies through evaluation and evidence, setting particular limits to policy implementation in the member states and their subregions.

3 European spatial planning and governmentalityScholars have recently emphasized the institutional, contextual, and discursive elements of making European spaces (Jensen and Richardson, 2004; Jones and Clark, 2010; Rovnyi and Bachmann, 2012). In such a view Europe is conceived “as spaces of interaction within which different actors stand in particular relations with each other” (Bachmann, 2011, page 60) or as a planning space which competing power factions seek to mobilize for their own political purposes (Clark and Jones, 2008).

The concept of governmentality seems particularly suitable for a political geographical approach to the issue of European spatial planning, for the concept stimulates one to explicate the means, mechanisms, procedures, instruments, techniques, and vocabularies by which authority is constituted and rule accomplished (cf Dean, 1999, pages 31–32; also Moisio and Paasi, 2013). In particular, it may help to understand how territory has been practised at different stages of European integration. Foucault (1991) referred to the concept of governmentality in his conceptualization of a historically evolved mode of power. Accordingly, ‘governmentalization of the state’ took place from the 18th century onwards through the development of liberal government whereby population in its entirety was taken up by the government of the state as the primary ‘problem’ and target of regulation. Governmentality, in this ‘narrow’ usage, refers to historically evolved procedures for directing human behaviour in light of particular techniques and knowledge.

European spatial planning can be regarded as a means to direct and control the ‘EU population’, and it thus belongs to what Foucault once labelled apparatuses of security (see also Brighenti, 2010, page 55). But at the same time it is more than that. The complex relationship between population and territory is at the heart of the concept of governmentality. This is the case even if territory was somewhat marginalized in Foucault’s account of sovereignty–discipline–governmentality (see Elden, 2007b, page 32). However, in his lectures in 1977–78,


Foucault himself discussed the practices of spatial (town) planning as epitomizing the historic emergence of population as a calculable object and primary target of government. As Elden (2007a, page 578) notes, Foucault’s notion of the politics of calculation (which is central in the formation of governmentality as a mode of government) is crucial, “but not as something which only manifests itself in population, but, rather, in territory too”. Elden (2013, page 17), again, offers that

“Territory and population emerge at a similar historical moment as new ways of rendering, understanding and governing the people and land. Both are crucial political questions—biopolitics and geopolitics exist, not in tension or as alternatives, but as entirety implicated in each other, intertwined in complicated and multiple ways.”There has been some debate as to whether the concept of governmentality can be

operationalized beyond the ‘domestic’ sphere of the state (see Kangas, in press). Scholars have nonetheless found the concept relevant in the context of ‘international spaces’ (see Larner and Walters, 2005).

A perspective of governmentality is perhaps more than anything else asking ‘how’ questions. In its broader meaning it guides thinking towards considering how governing involves and is based on “representations, knowledge and particular expertise regarding that which is to be governed” (Larner and Walters, 2005, page 2). This is a useful premise as it allows conceptualization of the governance aspect of European spatial planning not limited to institutions or in terms of particular ideologies but rather as “practical activity that can be studied, historicized and specified at the level of the rationalities, programmes, techniques, and subjectivities which underpin it and give it form and effect” (Walters, 2012, page 2).

In European spatial planning ‘EU territory’ emerges as a practice or act rather than physical space. This perspective was developed by Barry (1993), who examined the political rationalities of the formation of the single market and the associated governmental techniques of harmonization. Barry inquired into the spatial ideas upon which both the single market and the associated techniques were predicated, and in so doing set a research agenda by trying to understand “how, and to what extent, territory is articulated in the activity of European government” (page 317). In their pioneering work Jensen and Richardson (2004) teased out the ways in which the EU’s spatial policy has been discursively constructed and rendered meaningful in representations related with the ESDP and its predecessors. By drawing on Foucault’s conceptualizations of the linkages between discourse and institutional structures and practices, and by applying this ‘governmentality perspective’ onto EU spatial policy documents, they traced a spatial imagination or vision of the EU which they called a space of monotopia:

“By this we mean an organized, ordered and totalised space of zero-friction and seamless logistic flows … this idea of monotopic Europe lies at the heart of the new ways of looking at European territory. We will argue that a rationality of monotopia exists, and that it is inextricably linked with a governmentality of Europe, expressed in a will to order space, to create a seamless and integrated space within the context of the European project, which is being pursued through the emerging field of European spatial policy” (page 3). European spatial planning can be seen both as a way of imagining and reordering European

spatial composition as well as a technical manoeuvre directed at establishing this space as a governable entity, and as a possible object of government (cf Barry, 1993, page 319). It is thus crucial to ask how, and in what forms, territory is articulated in the activity of governing Europe in European spatial planning and what kind of spatial ideas, knowledge, expertise, means of calculation, and political rationality are employed in the practices of European spatial planning—that is, in order to regulate and monitor ‘Europe’, the ‘European economy’, and the ‘conduct of Europeans’.


The European spatial planning system does not represent an attempt by the EU to monopolize the right to speak authoritatively about European regions and places. It rather evidences a will to govern Europe as an identifiable political unit and to rework its spatiality. In this capacity European spatial planning aims to act at a distance by regulating—not directing—the conduct of social and bureaucratic activities across member states within the EU. This, again, resonates with the idea of the EU as a “regulatory state” in which regulation is the most significant type of policy making (Majone, 1999, page 2).

Viewing European spatial planning as an art of governing affords answers to questions such as who or what is to be governed, how they should be governed, and to what ends should they be governed (Rose et al, 2006, pages 84–85). The will to govern thus cannot exist without recognition and analysis of the problems upon which this will is predicated. Given the associations between “a way of representing and knowing a phenomenon, on the one hand, and a way of acting upon it so as to transform it, on the other” (Miller and Rose, 2008, page 16), an analytic distinction between political rationalities and governmental technologies is significant also in the study of European spatial planning. Political rationalities refer to the ways and styles of rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it is amenable to calculation and programming. European spatial planning is thus predicated on recognizing the particular problems Europe is facing. Governmental technologies of European spatial planning, in turn, are composed of the tools, devices, and personnel which enable authorities to imagine and act upon the conduct of persons individually and collectively. The rationalities and technologies of European spatial planning are two indissociable dimensions through which one might characterize and analyze such planning.

European spatial planning is not an independent policy arena but rather forms part of a larger assemblage of practices of European integration, thus reflecting the political rationalities which different EU policies are predicated upon and which bind these policy fields together. The European spatial planning system cannot be separated from, say, the policies of the single market or the Lisbon Strategy (Jones and Clark, 2010) with its underlying political goal of a radical transformation of the European economy (CEC, 2000) and tendency to naturalize territorial competition and competitiveness [for an overview on spatial competitiveness see Bristow (2010)]. The point here is not to argue that the relationship between the ESDP and the Lisbon Strategy (which came after the adoption of the ESDP) has been smooth or unchanging. However, as far as underlying political rationalities are concerned, the Lisbon Strategy and the ESDP, as both ongoing and parallel processes, have been seamlessly intertwined. Both have been premised on the discourses of the knowledge-based economy and society, competitiveness, talent, innovation capability, and attractiveness (see also CEC, 2005; 2010). It is therefore only logical that in the ESDP the population of the EU is mainly perceived through the lenses of the skills needed in a global knowledge-based economy in which “jobs are increasingly requiring more qualifications” (CEC, 1999, page 29).

Even if ‘competitiveness’ already in 1980 became central to the debates on the need to revitalize European integration in the face of all kinds of exogenous challenges (Rosamond, 2002, page 165), the central documents of European spatial planning disclose how the idea of competitiveness has been transferred from being a national issue to a matter of European importance. In turn, “competition in the Single European Market” is mentioned in the ESDP as a driving force behind European spatial development policies (CEC, 1999, page 7). Irrespective of the fact that social cohesion is one of the key elements of the ESDP, European spatial planning epitomizes an attempt to construe the EU in market terms as well as to tailor policies and promulgate a political culture that features European city-regions and places as rational actors of economic competition. Indeed, one of the central goals which the ESDP document of 1999 recognized was developing the EU’s competitiveness on a global scale by integrating European regions into the global economy (page 20).


The governmentality-inspired analysis not only asks with what kind of political rationalities European spatial planning operates but also investigates the techniques of monitoring and knowledge constitutive of it. It also examines what kind of subjectivities European spatial planning underwrites and explains how European spatial planning is put into place in different spatial and temporal contexts. Thus, one may not only inquire as to how the EU is framed as a calculable geopolitical reality in European spatial planning but also take a closer look at the strategies various actors deploy around these framings.

4 Constituting the territory of the EU as a calculable entity: spatial planning knowledge and the governmentalization of the EU4.1 Spatial ontology of European spatial planning: soft, relational, networkedIn European spatial planning, as in the most recent policy literature, Europe is conceived of as composing of all sorts of networks; or, more specifically, it is presented in the documents of European spatial planning as a territory which could be construed through all kinds of networks of objects and persons alike. In this context, network is a flexible concept which receives its meaning from literatures ranging in topic from policy networks to business, social, urban, and infrastructure networks. What gives coherence to the concept of European spatial planning is actually an emphasis on the complex geography of the knowledge-based economy, which is perceived as being characterized by a fluid surface of mobile, unstable, loose, and informal linkages that extend beyond the purported hierarchies of the territorially fixed nation-state (see CEC, 1999; cf Barry, 1996, page 36). The emphasis on relational space is understandable given that the specific themes related to the knowledge-based economy and economic competitiveness are often ultimately predicated upon the intriguing conception that the space of the global economy is first and foremost a space of networks (cf Walters, 2012, page 3).

European spatial planning documents celebrate different kinds of ‘soft spaces’ and ‘fuzzy boundaries’ as (definitive) territorial aspects of the EU. In this capacity, European spatial planning represents an attempt to build up informal, nonstatutory spatialities of planning, with relations stretching across formally established territories and scales of planning (see Metzger and Schmitt, 2012). This unbounded space of connectivity and movement is portrayed as a combination of nodes, corridors, and European megaregions which not only constitute the EU as a mobile territorial polity but also contribute to the formation of an entity which extends far beyond its official turf (see CEC, 1999).

European spatial planning is structured around the ideas of a competitive global marketplace, which is understood as a system of multiple interactions between competing urban spaces. In this capacity, European spatial planning displays a concern to replace the state with a new European urban order with a wider space of global circulation (see CEC, 1999; 2008). Even though the precise meaning of polycentricity has remained elusive in scholarly literature (Davoudi, 2003), in European spatial planning the concept is used to articulate the reworking of European development through connections which integrate Europe into the ‘global’; these network-based connections effect a managing of global value chains which are characterized by geographical accumulation of the most productive and prestigious activities to certain ‘privileged places’ (CEC, 1999; cf Porter, 1995; Scott, 2001). In European spatial planning, Europe appears as a constellation of city-regions [on the rise of the politics of competitive city-regionalism in Western Europe see Brenner (2004)], as an attractive urban machine (see CEC, 1999, pages 22–25). European spatial planning documents present Europe as a political space wherein the space of absolute distance is displaced by the notion of relative and discontinuous space.

The ESDP as well as its follow-up documents interestingly resonate with certain spatial ideas and concepts which are now widely circulated not only in planning literature but also widely across the social sciences. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that European


spatial planning is predicated upon ideas that have been developed and elaborated by scholars. Especially deeply rooted seem to be the whole gamut of relationalist and new regionalist readings of space and the associated ontological condition of the present (see also Haughton et al, 2013, page 218). One may, for instance, suggest that the concept of polycentrism—as one of the key network metaphors in European spatial planning—receives its meaning (and legitimacy) in part through the idea of new regionalism. The relational ontology of space and the underlying economism of European spatial planning are similarly closely intertwined.

Planning scholars have been active in commenting on the spatial ontology of European spatial planning. Dühr et al (2010, page 58) have suggested that the ‘Euclidean’ understanding of space is outdated and misrepresents reality and ought to be replaced by a more relational understanding of space as a network of flows. In such an understanding, connectivity—instead of geographical proximity—becomes more important. Another author has recently critiqued the ‘underlying territorialism’ of the EU’s spatial development policies by labelling subsidiarity as a conservative principle which, again, misses the ‘reality’ by highlighting a notion of hard rather than relative soft space (Faludi, 2012).

A peculiar interconnection between spatial planning scholarship and the European spatial planning system has been visible since the formal launch of the ESDP. Planning scholarship has either implicitly or explicitly contributed to the constitution of European spatial planning, again demonstrating how spatial planning is based on close relations between policy makers and academics (see Phelps and Tewdwr-Jones, 2008). The explicit dimension of this interaction has manifested itself, for instance, in the institutional cooperation between the Commission of the European Communities and regional planning think tanks. To illustrate, the Academy for Spatial Research and Planning (2008), based in Hanover, Germany, significantly contributed to the formulation of the principles of the EU’s territorial cohesion policy.

Scholars have occupied positions in European spatial planning as experts and have arguably contributed to policy formation via the interface of academic work. One of the most active scholars of European spatial planning has explicitly suggested that “the roving band of planners,” referring to a new generation of people with knowledge of European spatial planning principles and goals, embody a significant ‘knowledge resource’ for the EU (see Faludi, 2010). This ‘generation’ not only represents an interesting spatial expertise but also displays the close links between planning experts, researchers with a policy-oriented focus on spatial planning issues, and policy makers within the field of European spatial planning (cf De Jong and Edelenbos, 2007).

4.2 The constitution of the territory of the EU in ESPONRegulation requires detailed knowledge of regulated activity (Majone, 1994). One significant part of European spatial planning has been an attempt to bring into existence ‘EU territory’ which can be known and acted upon. It is possible to examine European spatial planning as European governance at the level of its practices, including “the ways in which European integration is materially inscribed, included in charts and tables, or ‘scoreboards’, and made calculable” (Barry, 1994). Such an analysis requires a close examination of how things are mapped and ordered, measured, and demarcated as substances in European spatial planning, and, thus, how Europe is made known via the practices related to European spatial planning.

European spatial planning makes part of an assemblage which territorializes the EU through ‘scientific methods’. Since the 1990s, the EU has been increasingly coupled with statistics, cartographic exercises, territorial surveys, social scientific studies of the qualities of EU territory, as well as a range of other calculative practices through which the ‘EU territory’, ‘EU economy’, and ‘EU population’ become visible. European spatial planning, in this respect, displays the development of European population–territory–economy as the object of European political rule. European spatial planning thus epitomizes the ways in


which the EU is based on a particular type of expertise and knowledge. This expertise is tied to the knowledge production of different kinds of professionals, such as university scholars, who work within different EU frameworks (Moisio, 2011).

The constitutive role of scholarship in European spatial planning is nowhere as explicit as it is in the context of geographical knowledge production of the European Observation Network for Territorial Development and Cohesion (ESPON, formerly known as the European Spatial Planning Observation Network). It arguably arose out of a view on the part of those involved in the preparation of the ESDP that its ‘realization’ requires an evidence base. Since its inception, the ESDP has been coupled with an attempt to foster the production of detailed knowledge dealing with the implications of EU-wide spatial planning as well as the territorial impacts of EU-sector policies. Even though one may argue that the leadership of ESPON has recently sought to dissociate this network organization from the concept of spatial planning (if understood in a narrow sectoral sense), the ESPON has proceeded in tandem with the ESDP and has engaged numerous European academics, planners, and experts within the EU’s sphere of influence (see table 1). Their task is to provide scientific knowledge about EU-wide spatial development patterns and trends. The ESPON projects have become routine work across Europe among university scholars, while the ongoing production of this routine work has potentially allowed the Commission to monitor European spatial planning.

As Sidaway (2006, pages 8–9) point outs, the ESPON is one significant instantiation of a European planning imaginary for policy practitioners. Thus representations such as maps and reports which depict European regional development in terms of spatial networks have indeed multiplied as a result of the ESPON programmes. In 2004 an ESPON project was launched not only to explicate and investigate the application and effects of the ESDP in different parts of Europe (see Sykes, 2008, page 538) but also to achieve a more “polycentric Europe” (ESPON, 2004, page 10). The main task of the ESPON for the years 2000 to 2006 was thus no less than to build a European scientific community which would produce knowledge on the implications of the ESDP with respect to transnational and national territories (see ESPON, 2006). The latest ESPON agenda is closely tied to the general principles of European spatial planning as these are presented in the follow-up documents of the ESDP, the territorial agendas of the EU (BMVBS, 2007; Council of the European Union, 2011), and the green paper on territorial cohesion (CEC, 2008).

The ESPON has sought to foster interdisciplinary networking, which in particular combines recent advances in economics with various computational methods. As a result of the activities of the ESPON, tens of seemingly neutral reports have been published on regional development in Europe. Many of these reports are based on positivist standing, advanced statistical methods, and seemingly nonnormative reporting of findings. The major political relevance of the ESPON lies in its attempt to translate the relational spatial ontology of European spatial planning into objects of knowledge. It is crucial to note that many ESPON projects are based on comparative methodology, an approach which can be seen as inherently associated with the techniques of harmonization. Indeed, the recent goal of the ESPON is based on the declaration that we are witnessing a decade of territorial evidencing, comparisons, and balanced development within the EU (ESPON, 2007)—the underlying idea being that the techniques of spatial comparison enable policy learning. Indeed, the issue of comparability was explicitly taken up already in the ESDP report of 1999 as one of the central aspects of the application of the ESDP:

“ It is proposed that Member States 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. This will enable comparability of the presentation of spatially relevant trends in the Member States” (CEC, 1999, page 38).


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The ESPON can be considered part of a larger assemblage of calculative techniques in Europe which bring together mapping and statistical modelling in the form of territorial indica tors. These indicators are crucial as they enable spatial comparisons, and, perhaps more importantly, they serve as constitutive elements of the open method of coordination—a nonlegislative governing technique which seeks to improve policy formation and harmonization (see also Faludi, 2004).

The ESPON projects are, either explicitly or implicitly, connected to the Eurostat, which gives detailed statistics about the EU and candidate countries with regard to population, territory, and wealth, and which is quite a significant rubric in the context of constituting the EU as a calculable entity. Similarly interesting is the connection of European spatial planning with the INSPIRE directive, which came into force in 2007. This directive aims at creating an EU-wide spatial data infrastructure to assist policy making and ‘good governance’ in the EU. The ESPON also has a number of parallels with the territorial impact assessment method which was originally developed in the EU to measure and monitor different impacts of various sectoral policies across Europe (see, eg, Golobic and Marot, 2011).

5 Manifestations: ‘Europe’ in the everyday spaces of spatial policy making Given that the EU is rendered meaningful through systems of representations as well as associated rationalities and techniques of governance, one of the key tasks of political geography is to examine how the nascent European territorial governance is playing out in different geographical contexts. In this section we discuss the presence or absence of European spatial planning in the rationalities of policy making in northern Finland.(2) We are thus interested in the interconnections of the discourses of European spatial planning and local decision makers and spatial planners.(3) This is crucial given that the spaces of Europeanization form arenas of interaction within which potentially competing visions with regard to ‘European policy making’ are promoted (Clark and Jones, 2008; Luukkonen, 2012).

In the following pages we examine how and to what extent the core political rationalities, as well as spatial imaginaries identifiable in the European spatial planning, manifest them-selves in local policy practices. In a very general level this entails the presence of all those formal and informal rules, procedures, styles of doing things, as well as shared beliefs and norms which constitute and give meaning to the EU as a spatial-political entity, and which thus structure and shape political actions and outcomes within that entity.(4)

(2) Our findings are based on extensive empirical material which was gathered through observations of various regional planning events organized by a Finnish provincial planning and development authority, the Regional Council (RC) of Northern Ostrobothnia. It is a key institution with reference to the relationship between local policy making and European spatial planning, for it seeks to coordinate the interplay between provincial and EU regional policy and is responsible for formulating and implementing regional development policies in general. We participated in thirty events, ranging from the regular meetings of the board of the RC to occasional discussions and learning events organized by the office of the council that targeted local policy makers. (3) We use the term policy makers hereafter to refer to both categories. In simple terms, a policy maker is an actor who represents local spatial planning. Given our broad definition of what constitutes spatial planning, the term planner refers here to all of the officials of the RC who participated in the observed events. This group involves not only land-use planners but also project workers, regional developers, advisers, and managers; that is, officials who participate in the decision-making and planning in the province. In Finland spatial planning is not as strictly an outlined profession as, for instance, in the UK context. Spatial planners may have different educational backgrounds (from lawyers to economists and engineers) and, as is often the case, may have no formal planning education at all. (4) We do not seek to explain the presence of Europe through the institutionalist approach, which either uses the institutions as explanadum or as explanans of political dynamics within the EU polity (see, eg, Jupille and Caporaso, 1999). Nor is the intention to study the hierarchies of the institutionalization or to point out the hierarchical causalities between the EU-level and local policies (cf Exadaktylos and Radaelli, 2012; Radaelli, 2002).


Rather than arguing that the spatialized politics of Europeanization of planning is a one-way process (often to the benefit of the EU), we see the presence of Europe as a mani-festation of multidimensional policy transfers in which the role of individual policy makers in sharing and transforming spatial knowledge is considered more important than the role of discrete political units or the formal institutional relations between them (cf Prince, 2012). (5)

As we were interested in the presence of Europe at the level of political rationalities, our focus of observations was not so much on the acts of transfers themselves as on the knowledge transferred (cf Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996).(6) Policy transfers and political rationalities are seamlessly intertwined: transfers make possible the existence of different political rationalities by quite literally putting political ideas and knowledge into motion. At the same time, policy transfers are affected and made possible by political rationalities. Shared understanding of how things are and how they ought to be governed may, for instance, ease the transfer of ideas and knowledge. Moreover, political rationalities are constructed, formed, and potentially confirmed in policy transfers (see Prince, 2012). In short, political rationalities are ‘at work’ in policy transfers by regulating both ways of thinking and ways of employing knowledge—that is, by conducting transfers in both content and form.

5.1 Problematizing the presence of Europe in local contextThe presence of Europe in provincial planning practices can be placed in two overlapping categories: explicit presence and implicit presence. The former refers to the effects of the EU’s regional policies—such as the Structural Fund Programmes—on the agendas, timetables, and procedures of the meetings of provincial decision-making bodies. Explicit presence is thus in many ways the result of hard transfer of policy tools and practices between two discrete political units. The implicit presence of Europe, in turn, results from the soft transfer of spatial policy ideas, concepts, and knowledge which relate to the ways of reasoning and of employing knowledge about how European space ought to be.

In contrast to the transfer of policy tools and practices, the soft transfer of spatial knowledge and ideas is not necessarily confined to formal political processes and institutions. Thus, the interplay between actors (institutions and policy makers) is more complicated, leaving room for various interpretations and obscuring the ‘origin’ or the ‘initiator’ of the policy concept or idea transferred. Consequently, the implicit presence of Europe is more a result of circulation of knowledge and ideas wherein the intersections between the EU’s policy norms and local planning policies are not necessarily explicitly present but built into the political rationalities that inform local policy practices.

The implicit presence echoes what Jensen and Richardson (2004) have called the silent development of the EU’s spatial discourses: the often passive or unconscious adoption of a particular spatial lexicon in policy making (see also Olesen and Richardson, 2011). As such, it entails also the presence of Europe through its absence: local planning practices are informed by collective reasoning as regards not only ‘European development’ but also the ‘cold facts of globalization’.

(5) Policy transfer refers to “ a process in which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions etc. in one time and/or place is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements and institutions in another time and/or place” (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996, page 344; see also Stone, 2010).

Transfers may entail either the ‘hard’ transfer of policy contents, instruments, or administrative techniques or the ‘soft’ transfer of ideologies, policy concepts, ideas, etc (Stone, 2010). Institutions are inseparable parts of these processes as policy transfers both affect the institutional settings (eg, Bulmer and Padgett, 2005) and are effectuated through them (eg, Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000).(6) That said, the power relations (ie who speaks, what, and for whom) of the observed events cannot be ignored, for they are partly resultant of governmental technologies and rationalities (cf Dean, 1999, page 29).


5.2 The content of spatial knowledge in provincial planningIn the studied context Europe becomes present in local policy making through the adoption of a particular European spatial ontology. Local policy makers had adopted a particular understanding of the substance of space and spatial relations which resonates well not only with the explicitly EU-driven knowledge on ‘European territory’ but also with the more broadly defined European spatial thinking (see Zonneveld and Waterhout, 2005). The adoption of this ontology is manifested in how the policy makers defined the goals and principles of planning policies as well as in the ways in which the knowledge related to spatial planning was circulated and treated.

The adoption of European spatial ontology did not entail that local policy makers had ‘fully’ adopted the relationalist ‘Europe as a monotopia’ discourse in their doings, demonstrating that this dominant discourse has proven difficult to institutionalize through local planning practices (also Jensen and Richardson, 2004, page 241). Actually, Europe did not exist as a ‘smooth space’ or as a ‘shared duty’ in local discourses at all. The region in question was not positioned as part of the wider European territory whose development requires contributions from each of its regions. Nor were the other European regions used for peer reviewing or as potential sources of policy learning. Similarly, the ‘scoreboarding’ developed, for instance, by the ESPON have not become central constituents of local policy making.

However, European spatial planning manifested itself in the contents of local policies at the level of rationalities. The practices of provincial planning were predicated upon the rationales of economic competitiveness and growth, which also gave meaning for the territory of the EU and for the spatial planning activities directed towards it. Spatial affairs were thus usually discussed at the events from an economics perspective. The province was perceived as being in constant competition with other parts of a globalizing world and, therefore, every decision ought to be assessed in terms of its effects on local businesses. Business orientation was not limited to only the discussed spatial affairs but also extended to cover the working methods of the RC itself. Questions about the effectiveness of the RC’s policies and its willingness to take risks (eg, by funding insecure policy projects) were constantly posed.

The rationales of economic competitiveness and effectiveness structured the understanding of space in provincial planning. The policy makers conceptualized the world as a space of flows in which regions are in persistent ‘global competition’. Mobility and connectedness were therefore considered as central themes for provincial planning and development. Physical and other types of connections and active networking across borders were seen as the essential prerequisites for luring global economic flows into the region as well as for opening possibilities for local actors to tap into the global marketplace. Because the relational world of flows and movement was understood to be unstable and crisis-prone, the policy makers emphasized that the province ought to be spatially flexible and agile to respond to rapid changes.

However, the adoption of a relational understanding of space was rather selective, and it did not preclude the territorial readings of provincial space. Rather than viewing the province as part of the European entity, it was conceived of as a functional region of its own. In this context, Europe—along with the state apparatus—was rather considered something that had to be carefully borne in mind. The policy makers considered the promotion of territorial interests as a central duty of the RC, and planning as a policy for regulating the incoming and outgoing flows. The world was thus seen as increasingly relational, but simultaneously this world of flows was conceived as possible to regulate through context-sensitive spatial planning.


5.3 The ways of processing spatial knowledge of EuropeAlong with the content of spatial knowledge, the rationales of economic competitiveness and effectiveness informed the ways the actors employed spatial knowledge. First, an over-arching feature of the meetings was the willingness to stick to ‘evidence-based’ argumentation without slipping into any political disputation. This way of thinking was crystallized in a statement by an official at a meeting of the board of the council:

“The lobbying [of the interest of the Northern Ostrobothnia] is based on factual matters, on the searching for factual arguments … the lobbying here doesn’t involve regional pathos or the exploitation of political institutions” (regional official, Northern Ostrobothnia).The tone in provincial policy making was managerialist and depolitizing. Debate

about the underlying rationalities of provincial planning was rarely conducted, as the focus of the discussions was mostly on the financial and juridical details of the individual policy programmes and initiatives. Policy makers were astonishingly unanimous about the ‘necessities’ and ‘facts’ of provincial planning, which were validated either by the expertise and evidence of that of RC officials or through external consultants (mostly business) professionals.

The second main feature of how policy issues and related knowledge were processed touched upon the issue of routinization. We refer here to the routinized ways of managing decision-making processes—that is, the procedures related to the evaluation of the consistency between the EU policy programmes and the EU-financed regional development projects. Perhaps, more importantly, however, routinization refers to the adoption of a certain way of doing things. This involves the fashioning of ‘clever’ modes of local action through which the policy makers could eschew the conflicts between the EU and the RC which might possibly hamper access to the available EU resources (cf Keating, 2008, page 72). This form of routinization was strikingly present, for instance, in the straightforward adoption of the EU-driven concept of smart specialization by local planners. However, the routinization of Europe among policy makers also manifested itself as a peculiar resistance to EU-wide spatial planning agendas. One of the key regional policy makers stated that RCs had become mere ‘EU offices’ which are unable to bring into existence more context-sensitive spatial planning ideas and are thus in danger of losing their legitimacy.

The third main feature of processing knowledge about spatial policies was the unanimity—or, more accurately, silence—concerning the ways the matters related to the EU policies were treated in the meetings. The structural fund project applications, for instance, were mostly gone through at the meetings without any debate on the development goals of the EU. Although the bulletins published after the meetings implied that the funding decisions were the result of rigorous negotiations, the applications were, as a rule, accepted according to the proposals made by the presenting officials. Even if the EU’s spatial planning lexicon was adopted unquestioningly, Europe was rarely, if ever, mentioned as a spatial entity or as a spatial framework for assessing or measuring the success of local planning. Instead, ‘the national’ seemed to be the most important frame of reference (cf Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996, page 351).

6 DiscussionEuropean spatial planning marks a milestone in the ways in which a particular spatial economy is introduced into political practice in the context of European integration. Europe appears as a smooth economic space which is viewed as a necessary political act in the face of global or transnational challenges. Europe is conceived as a flexible spatial project whose existence and legitimacy lean on voluntary engagement in building Europe not only as a deterritorialized space of cultural identity and ‘cohesion’ but also as a networked space of competition and competitiveness. In this capacity, European spatial planning is a territorial rearticulation of the spatial ontology of the single market project which was launched in the


1980s with an emphasis on economic competitiveness and political, economic, and cultural mobility (cf Barry, 1993; Jensen and Richardson, 2004).

The governmentality approach to European spatial planning has stimulated us to consider four issues in particular. Firstly, we have examined the political rationalities of European spatial planning. Arguably, European spatial planning evinces will to govern through economy, competition, and competitiveness. Secondly, we have investigated the spatial ontologies of European spatial planning, which can be seen as predicated on particular economy-centric political rationalities.

Thirdly, we have discussed the techniques through which ‘European space’ is made a calculable object in European spatial planning. The constitution of ‘EU territory’ is thus dependent on political techniques of calculation (see Elden, 2007a) which make possible an articulation of the European populace, economy, and society. Fourthly, we have examined the practices of spatial planning in the concrete actions of policy makers and politicians, thus suggesting that European spatial planning should also be analyzed through an examination of certain sociotechnical encounters.

We found that the key rationalities of European spatial planning structured local policy making—in terms of both contents as well as ways of employing spatial knowledge. We inquired into policy learning and tactics which have emerged in the everyday work of regional planners and decision makers as regards the ‘European dimension’ of their work and pointed out the rather apolitical presence of Europe in these local practices. Our results have indicated a peculiar absence of Europe and the EU in their everyday work but have also highlighted the notable presence of European spatial planning at the level of routines, political rationalities, and the ways through which these actors legitimize their own actions. European spatial planning may not easily lead to the harmonization of actual spatial planning practices across the EU but rather may lead to context-specific learning processes which are characterized by deeply rooted political traditions and conflicts.

In our reading, European spatial planning not only reveals a will to establish Europe as a governable entity but also discloses the process of articulating territory as the central concern of ‘European government’. It demonstrates an attempt to bring the territory of the EU into being through informal spatial policy standards and nonstatutory spatialities as well as associated ideas, maps, researchers, and all manner of human and nonhuman actors and associated networks. Perceived from this angle, the ‘territory of the EU’ is an outcome of networked sociotechnical relations (cf Painter, 2010, page 1093): it is the effect of these and related practices which cohere just enough to become describable.

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European spatial planning as governmentality: An inquiry into rationalities, techniques and...

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