Spatial Visions as Power Tools in European Planning
Richard Ek
GAME (Geographical Analysis and Modelling for Evolving Europe) Group Meeting, University
Paris – UMR Geographie-cité, Friday, May 4th 2007
The Department of Service Management
Lund University, Campus Helsingborg
Box 882
S-251 08 Helsingborg
Sweden
Richard.Ek@msm.hbg.lu.se
1
Introduction
This is a paper and a presentation that tries to sum up my research on planning and space for the
last four years or so. I am a human geographer, primarily interested in how power is spatially
articulated, grasped and consolidated. In my PhD I investigated how spatial visions, that is, a
particular form of geographical imagination of a territory's future development) functioned as a
kind of discursive tools in the shaping and social construction of the Øresund Region, a transnational region that ties Copenhagen with, Scania, the most Southern county of Sweden. After
my PhD I have paid special attention to how political and economic interests attempts to create a
‘faster Europe’, mainly through different infrastructure projects. In the political vision of ‘Europe
on speed’, democratic questions and concerns increasingly, in my opinion, give away to a ‘politics
of dromocracy’, in which questions concerning identity, community and civic society are
increasingly tied to aspects of speed, acceleration and velocity.
The disposition of the paper is as follows. First there is a section on tendencies in Europe from a
European Union planning perspective. Then I have a concept-based methodological section on
the geographical vision as a tool of power in the discursive engagement regarding the future of
specific territories. Thereafter follows a critical reading of European Union spatial planning,
especially on the attempts to create larger and larger regions based on infrastructure and
communications. The fourth section discusses how the focus on speed and mobility in the
European planning discourse reduces or at least changes meanings and implications regarding the
political, democracy and the role of the citizen. In the conclusion, some social implications of
what at least in Sweden has been labelled regional enlargement are mentioned. Since some of this
must be quite familiar to you, I will in my presentation
A More Ambitious Planning Apparatus
Since the European Community became the European Union back in 1992, attempts to produce
new EU spaces in order to adjust the political costume to the ‘economic reality’ (regarded as a
volatile and borderless global economy) and increase economic competitiveness have accelerated
and amplified in ambition. Following David Harvey’s historical-geographical materialism, the EU
is currently searching for a new spatio-temporal fix, a historically specific temporarily stable
sociospatial configuration upon which capital’s circulation process can be accelerated and
intensified.1 Part of this ‘search’ includes the aim to institutionalise new spatial scales, in open
competition with or/and as a complementary addition to the nation state. The construction of
new spatial scales has initiated an uncertainty about if, and in that case, which scale level will
ultimately become a new anchorage point in political and economic life in the European Union,
and enjoy as dominant a position as that held by the nation state during the Fordist epoch. While
the number of possible scales and scale-connected horizons of action is immense, few are likely
to become institutionalised.2
Two spatial scales seem about to be - and in some respects already are - institutionalised.3 The
first is the spatial scale that represents the European Union as a whole. The crystallisation of the
See Harvey 2003 for an accessible description.
Jessop 2002, Brenner 2004.
3 The Finnish geographer, Anssi Paasi, has written about the institutionalisation of territories of a specific
scale, which he divides into four stages: the development of territorial shape, the formation of symbolic
shape, the emergence of institutions and the reproduction of the territory. The first stage includes the
demarcation of space, the inclusion of a territorial unity and, simultaneously, an exclusion of surrounding
areas. Secondly, the formation of symbolic shape refers to the establishment of a number of territorial
1
2
2
European Union as a spatial scale takes many forms, often similar to that of the state (forms of
government, choices of democratic model, similar symbols such as flags, etc.)4. Of particular
interest here, however, is the emergence of an increasingly ambitious EU spatial policy and
planning apparatus. A more active spatial policy and planning machine at EU level has been
regarded as a necessity, since the negative consequences of integration in the EU (as increased
regional disparity and uneven development) per se have been seen as threats to further
integration.5 However, as Giannakourou has stated:
If the needs of the European integration process seem to have added a European
level of spatial planning policy to that of the national states, it is the economic and
institutional properties and dilemmas of this same [market-oriented] integration
process that circumscribe the conceptual identity and the normative value of the
emerging policy.6
In a sense, the more ambitious spatial policy and planning apparatus at EU level embodies the
return of a strategic and long-term spatial policy and planning practice (similar to the vogue of ad
hoc and project-based planning practices of the 1980’s), but not a return of the spatial policy and
planning philosophy intertwined with the Keynesian welfare national state.7 Instead, the
contemporary EU spatial policy and planning apparatus bases its planning philosophy and its
ontological foundations on a business and market-led logic.8 For instance, business management
terms and practices like ‘marketing’, ‘branding’, ‘benchmarking’, ‘SWOT analyses’, ‘business
intelligence’ and ‘visioning’ are omnipresent in the spatial policy and planning apparatus of today
(and not only at EU level).9
The European spatial policy and planning apparatus has further institutionalized the organization
of the work following a multi-level governance technique. While government indicates formal
and hierarchical ways of implementation and steering in the public political and administrative
system, governance indicates the engagement of public, private and non-profit actors in more
fluid and flexible ways of co-operation. Governance are by some regarded as a third way between
hierarchical and market oriented ways of organizing10 in which the boundary between different
kinds of organization is permeable.11 But preferably, governance should be seen as a
complementary organization principle to more traditional ways to orchestrate political
processes.12
symbols crucial to creating a symbolic significance for the demarcated territory. Of specific importance is
the naming of the region. Furthermore, symbols, such as flags, monuments and buildings, are developed
in order to represent the common interests of the inhabitants. Thirdly, the emergence of institutions
includes the crystallisation of local and non-local practices in the spheres of politics, legislation, economics
and administration, and in formal organisations in the media, education and so on. Finally, the territory is
reproduced when it has achieved an established status in a wider spatial structure. For Paasi, the
‘culmination point’ of this stage is when the territory gains an administrative role that integrates it with a
surrounding system of public administrative practices (Paasi 1991 & 1996).
4 Anderson 2002.
5 Kunzmann 1998, Lovering 1998, Hudson 2003.
6 Giannakourou 1996: 602.
7 Hull 1996, Healey 1998.
8 Brenner 1997.
9 Shipley and Newkirk (1997, 1999) have written about ‘visioning’ in planning and policy-making. See also
Shipley 2000 and 2002.
10 Larsson 2002.
11 Stoker 1998.
12 Larsson 2002.
3
Multi-level governance refers to a governance situation with a particular kind of interaction, both
horizontally and vertically, between several institutional and spatial levels.13 Multi-level
governance denotes a negotiated rather than formalized order, and is a reflection of the
assembled nature of the surrounding institutional arrangement (ibid.). Multi-level governance as
an ordering principle has by time become the special trademark and mode of organizing and
institutionalizing European political space, and most notably that of European regional policy.
The European multi-level governance model is based on three fundamental assumptions, that (i)
sub-national actors are regarded as important next to actors on national and European levels, (ii)
that sub-national mobilization and empowerment is not replacing national state political
maneuver capability, and (iii) that European institutions exerts an independent influence in policy
making. 14
In particular, the increased European Union spatial policy and planning ambition has been
expressed in different visions and policy documents, as well as in several of the programmes
about to be implemented. One of the most important documents are the European Spatial
Development Perspective (ESDP), through which it is intended to impose a common vision and
planning coordination in order to implement political, economic and social objectives in the
member states.15 An important programme is the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T),
which is a strategy to transform different national networks into a pan-European transportation
and infrastructure system.16 The purpose of these initiatives is primarily to create a common
approach to spatial policy within the EU, and to ‘Europeanise’ spatial policy and planning
practices at lower spatial scales (national, regional and local).17 In order to be more persuasive,
maps and other visual representations have been expressly used and referred to.18 Most recently,
the notion of territorial cohesion has increased in importance and magnitude.19
Geographical Visions – A Methodological Contextualization
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. 20 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 multilevel policy-making systems’ in Europe today.21
Peter & Pierre 2004.
Gualini 2004, Hall et al 2005.
15 Richardson and Jensen 2000, Faludi and Waterhout 2002.
16 Richardson 1997, Scott 2002, Peters 2003.
17 Gualini 2004.
18 Faludi 1996, Jensen and Richardson 2003 and 2004, Dühr 2004.
19 Faludi 2007.
20 Böhme et al 2004: 1176, 1179.
21 Böhme et al 2004: 1180. 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 policymaking; and finally, the consequences of Europeanization on national, regional and local scales
(investigations into the degree of homogenization and diversity through aerial comparison).
13
14
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As an analytical category, spatial ideas have a central position in the IMAGES framework. Policy
networks that produce spatial ideas with the aim of establishing hegemonic images, new ways of
thinking, etc., shape the EU policy agenda.22 Specific forms of policy knowledge are produced
depending on the spatial ideas that have to be legitimized.23 Furthermore: ‘…an understanding of
how ideas are variably constructed within…multi-level, multimodal and multinational sphere[s] of
governance are crucial in exploring the networks and interdependencies within…’ constellations
of multi-level governance24 and the construction of democratic practices and meanings through
multi-level governance (as other practices across the European spatial policy and planning field)
strongly determine the ‘scope of play over [spatial] ideas and outcomes’.25 Finally, an analysis of
the shaping of ideas within different policy environments needs to be informed by research that
takes diversity seriously, i.e. research that admits that spatial ideas are contextually produced even
though the Europeanization of spatial policy has, to some degree, been successful.26
The investigation of spatial ideas further offers an entrance into an exploration of how spatialities
are constructed in specific spatial policy discourses. Richardson and Jensen have elaborated upon
a theoretical and analytical framework for the discourse analysis of socio-spatial relations in
general, and with regard to the field of European spatial policy in particular - or at least as an
especially illuminating example of a certain kind of socio-spatial relations.27
The cultural sociology of space framework contains three dialectic analytical dimensions: spatial
practices (emphasizing the material consequences as well as the significance of power of sociospatial practices); symbolic meanings (how representations, symbols and discourses frame the
cultural meaning of socio-spatiality); and the politics of scale (the manifestation of spatial
practices and symbolic meaning on a certain scale, or set of interconnected scales).28 The overall
intention of the cultural sociology of space framework is to carry through a discourse analysis
where the cultural and material dimensions of space are highlighted. In other words, that space is
produced and should not be taken for granted as a container of social life.
Analyzing spatial policy discourse includes the exploration of how actions, practices, relations,
etc., are represented in the language of policy documents, the spatial practices intended to
reproduce the spatial policy discourse and the deconstruction of the nested power rationalities:
‘with their distinctive horizons of values and norms that guide social actions…’.29 This discourse
analytical framework developed by Richardson and Jensen harmonizes well with Maarten Hajer’s
approach towards different planning and policy discourses, based on the crystallization of storylines.30 For Hajer, story-lines are a kind of generative narratives that make it possible for social
agents and actors to use different discursive categories in order to give meaning to physical
Böhme et al 2004: 1181, see also Faludi 1996, Khakee 1997, DiGaetano & Lawless 1999, Stone 2000.
Böhme et al 2004: 1182, see also Häkli 1998, Scott 2002, Jensen & Richardson 2003, Dühr 2004. The
relation between spatial ideas and knowledge production is of course dialectical, as the available
knowledge also influences the production of ideas. Here, I want to stress the explicit production and
visualization (in maps, statistics, etc.) of knowledge in order to legitimate certain spatial ideas.
24 Böhme et al 2004: 1182, see also Bache 2004, Blatter 2004, Gualini 2004.
25 Böhme et al 2004: 1183, see also Abram et al 1996, Amin & Thrift 1999, Shore 2000, Atkinson 2002,
O’Dowd 2002, Rumford 2003, Peters & Pierre 2004.
26 Böhme et al 2004: 1184, 1177, see also Herrschel & Newman 2002.
27 Richardson & Jensen 2003.
28 Richardson & Jensen 2003, 10-13.
29 Richardson & Jensen 2003: 19.
30 Hajer 1995.
22
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and/or social phenomena. Story-line offers an understanding of a set of confusing discursive
components, and at the same time (seemingly) reduces the discursive complexity:
Story-lines are narratives on social reality through which elements from many
different domains are combined and that provide actors with a set of symbolic
references that suggest a common understanding. Story-lines are essential political
devices that allow the overcoming of fragmentation and the achievement of
discursive closure.31
Story-lines can therefore be regarded as narratives that organize, simplify and dramatize the
process of world-making32 within a particular discourse. If successful, the story-lines become
institutionalized as myths within organizational fields, ‘telling’ how actors in the field should act
and behave towards different social phenomena and the socio-spatial environment in general.33
It has perhaps now become evident that both the cultural sociology of space framework and the
IMAGES framework firmly place the importance of social agency in the foreground. In the
particular example used, it is clear that organizations in the spatial policy and planning field
construct a worldview and act according to the parameters of that worldview. But the
relationship is dialectical, and the worldview is not only shaped by ‘intellect alone’ but also by
actions that are taken and embedded in specific institutional settings. However, in attempting a
sketch of the analysis of the ‘spatialization of ideas’, an analytical entrance has to be chosen. I
would like to use the concept of ‘geographical imagination’ as such an entrance.
There are several definitions of geographical imaginations.34 Here, geographical imaginations are
hypotheses or presumptions of how space and relations in space start and shape different societal
processes, tendencies and changes, and what shape these processes, tendencies and changes are
expected to take. These geographical imaginations are abstractions based on available but
subjectively chosen expert knowledge, normative ideas, ideological convictions and taken-forgranted basic knowledge articulated and canalized through discourses.35
Geographical imaginations are, in the future-oriented spatial policy and planning field, formalized
into spatial visions:36 collections of images of the future about a specific area that are structured
into spatial wholes. They express different arrangements of social activities - both functionally
and spatially - and use absolute, relative and relational conceptions of space37 in order to
Hajer 1995: 62.
Fischler 1995.
33 Meyer & Rowan 1977, DiMaggio & Powell 1983, Scott 1995.
34 H. C. Prince (1962) portrayed geographical imaginations as a universal creative and aesthetic instinct of
humankind to generate insight and understanding of the commingling of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ in the
conduct of life. David Harvey (1973) contrasted and connected the concept of geographical imaginations
to C. Wright Mills (1959) ‘sociological imagination’ and defined it as a capacity in humans to recognize
how transactions between individuals and organizations are affected by space (arguing for the
humanization of human geography, i.e. a cultural turn) and later (Harvey 1984) a spatial turn within the
social sciences in general.
35 Gregory 1994.
36 Ek 2003: 104. See also Zonneveld 2005.
37 Absolute space is the traditional notion of space as equal to distance, and as a unmovable and
indestructible container of all matter while relative space is a dimension or a measure of absolute space
that makes it possible to measure movement (Harvey 1969: 195-196, Tonboe 1993: 76-78, Curry 1996a: 5
& 1996b: 92). The concept of relational space stress that space is produced through relations between
humans, artifacts, phenomenon etc., and therefore changeable (as relations change) (Werlen 1993: 1,
Harvey 1996: 250-251).
31
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emphasize different aspects of the vision. The vision usually includes aspects such as
infrastructure, relationships to surrounding places and spaces and societal spheres such a
business, planning systems, education, political governance and institutions.
In this context, the production of spatial visions is equal to the spatialization of ideas. Even if
not all the work within the spatial policy and planning field results in visionary documents,
strategic plans, etc., it is work that is intended to change the societal future and make and
organize space according to intentions based on a more or less common geographical
imagination among different policy and planning organizations. In other words, ideas (based on a
geographical imagination) are spatialized (concretized, materialized, visualized, etc.) into spatial
visions. Since this is very much about social agency, the spatialization is an act embedded in a
specific societal context (institutional setting).
A Critical Reading of Spatial Planning and Policy in the European Union
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.38 Only a zero-friction European society based on an increasing
harmonization of physical and non-physical mobility within the space of flows39 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.40 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.41 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 as well as in the above mentioned
ESDP and TEN-T. These visionary policy documents has become important discursive
cornerstones in the discourse of monotopia.42
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.43
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
Jensen & Richardson 2004: 3.
Castells 1996, Flyvbjerg et al 2003: 2-3.
40 The concept of story-line as developed by Maarten Hajer (1995) has been elaborated upon in the
methodological section of this paper.
41 The Cecchini Report (1988) is an example.
42 Jensen & Richardson 2004: 20-21.
43 Dunford 1994, Hudson et al 1997, Kantor 2000.
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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.44 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.45 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.46
Brenner also mentions the expansion of cooperative relationships among geographically noncontiguous 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.47 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 networks48 and that tries to ‘span space’ among spatially dispersed
nodes in order to create selective ‘leapfrog’ geographies.49 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 strategies50 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.51
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. 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
Brenner 2004: 279-281, see also Lefèvre 1998: 22.
Brenner 2004: 283-284.
46 Ek 2003.
47 Brenner 2004: 286-287, see also Benington & Harvey 1998.
48 Brenner 2004: 290-291. See also Leitner & Sheppard 1999 and Phelps et al 2002.
49 Leitner et al 2002: 297, Leitner 2004: 248.
50 In his ‘spatialization’ of Jessop’s (1990) strategic-relational approach to state theory, and Jones’ (1999)
reworking of Jessop’s arguments, Brenner (2004: 92] defines state spatial projects as initiatives by the state
to: ‘…differentiate state activities among different levels of territorial administration and coordinate state
polices among diverse locations and scales…into a partitioned, functionally coordinated, and
organizationally coherent regulatory geography.’ State spatial strategies, on the other hand, are initiatives
intended to intervene into socioeconomic life within the national territory in order to create or secure a
‘structured coherence’ (Harvey 1989) for capitalist growth (Brenner 2004: 93).
51 Brenner 2004: 293. See also Ansell 2000 and Leitner & Sheppard 2002.
44
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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.52
In this discursive and to a high degree visionary context, the corridor concept, actually an old
planning concept,53 has been transformed into something multi-faceted in the European spatial
policy and planning field. 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) crossborder 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 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.54
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.55
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.56
In this strategic planning and policymaking, ‘corridor thinking’ and ‘region thinking’ blend. As
variously desk-produced ‘super regions’ of different kinds and themes mainly based on urban
clusters and distinctive geographical features have already covered much of Europe,57 the crossborder region extra large (CBR XL) indicates a new thematic ‘super-region’ based on (the vision
Jessop 2002: 29.
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
(Priemeus & Zonnevled 2003: 168.
54 CEC 1999: 36.
55 Priemeus & Zonneveld 2003: 173.
56 Chapman et al 2003.
57 Herrschel & Newman 2002: 110.
52
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of the) transnational premium networks.58 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.59 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…’60 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 socioeconomic assets and resources in particular locations.61 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.62
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. The CBR
XL, do, however, connect and integrate discontinuous city-regions 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.
From Democracy to Dromocracy in European Monotopia?
Manuel Castells has labelled the EU as the first ‘network state’, where power and decision
capacity circulates in political networks rather than being tied to a distinct centre.63 The conduct
of governance is distinguished by negotiations taking place among different actors, at different
scales and by increasingly large sectors. EU spatial policy making and planning are carried out at
meso-governance level, as ‘second-order governance’, i.e. committees, commissions, directorates
etc.64 The way of working is characterised by an informal network approach and:
…because of its managerial, functional and technocratic bias, [it] operates outside
parliamentary channels, outside party politics…its processes typically lack
transparency and may have low procedural and legal guarantees…In general, the
classic instruments of control and public accountability are ill-suited..65
In striving for an efficient and pragmatic decision-making process, some actors may even prefer
informality and opaqueness; making European space in ‘obscure policy spaces, away from the
public gaze’.66 The (cross-border) region is a telling example. In the EU rhetoric, cross-border
cooperation is often argued to be a step towards a higher degree of subsidiarity, and a solution to
the ‘democratic deficit’. As the EU encourages a consensual and negotiated procedure in these
matters, ‘border policy continues to be relatively undemocratic, with consequences for both the
EU as a transnational policy’67 and for EU spatial policy as a whole, since ‘transnational activity
Graham 2000.
Graham & Marvin 2001: 8.
60 Graham 2000: 185.
61 Brenner 2004: 97, 244.
62 Graham & Marvin 2001: 33.
63 Castells 1998.
64 Weiler 1999.
65 Weiler 1999: 284-285.
66 Jensen and Richardson 2004: 5.
67 O’Dowd 2001: 96.
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plays a crucial role in the Europeanisation of spatial policy’.68 Since the cross-border regional elite
seems to consist of a number of social agents, the new transnational spatial policy in the making
has so far excluded participants from civil society, NGO’s and other actors that may question the
democratic authorisation of the discourse of EU monotopia.69
This lack of democratic legitimacy threatens the very discourse of EU monotopia, since ‘…the
imagined community of monotopic Europe needs cohesion as its vehicle for the idea of a level
and coherent playing field in order to carry forward the message of ‘one Europe’’.70 As there are
no a European ‘demos’ (no European people that can constitute a democratically elected body)71,
the EU has to legitimise itself as a political and economic project through the creation of an
embryo of a European identity.72 The ‘EUropean citizen’ has therefore to either be created or
reconstructed.
This forming of a legitimate EU identity - in order to extend and rationalise the EU apparatus’s
domination versus the citizens in Europe73 through different ‘agents of European
consciousness’74 - can here be regarded as a political technology based on a certain
governmentality.75 There is, however, an in-built tension (not necessarily an antagonistic or
contradictory one) within this European Union identity building, as it is based on a logic of ‘space
of places’ as well as a logic of ‘space of flows’. For Castells, the ‘space of places’ is the
juxtaposition of places: ‘…whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of
physical contiguity’.76 This particular logic of space is the foundation of the idea of territory. The
‘space of flows’, on the other hand: ‘…is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that
work through flows77 as the circuit of electronic impulses, nodes and hubs and the spatial
organisation of managerial elite groups. In an ontological sense, this particular logic of space
challenges the territorial imagination, creating a dialectical struggle between two dichotomous
spatial logics (one territorial, the other not).
The attempt to create a territorial, ‘banal’78 imagined EU identity/community seems to be
conducted through the creation of a ‘space of flows’ and a culture of mobility in the EU. Even if
Jensen and Richardson 2004: 183.
O’Dowd 2001: 104, Jensen and Richardson 2004: 209.
70 Jensen and Richardson 2004: 226.
71 Weiler 1999.
72 Shore 2000.
73 Castells 1997: 8.
74 ‘Agents of European consciousness’ are defined by Shore (2000: 26) as “those actors, actions, artefacts,
bodies, institutions, policies and representations which, singularly or collectively, help to engender
awareness and promote acceptance of the ‘European idea’”.
75 Shore 2000: 83. For Foucault (1991: 102) governmentality is:
68
69
The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the
calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of
power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political
economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security (Foucault 1991: 102).
Like other forms of biopower, governmentality is therefore at a general level a rationality of social control
based in the mutual constitution of power and knowledge. As an object of knowledge, the social body, is
constructed through different discursive practices, which render the object at least to some degree
susceptible to rational management (Hannah 2000: 24-25).
76 Castells 1996: 423, original emphasis.
77 Castells 1996: 412, original emphasis.
78 Billig 1995.
11
the ‘space of places’ and the ‘space of flows’ are a dichotomy, that does not mean that it is not
possible, through different discourses, to create an imagined community based on them both,
since history (and geography) is created through the interface between places and flows.79
Through the political consequences of the discourses of Monotopia and the ‘Europe of flows’,80
the ‘space of flows’ spatial logic dominates the place – flow nexus much more than before.
To sum up, there are tendencies that, in the spatial policy and planning discourses, EU citizens of
today or the near future are or will be represented and regarded as a dromocratic rather than a
democratic being. The EU citizen’s function is not primarily to take an active part in the decisionmaking processes about how society should be planned and changed, or have an insight into
organisations responsible for the spatial policy and planning in the EU. The citizen’s function in
the EU spatial policy and planning discourses (and in European integration discourses in general)
is rather to be as geographically mobile as possible and legitimate the monotopia discourses in the
European Union (and implicitly, the social actors behind the discourses). A very instrumental
view of the citizen stands out in the discourses: that an unrestrained mobility and a distinct
European identity is what it takes to secure the democratic condition. For instance, in the
Öresund region, the explicit aim of several INTERREG - financed projects has been to create
the Öresund citizen - especially focusing on the identities of children and younger people in the
region.81
Conclusion Through Exemplification: Social Implications of Regional Enlargement
Regional enlargement is a concept that incorporates the local labor markets geographically as well
as a concept that indicates development and an active regional politics, but it is also an analytical
concept that has gained a substantial symbolic value in Swedish regional policy. Statistics indicate
that people are prepared to commute longer distances, with the consequences that several local
municipalities today has to be regarded as a common local, or extra-local, labor market. In the
regional policy discourse, this development is regarded as a fruitful tendency and is seldom
questioned. Within the regional polity, people is increasingly expected to be prepared to commute
longer and longer distances and regional enlargement are motivated with functional and
efficiency oriented arguments such as the idea that geographically larger labor market more easily
creates growth, dissolves bottle necks on the labor market, are more diversified, and so on.82
To function properly, or rather, to be able to function at all, infrastructure, transportations and
communications has to be improved and so called transport corridors created. To NUTEK this
is a reasonably certain way to increase efficiency and prospects for growth.83 This dominant view
on region enlargement indicates an instrumental view on humans. People become calculable
units, their commuting measurable statistics and possible to categorize in distinct groups.
Humans are expected to behave as rational decision-makers, following economic or career
incitements.84 The increased demand on flexibility and mobility among people, conceptualized as
a rational labor force, living in the enlarged region is not only about possibilities. It can also be a
burden, perhaps especially for those not included in the labor force. The situation for children is
a forgotten variable in the discourse of region enlargement. The everyday life for children
becomes increasingly centered on public (and increasingly private) institutions as day nursery and
Castells 1999: 302.
Hajer 2000.
81 Ek 2003.
82 Friberg 2007.
83 NUTEK 2002.
84 Friberg 2007.
79
80
12
school when their parents spend more time commuting longer and longer distances. The every
day of households with small children and both parents commuting several hours every day
becomes a logistic puzzle that has to be solved on an ad-hoc basis, and where every unplanned
incident as a visit at the dentist or a buss or train ten minutes late immediately has consequences
on the timetable for the day. Tora Friberg85 discusses a concrete example, a family, which moved
out from Linköping to a little village on the countryside. After one and a half year they moved
closer to the woman’s work. It was not an easy decision to take, but commuting took to much
time and was a very stressful everyday experience. Not only that commuting took time, the seats
on the train were often occupied so she had to stand up the whole journey. Besides that, they got
a place in the day nursery in another village, which made every day even more filled with time
press and stress.
In a more analytical vein, we can return and discuss Castells’ ideas in more detail, and apply it to
the situation of people in an enlarged region. In Castells’ vision, contemporary society is going
through a period of historical transformation due to the revolution in information technology,
globalization and the emergence of a new form of organization that he calls networking. The
result is a new social structure: the network society.86 In the network society a new spatial form
characteristic of social practice dominates: the space of flows, “the material organization of timesharing social practices that work through flows”.87 The space of flows does not, however,
permeate down to the whole realm of human experience. Actually, a majority of the population
live in places, a ‘locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the
boundaries of physical contiguity’.88 Here, two spatial logics meet and collide in the context of
everyday experience, as:
Thus, people do still live in places. But because function and power in our
societies are organized in the space of flows, the structural domination of its
logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamic of places. Experience, by being
related to places, becomes abstracted from power, and meaning is increasingly
separated from knowledge. It follows a structural schizophrenia between two
spatial logics that threatens to break down communication channels in society.
The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked ahistorical space of
flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places,
increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes.
Unless cultural and physical bridges are deliberately build between these two
forms of space, we may be heading toward life in parallel universes whose
times cannot meet because they are warped into different dimensions of social
hyperspace.89
I think that peoples’ everyday experience of the implications of regional enlargement has to be
taken into more consideration in regional planning. Otherwise, regional planning, in a sense, runs
the risk of becoming quite inhuman. These implications are however seldom approached, at least
not in Sweden.
Ibid.
Castells 2002.
87 The space of flows consists of three layers, the material support constituted by a circuit of electronic
impulses, its nodes and hubs, and the spatial organization of the dominant managerial elites (Castells 1996:
412-415).
88 Castells 1996: 412.
89 Castells 1996: 428., original emphasis.
85
86
13
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