Spatial justice and regional calls for devolution and/or independence in a
‘European Union of the Regions’: analysing the contemporary Scottish,
Catalan and Flemish debates through a spatial planning and territorial
cohesion lens.
Several member states of the European Union have, in recent months, been
faced with a strengthening of claims for territorial independence, or for more
devolution, from one of their constituent regional units with a strong regional
‘identity’: Scotland in the United Kingdom, Catalonia in Spain, and Flanders in
Belgium are the most notable examples. Such claims are not new and have a
long political history in these three countries. What seems to be new is their
intensification in a context of economic crisis of the nation-state and of the EU,
leading particular regions to contest the current model of fiscal redistribution in
place at the national level and demand that structural changes be
implemented in order to gain the ‘true’ means to steer and finance their own
regional development. A close look at the media, political and civic society
discourses surrounding the Scottish, Catalan and Flemish questions in recent
months reveal that arguments related to the ‘politics of territorial solidarity’
(Béland and Lecours, 2008), to territorial justice, spatial redistribution and the
financing and planning of large-scale infrastructural developments have
gained strength, perhaps at the expense of more ‘culturalist’ and identitybased arguments.
This exploratory project thus proposes to bring geographers and spatial and
regional planners – whose disciplines and practices are centered on notions
of territorial justice, spatial redistribution and infrastructural planning – in
dialogue with political scientists and public policy experts specialized in the
study of intra-state conflicts, devolution and federalism, in order to analyse the
current debates on the devolution and/or potential independence of Scotland,
Catalonia and Flanders from a spatial planning, regional policy and territorial
cohesion perspective. What competing visions and models of spatial justice,
territorial solidarity and territorial redistribution are at stake in the current
discourses of pro-independence, Federalist and more centralist advocates in
the three countries/regions? Which ‘legitimate’ scales of inter-territorial
solidarity are advocated? How have spatial planning and territorial
development issues gained ground as important arguments in the current
debates (e.g. rail infrastructure planning)? What kind of spatial planning
implications would the future scenarios currently debated by the media and
regional politicians have for the regions/countries concerned? How do these
current debates fit within the discourse on a ‘Europe of the Region’, the
debates on the future of EU Cohesion Policy and debates on the notion of
‘territorial cohesion’?
Funding from the UCL European Institute will support a one-day public
seminar to explore the above mentioned issues, organized by Dr Claire
Colomb (Bartlett School of Planning), a spatial planner and urban sociologist
working on urban and regional policies in Europe, European spatial planning
and transboundary cooperation, and the transformation of spatial planning
cultures in Europe, and Dr. Kristin Bakke (School of Public Policy), a political
scientist working on intra-state
determination movements.
conflicts,
decentralization
and
self-