Soft Spaces in Europe

Re-negotiating governance, boundaries and borders

Phil Allmendinger, Graham Haughton, Jörg Knieling, Frank Othengrafen, Phil Allmendinger, Graham Haughton, Jörg Knieling, Frank Othengrafen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317666332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

The past thirty years have seen a proliferation of new forms of territorial governance that have come to co-exist with, and complement, formal territorial spaces of government. These governance experiments have resulted in the creation of soft spaces, new geographies with blurred boundaries that eschew existing political-territorial boundaries of elected tiers of government. The emergence of new, non-statutory or informal spaces can be found at multiple levels across Europe, in a variety of circumstances, and with diverse aims and rationales.

This book moves beyond theory to examine the practice of soft spaces. It employs an empirical approach to better understand the various practices and rationalities of soft spaces and how they manifest themselves in different planning contexts. By looking at the effects of new forms of spatial governance and the role of spatial planning in North-western Europe, this book analyses discursive changes in planning policies in selected metropolitan areas and cross-border regions. The result is an exploration of how these processes influence the emergence of soft spaces, governance arrangements and the role of statutory planning in different contexts.

This book provides a deeper understanding of space and place, territorial governance and network governance.

Part I

A conceptual framework for soft spaces

1 Soft spaces, planning and emerging practices of territorial governance

Phil Allmendinger, Graham Haughton, Jörg Knieling and Frank Othengrafen

The argument here is not that planners are shifting from one set of spaces to another, but rather that they are learning to acknowledge that they must work within multiple spaces, and as part of this adapting to and even adopting the tactics of soft spaces and fuzzy boundaries where these help deliver the objectives of planning.

(Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009: 619)

Introduction

During the past thirty years there has been a major proliferation of new territorial governance forms that have come to co-exist with and indeed complement the formal territorial spaces of government. The emergent new spaces of governance can operate at multiple scales, from the neighbourhood to the supranational, and are particularly associated with regeneration, spatial planning and environmental policy. This book focuses specifically on the soft spaces that relate to strategic spatial planning, which given the multifaceted nature of planning means that we also touch on various regeneration and environmental soft spaces.

The importance of this is that the past three decades have seen an explosion of planning activities outside the statutory planning system, including innovative approaches to territorial management involving soft spaces and fuzzy boundaries (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009; Haughton et al., 2010). Examples of such soft spaces include the European Union (EU) Baltic Sea macro-region, the Oresund region and the Thames Gateway area in the UK, plus recent work on metropoles and city-regions, such as the projets de territoire and planification stratégique in France and überregionale Partnerschaften (supra-regional partnerships) like Hamburg and Nuremburg in Germany.

As these examples indicate, the emergence of new, non-statutory or informal spaces can be found across Europe, in a variety of circumstances and with diverse aims and rationales. What all these planning activities and processes have in common is that they are the result of hybrid and multi-jurisdictional governance processes, drawing together actors from a variety of spheres into new networks (Bevir, 2013; Bevir and Rhodes, 2013; Denters, 2013). These governance arrangements frequently involve attempts to generate new spatial imaginaries that do not necessarily or even ordinarily reflect political-territorial boundaries.

In this book we focus on those governance experiments that involve the creation of new geographies, which we refer to as soft spaces, with new and sometimes fuzzy boundaries that eschew the existing political-territorial boundaries of elected tiers of government. The research presented here provides the first major international comparative study of soft spaces in planning, with case studies drawn from various countries in north-west Europe. The book is focused explicitly on moving beyond the theory to examine practices; that is, to investigate soft spaces empirically to better understand the various practices and rationalities of soft spaces and how they manifest themselves in different planning contexts.

This chapter sets out the context of soft spaces forms of governance to frame the more empirical chapters and analyses that follow. First, we examine alternative ways of understanding the term ‘soft spaces’ in relation to planning before turning to different theories of why and in what circumstances they emerge. Finally, we highlight a range of themes and objectives that structure the chapters that follow and to which we return in the conclusions at the end of the book.

What are soft spaces and how do they relate to planning?

We use the term ‘soft spaces’ in this book to refer to the emergence of new, non-statutory or informal planning spaces or processes. They exist alongside but separate to the spaces and scales of elected government bodies such as local, regional or national government. Whilst some governance spaces can be coterminous with the territorial boundaries of elected government, soft spaces by contrast involve the creation of new geographies that transcend existing political administrative boundaries. As such, they represent specific social constructions of space that do not correspond to the political-territorial boundaries and internal divisions of the nation state.

The governance bodies that use these spaces to define their areas of interest are not subject to the formal system of democratic elections, though they may well set out to work within alternative accountability frameworks, and to claim legitimacy though their engagement with elected politicians and government actors. Soft space forms of governance typically involve diverse mixes of actors, including government, civil society and the private sector, creating new networks that may vary according to the project or thematic policy area under construction. Typically they are intended to allow new thinking to emerge and to provide testing grounds for new policy interventions.

The emergence of new, non-statutory or informal planning and regeneration spaces is evident at a range of scales, including:

• European (Jensen and Richardson, 2004; Faludi, 2009, 2010, 2013a),

• macro-regional (Fabbro and Haselsberger, 2009; Metzger and Schmitt, 2012; Stead, 2011),

• sub-national/regional (Heley, 2013; Walsh, 2014; Haughton et al., 2010; Harrison and Growe, 2012; Knieling et al., 2003),

• metropolitan, city-regional (Levelt and Janssen-Jansen, 2013; Savini, 2012; Knieling, 2011) and

• local spaces of delivery, for masterplanning and regeneration projects for instance (Counsell et al., 2014; Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009).

This diversity of forms has led to an almost similar diversity in attempts to understand these trends in theoretical terms, typically attempting to identify the range of rationalities behind the emergence of soft spaces and the implications both for statutory planning and more flexible or informal ways of planning. Some have framed soft spaces within the context of metagovernance (Haughton et al., 2010) and neoliberal spatial and scalar restructuring (Cochrane, 2012; Haughton et al., 2013). Others have pointed to the growing influence upon space and scale of globalisation, the influence of the European Union (Chilla et al., 2012; Faludi, 2013b) and new doctrines such as governance and spatial planning that challenge ‘Euclidian planning’ (Friedmann, 1994; Healey, 2007; Albrechts et al., 2003).

Against the background of a longer discussion about the limits of statutory planning and related restrictions of administrative structures and processes (e.g. Benz, 1994; Knieling et al., 2003 for the German discussion), the term ‘soft spaces’ emerged out of work by UK academics working on an Economic and Social Research Council project to examine how devolution had affected the practices of spatial planning across the UK and Ireland (Haughton and Allmendinger, 2007, 2008; Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009; Haughton et al., 2010). In one of the earliest outputs of this work, a definition was put forward, which drew heavily on debates around territorial and relational spaces within the geography literature:

whilst planning still needs its clear legal ‘fix’ around set boundaries for formal plans, if it is to reflect the more complex relational world of associational relationships which stretch across a range of geographies, planning also needs to operate through other spaces, and it is these we think of as ‘soft spaces’.

(Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009: 619)

Since then others have gone on to try to add clarity and precision to this definition. So for Metzger and Schmitt (2012: 265–6), ‘soft spaces’ refers to the

Informal or semiformal, non-statutory spatialities of planning with associations and relations stretching both across formally established boundaries and scalar levels of planning and across previously entrenched sectoral divides.

Particularly in early accounts, those using the terminology of soft spaces of planning frequently counterposed them to the ‘hard’, territorial spaces of planning, the statutory spaces of regulation that bring with them certain images, language and tools around regulatory processes, accountability structures, policy hierarchies linked to hierarchical scales of decision-making, and bounded jurisdictions. Whilst a distinction is drawn between the soft and hard spaces of planning, it was also recognised that the statutory and informal systems of planning existed in a symbiotic relationship, each needing the other (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009). Subsequent work drew attention to how the crude binaries of soft and hard spaces ran the danger of failing to see the possibilities for transitioning between the two forms and for hybrid practices emerging that were part-soft, part-hard in characteristics (Metzger and Schmitt, 2012).

Additionally, soft spaces have also been discussed as a strategic approach to break away from the constraints associated with the formal scales of statutory planning (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009: 619). Similarly, Olesen (2011: 151) summarised that

We might understand soft spaces as particular strategy-making episodes, where strategic spatial planning moves beyond formal planning arenas in attempts to destabilize existing practices and structures.

Very quickly work on soft spaces was adopted and adapted by others, notably including Andreas Faludi (2010, 2013b) who used it to develop his own thinking on what he referred to as soft planning. Though the terminology and interpretations might vary a little, the idea of soft spaces was seen by many commentators to be helpful in understanding that something important was happening in European planning practices, something that was not fixed and yet also not entirely fluid; a hybrid form of planning that drew upon the legitimacy and statutory powers of territories yet was more open and continuous; a form of planning that engaged with and coordinated different policy sectors and boundaries, creating new spatial imaginaries yet not discarding the old. Most significantly, this was not a conscious or planned outcome; it was happening spontaneously in different places and different circumstances.

Why do soft spaces of planning emerge?

Given the different scales and contexts yet similar manifestations, what was driving the emergence of these new planning spaces? If we think of them as policy tools, then what is leading to this surge of activity? From the existing literature and our own research we can identify a range of influences upon the emergence of new planning spaces such as soft spaces. These include discussions about the rescaling of the nation state, neoliberalism and competitive localism, post-political planning processes and territorial governance.

Redistributing state powers and state rescaling

The emergence of soft spaces needs to be understood against debates around the changing nature of nation states as they come under pressure from ‘above’ (supranational political decision-making arenas such as the EU) and ‘below’ (for example, new functional city-regions) and the need to rethink what government is and how policy making is achieved in a networked world (Hajer, 2003).

Originally, nation states aimed at territorial integrity as a matter of national security, which involved not simply dealing with national borders but also arranging the political organisation of its internal geographies into governable units, particularly regions and local governments. In recent decades nation states have had to attempt to find new territorial fixes in the face of economic globalisation and other challenges to state authority. The result is not so much a marginalisation of the nation state as a dramatic rethinking of how it mobilises its powers and resources at sub-national level and through supranational agreements, to help it deliver its strategic objectives.

The rescaling of the state has two dimensions then, with ‘hollowing out’, here understood as a process in which state powers are lent upwards (e.g. to the EU), downwards (e.g. to local or regional government) and outwards (e.g. to neighbourhood regeneration partnerships). Running alongside this hollowing out, however, has been a near continuous experimental process of ‘filling in’, in which new institutional forms are trialled, bringing in unique constellations of actors often mobilised at hybrid spatial scales or in new geographies that challenge pre-existing state territorialities (Goodwin et al., 2005, 2006; Jessop, 2000, 2001). This reworking of powers is spatially strategic and selective; that is, the nation state retains its overall primacy and selectively reworks its powers by lending them vertically across scales and horizontally to bring in new policy actors (also Brenner, 2004, Jones, 2001). It is the state that decides who to lend its powers to and that can rescind these at its whim.

It would be wrong to suggest that such processes have been wholly negative; clearly there have been significant benefits in terms of a greater flow of ideas and spatial coordination. Yet there have also been more negative consequences in terms of the seemingly constant rescaling of preferred governmental scales of action, involving a remaking of the formal tiers of sub-national government in particular, with powers shifting between different scales and institutions in ways that seem experimental or short term. One important consequence is the resultant congested and confused landscape of responsibilities and functions, raising an important question of ‘where can planning be found?’ for those who wish to engage in the process.

Neoliberal restructuring and competitive localism

Driven by neoliberal ideology about the primacy of market logics and the necessity of governments being refocused on the pursuit of economic growth, competitive localism has emerged as a dominant feature of sub-national government across large parts of Europe. Neoliberal policy prescriptions for reducing the cost, size and role of government were portrayed as a necessary adjunct to an entrepreneurial emphasis on liberating the individual and private enterprise from the so-called shackles of the state. The state was recast from its ‘welfare’ era role of ‘taming the market’ to one of promoting the market, requiring a rhetorical attack on government itself as being overly bureaucratic, inefficient, ineffective, interfering and expensive.

Land use planning has always had a market-supportive function (Harvey, 1989) but what marks out the period from the mid-1970s is a more active role as planning has been co-opted into an ongoing process of neoliberalisation (Peck et al., 2009). As part of this changing conceptualisation of the role of government in the UK, the Netherlands and elsewhere, planners were told to change their ways, to embrace the logic of markets and pursue economic growth. The idea that planners could simply ‘allocate’ or zone land for development and then wait for it to happen was replaced by a more proactive stance in promoting growth. At a different scale we have seen new growth-oriented approaches to cross-border cooperation and territorial ‘fuzzying’ through macro-regional strategies and partnerships.

It is possible to see soft spaces as one of the arenas within which planners and others come together to ‘make sense’ of neoliberal principles, attempting to address the inevitable contradictions in different and evolving approaches and ‘setbacks’ within its underlying and always mutable logics. There are no ‘easy’ or ‘clear’ answers or settlements and those responsible for creating planning systems must constantly search for workable market-supportive scalar, institutional an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part I A conceptual framework for soft spaces
• Part II Soft spaces in France, Germany, the Netherlands and England
• Part III Cross-border soft spaces
• Part IV Conclusions and outlook
• Index