Regions and Regional Planning

Experiences from France and Europe

Thomas Perrin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032278193
• eBook ISBN: 9781000599824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book addresses the making and transforming of regions and territorial organisation, which are significant activities for policy makers and planners. It focuses on the regional, intermediate scale and gathers contributions by researchers from various European universities, especially at a time when there is a renewed interest for regions, regionalisation and regional planning.

The different chapters in this edited volume deliver insightful theoretical approaches and documented empirical case studies. The recent reform that redrew and reorganized regions in France is of particular interest. Other contributions enrich the reflection about territorial reforms and changes by analysing situations in Italy, Poland, United Kingdom – notably the issue of planning city-regions or metropolitan areas. This volume provides a comparative view of the impact of territorial reforms on planning policies and explores the evolution of regional settings in Europe. It also confirms region as a fundamental scale and an essential instrument to organise and develop societies and territories.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal European Planning Studies.

The road to ambiguity: the axiological construction of the regional tier in France

Arnaud Brennetot

ABSTRACT

The merger and enlargement of French regions implemented from 2015 is part of a regionalization process which began in the 1950s. A constructivist approach of the emergence and strengthening of this new regional tier demonstrates the continued existence of an axiological ambiguity combining neoliberal and solidarity-based norms upon which are founded French regional planning policies. The continuation of this ideological assemblage has made the regions flexible instruments, capable of responding to heterogeneous ends and building consensus among political elites.

Introduction

In 2014 and 2015, three laws changed the number, perimeter and official powers of the French regions.¹ By merging 16 of the 21 previous regions into 7 new entities (Figure 1), the official purpose of the reform was to create regions of ‘European size, able to build territorial strategies’ and adapted ‘to the development of the local economy’ (from a statement made by President François Hollande, 2 June 2014).

Figure 1. The former and the new regions in France. (a) The French regions designed in 1956. (b) The regional mergings established in 2015.

The arguments put forward to justify these regional mergers refer to the neoliberal framework (Brennetot 2018). In the same year, the NOTRe Act (2015) established two new kinds of pluriannual regional plans. One of these plans, the ‘SRDEII’ (the Regional Plan for Economic Development, Innovation and Internationalization), aims to help regional councils to develop strategies to enhance regional economic competitiveness in the context of economic globalization. These are then coherent with the aim of neoliberal governmentality.

In a somewhat paradoxical way, the second plan created in 2015, the ‘SRADDET’ (the Regional Plan of Sustainable Development and Equal Territories) was conceived to promote spatial and social solidarity and sustainability within the perimeter of each region. The French State’s concern to help regions and territories in difficulty was confirmed in Law n° 2019–753 of 22 July 2019 creating a ‘National Agency for Territorial Cohesion’.

Through these recent spatial planning reforms, the French central government seems to be pursuing heterogeneous and potentially contradictory goals: on the one hand, it encourages competition between regions and seems to adhere to a neoliberal concept of spatial planning and, on the other hand, it demonstrates a willingness to promote equality and solidarity between territories. Such axiological ambivalence invites us to re-examine these rescaling and territorial restructuring processes; taking into account the complexity of the motivations reformers claim to pursue. It is therefore possible to demonstrate how the space reforms developed by the state are more ambiguous than many critical analyses suggest.

In-keeping with this perspective, this article proposes a constructivist analysis of French regionalization focusing on axiological representations and the legitimizing discourses implemented by actors to justify their rescaling projects within a political system also affected by broader structural, economic, cultural and social dynamics. It is therefore possible to show how the French regionalization processes, launched in the 1950s, has been accompanied by ambiguous legitimizing discourses which have helped to both fuel consensus and limit political oppositions. Far from revealing a succession of antagonistic regimes as postulated by certain neostructuralist analyses (Brenner 2004), the phenomenon of French regionalization presents an axiological continuity mixing certain elements of neoliberal productivism and social solidarity in order to gather maximum political support.

The first section proposes a comparison of the theoretical frameworks available for analyzing regional rescaling processes, and justifies the choice made in favour of a constructivist approach. The second section demonstrates how the creation of French regions during the 1950s and 1960s was the result of a technocratic process which mobilized a heterogeneous and ambiguous axiological matrix, combining certain elements of egalitarian solidarity and neoliberal productivism. The third section demonstrates how the regional decentralization implemented by left-wing governments in the 1980s replicated the axiological bases of earlier regionalism in order to better involve subnational governments. The last section explores how the upscaling of several subnational governments over the past decade (2010-2020) reflects a perpetuation of the original ambiguities of the French governance system.

1. A constructivist approach to regional rescaling

Regional rescaling and territorial restructuring processes have been the subject of several theoretical approaches providing invaluable insight into the specificities of French regionalization (Table 1).

Table 1. Theoretical frameworks available for the analysis of regional rescalings.

	Functional Approaches	Neostructuralist Approaches	Sociology of organizations approach	Constructivist Approaches
Epistemological perspective	Normative	Critical	Explanatory	Explanatory
Key Factors explaining regional rescalings	The rational choice of institutional decision-makers	Changes in accumulation regimes	Power rivalries between actors	The adequacy between the representations of decision-makers and the capacity of institutions to adapt to external changes
References	(Alesina and Spolaore 2005)	(Brenner 2004)	(Grémion 1976)	(Keating and Wilson 2014)

Functional explanations question the link between the size of jurisdictions and the capacity of their respective institutions to provide public goods (Alesina and Spolaore 2005; Hooghe and Marks 2016). These analyses often adopt a normative perspective, seeking ways in which to optimize state territorial structures. Baldersheim and Rose (2010) identify ‘consolidationist’ perspectives which advocate the amalgamation of administrative units in the name of economies of scale while ‘public choice’ rationales are more favourable to territorial fragmentation, supposed to encourage closer contact between citizens and institutions and to offer greater freedom of choice. These functional approaches tend to envisage the advantages and disadvantages associated with scalar redistributions of power in general terms, regardless of the historical contexts in which they occur.

The neostructuralist approaches of state space rescaling, inspired by regulationist and neo-Marxist theories, analyze territorial reorganization processes in terms of the dynamics of the political economy (Brenner et al. 2003). According to these analyses, the succession of different regimes of accumulation can account for changes in the scalar organization of state spaces. In Western Europe for example, a regime of ‘spatial Keynesianism’ would have developed after the Second World War through top-down, centralized and standardized spatial planning policies aiming to redistribute investments, capital and public infrastructures in favour of outlying towns, underdeveloped areas and rural peripheries. From the 1970s, the transition to a post-Fordist economy would have led to the gradual emergence of a ‘Rescaled Competition State Regime’ (RCSR) characterized by a multilevel, decentralized and flexible system of coordination aiming to foster economic growth by promoting interlocal competition and boosting the competitiveness and attractiveness of the best performing cities and regions (Brenner 2004). While this approach provides an interesting analytical framework for understanding the political effects of economic transformations, it does not adequately account for the existence of an axiological incoherence at the foundation of the successive regimes identified, and overlooks some potential internal ambiguities. It also tends to view political temporalities in terms of dramatic turns between antagonistic cycles, and to underestimate the existence of continuities and long-amplitude processes. In contrast, as this paper demonstrates regarding France, the welfare state and neoliberal policies developed more synchronously than successively. Lastly, neostructuralist analyses neglect the issue of agency in rescaling processes, the role of actors, their interests, their ideas and the potential political rivalries between these.

A third approach of regional rescaling relates to the strategic analysis of public policies developed in the field of sociology of organizations to understand how institutions are shaped by unequally efficient systems of actors (Crozier and Friedberg 1981). Applied to the regions created in France from the 1950s, this approach focuses on how struggles for power affect territorial reconfiguration processes and lead to unstable outcomes (Worms 1966; Grémion 1976). In the wake of such analyses, Burnham (2009) looks at the influence of the political position and leadership of institutional reformers in their ability to carry out regional reorganization processes. Focusing on power relations, these analyses pay too little attention to the intentions of the reformers and to the effects they attempt to produce on the territories they reconfigure. For example, they underestimate the link between the importance attached by successive French central governments to economic issues and their desire to make the regional tier a key instrument of economic development.

None of the previous theories are able to provide an adequate understanding of the axiological heterogeneity and complexity of French regionalization. The constructivist approach proposed by Keating (2017) seems comparatively more accurate. By focusing on the way in which political actors engage when integrated within complex systems of interactions, this constructivist approach seeks to identify and explain the existence of several contrasting frames of regionalization. Keating’s analysis of regional policy networks, studied from a bottom-up perspective, provides an illustration of the possible contribution of a constructivist approach to gain insight into the complexity of regional restructuring (Keating and Wilson 2014). This approach of regional policy networks converges with the analysis of communitarian regional mobilization developed in comparative politics by Hooghe and Marks (2016), or with that of the empowerment of French regions by Pasquier (2015).

The constructivist approach may also ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The bigger the better? The new ‘macro’ regions in France in the lens of territorial changes in Europe
• 1 The road to ambiguity: the axiological construction of the regional tier in France
• 2 The territorial big bang: which assessment about the territorial reform in France?
• 3 Conflicts, competition and cooperation between territorial self-government units after the administrative reform in 1999: Wielkopolska
• 4 Merging regions in contemporary France: a policy perspective
• 5 Exploring the creation of the metropolitan city-region government: the cases of England, France and Italy
• 6 The making of the Bydgoszcz-Toruń partnership area as an example of a bipolar conflict
• 7 The scale of the century? – the new city regionalism in England and some experiences from Liverpool
• 8 The ‘Alsace European Authority’: a new step in the ‘territorial differentiation’ in France
• Index