Environment and Planning A 2013, volume 45, pages 1302 1317

doi:10.1068/a45299

Territorial cohesion, territorialism, territoriality, and

soft planning: acritical review

Andreas Faludi
Delft University of Technology, OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment,
Oostplantsoen 114, 2611WL Delf t, The Netherlands; e-mail: A.K.F.Faludi@tudelft.nl
Received 7 June 2012; in revised form 20 August 2012

Abstract. Territorial cohesion is a shared EU competence, but what is territory? This

paper seeks to alert plannersin particular those involved in European spatial planning
that common-sense answers do not necessarily apply: it is not a container. A view of
macrospace as filled with territories-as-containersterritorialismis nonetheless the
basis for common misunderstandings about the EU, and also about European planning,
now being articulated in terms of territorial cohesion. Leaving the container view behind
means that control over territoriesterritorialitymust be negotiated, something that
relational regionalism also suggests. The planning literature is beginning to absorb
such views, articulating soft rather than hard forms of planning for soft spaces. Hard
planning is bound to continue, but it will be embedded in new practices, including the
conceptualisation of multiple visions on territory.

Keywords: territorial cohesion, territory, territorialism, territoriality, soft planning

1 Introduction
European treaties recognise economic, social, and territorial cohesion as competences that
are shared between the Union and its members. The Council of Ministers and the European
Parliament have to approve any Commission initiative. In the light of unsuccessful attempts
in the past to arrive at a form of EU spatial planning (Dhr et al, 2010; Faludi and Waterhout,
2002), such initiatives in regard to territorial cohesion, if any, are likely to be controversial.
This paper does not pursue the politics involved but explores an underlying issue. Of
territorial cooperationa Cohesion policy objective and currently the chief medium through
which territorial cohesion is being pursuedPeyrony and Denert (2012, page 2) say that
neither its aims nor the territorial concepts it uses are adequately defined. Basic as it is to
territorial cohesion, this is also true for the concept of territory (Elden, 2010, pages 799800).
Based on an exploration of relevant academic literature, this paper seeks to alert planners
in particular those involved in European spatial planning in its various permutationsthat
common-sense answers to what territory is do not necessarily apply. Amongst others, such
assumptions come from conventional international relations theory, seeing states as fixed
units of sovereign space and postulating a divide between domestic and foreign policy: in
short that states are containers of societies (Agnew, 1994). This casts EU member states as
the regions most important internal spaces and treats politicalterritorial developments
at other levels largely in terms of the ideological norms that underpin the modern state
system (Murphy, 2008, page 9). However, there has been a shift away from explaining
European integration in terms of formal positions to exploring how the system works as a
form of multilevel governance. Marks (1992), credited by Conzelmann (2008) with having
introduced the concept, asked, for instance, whether the EU should be understood as a club of
member states (the intergovernmental or state-centred perspective) or something above them
(the supranational perspective). His close look at EU regional policy made him think in terms
of network governance (see also Kohler-Koch and Rittberger, 2006, page 34). Other US
Territorial cohesion, territorialism, territoriality, and soft planning 1303

commentators describe the EU as a first governing experiment in a world metamorphosing

from geographic planes to planetary fields (Rifkin, 2004, page 225) and as a functional novel
polity without a state (Sabel and Zeitlin, 2010, page 2). According to Clark and Jones (2008,
page 301), the EU is, indeed the only self-sustaining example of post-sovereign statehood,
comprising a multitude of new political spaces and scales of engagement.
Marks (1992, page 223) called it an untidy novel polity involving the fusion of state
functions and also of territories, with implications for planning. Straddling the borders
between Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, and France, the Grand Rgion is an example
where national administrative divisions do not always correspond with the scales at which
the dynamics of development need to be planned and it is constantly necessary to invent
more pertinent and functional perimeters, as for instance transnational agglomerations,
functional urban regions or also employment areas (Vidal and Niedermeyer, 2011, page 298;
translation by the author). Another example, the Euroregion Neisse-Nisa-NysaTri-Country
Border Region (Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic) capitalises on this, its position:
Rather than representing edgeness and end of territory, borderness is reinterpreted and
projected as a strength (Herschel, 2010, page 163). More commonly, there is (still) a major
failure to take account of neighbouring communities (administrative boundaries still rule)
(Goodstadt, 2009, page 8; quoted after Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009a, page 2544).
Couching their argument in terms of scale rather than territory, Janssen-Jansen and Hutton
(2011, page 307), writing on metropolitan planning around Milan, Stuttgart, Portland,
Vancouver, and Amsterdam, claim that it is hard to find the right one. Scale is a dynamic
concept, varying by theme and time. The urban region does not exist and regions are always
in the making defined on the basis of a particular theme or subject around which the actors
have formed a coalition.
A defining element of territory, contrary to the common view, a border does not necessarily
mean a linear boundary (Antonsich, 2011a, pages 423424). Indeed, boundary studies have
moved away from the study of the evolution and changes of the territorial line to the border,
more complexly understood as a site at and through which socio-spatial differences are
communicated (Van Houtum, 2005, page 672). All this challenges key assumptions, as if
states and their subnational derivatives exercised control over clearly defined territories; that
territories are like containers. The further assumption which is also challenged is that of EU
space as one large container filled with smaller ones, each with a government responsible for
what happens in and with it.
The literature on which this paper draws is complex. Identifying territory, place, scale, and
network as distinct spatial lexicons, Jessop et al (2008) foresee being able to reconceptualise
practical issues, the sociospatial specificities of the EU and multiscalar metagovernance
amongst them. However, here this literature is discussed only as regards whether territory is
like the property of an administration, which is what the Westphalian nexus, so called after
the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, between national territory and sovereignty implies. Indeed,
according to Soja (1971, page 9; quoted after Elden 2010, page 805) Western perspectives
on social organization are powerfully shaped by the concept of property, in which pieces of
territory are viewed as commodities (emphasis in original). This is what, for instance, EU
discussions on subsidiarity and multilevel governance imply (Faludi, 2012a; 2012b) but what
this paper criticises.
Before launching into the argument, a disclaimer is in order. The purpose here cannot be
to argue for a greater EU role, as if it were a more suitable container than nation-states are.
Rather, the aim of the paper is to challenge the container view as such and to explore policy
implications of the challenge, couched in terms of a critique of territorialism and territoriality
for the pursuit of territorial cohesion. Territorialism stands for seeing territories-as-containers
1304 A Faludi

as the building blocks for the organisation of macrospace and these building blocks as subject
to government control, or state territoriality.
The paper begins by discussing territorial cohesion in section 2. Section 3 on territorialism
outlines the challenge to the container view of territory. Section 4 discusses the complement
of territory, territoriality (Clark and Jones, 2008, pages 304306), and how, once the notion of
territory changes, territoriality becomes more than the privilege of states. Section 5 deals with
soft planning for the soft spaces emerging as borders are fading. The conclusions in section 6
temper any expectation of a radical break with existing practices. After all, this would imply
no less than a reconsideration of territorial representation as mediating democratic decision
making.

2 Territorial cohesion
Waterhout (2008, pages 97122) identifies three storylines relating to territorial cohesion
that are not explicitly concerned with territory as such but rather with substantive goals of
territorial development: Europe in Balance, Competitive Europe, and Clean and Green
Europe. The Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion (European Commission, 2008) and the
consultations on it (Cotella et al, 2012, pages 917; Faludi, 2010, pages 162167; Sykes,
2011, pages 378382) refer to these storylines. Territory comes through more strongly in
the fourth storyline which Waterhout dubs Coherent Europe. Much like the Barca Report
(2009), which advocates integrating territorial development policies, Coherent Europe is
about territorial cohesion creating added value by packaging policies in such a way as to
suit the territory concerned. Ten years earlier the European Spatial Development Perspective
(ESDP) talked about this as the spatial approach arguing that projects complement
each other best, if they are directed towards common objectives for spatial development.
Therefore, national spatial development policies of the Member States and sectoral
policies of the EU require clear spatially transcendent development guidelines (European
Commission, 1999, page 7). Evers (2008, page 304) makes a distinction similar to that of
Waterhout between territorial cohesion relating to substantive goals of EU Cohesion policy
on the one hand and pursuing efficiency gains due to policies being integrated, in so doing
avoiding any costs of non-coordination (Robert et al, 2001) on the other. For instance, EU
liberalisation policy may lead to the withdrawal of services, thus counteracting the intention
that people should not be disadvantaged by where they happen to live or work in the Union
(European Commission, 2004, page 27). Territorial cohesion is thus said to promote a better
balance between competitiveness and equity (Faludi, 2007; Peyrony, 2007; Ross, 1995) by
spatialising the European model of society (Davoudi, 2007, pages 8284).
Driven by such concerns, amnagement du territoire has been the model for EU Cohesion
policy and with Dutch support the French have initiated the intergovernmental ESDP process.
Upon the completion of the ESDP, the Commission switched to invoking territorial cohesion
as a concept. French experts confide to each other that it is the same as amnagement du
territoire (Guellec, 2009, page 9), a broad, strategic form of spatial planning different from
statutory land-use planning (Faludi, 2004, page 159). So territorial cohesion is like strategic
spatial planning. In the EU context it is simply a more convenient label. Invoking territorial
cohesion as a concept, the same kinds of experts as before in the ESDP process have prepared
the Territorial Agenda (2007) and the Territorial Agenda 2020 (2011) and largely the same
member states that were opposed to EU spatial planning are against an EU role as regards
territorial cohesion (Faludi, 2010, pages 165167). Integration, such as territorial cohesion
demands, they say is a task for the nation-state.
Be that as it may, it is a longstanding argument that the fact that policies with territorial
impact should be integrated makes a case for planning. The Schuster Report (Committee
on Qualifications of Planners, 1950) had already pointed out that for nearly all its activities
Territorial cohesion, territorialism, territoriality, and soft planning 1305

the community depended on land, a limited resource, and that the location of development
could affect the achievement of its goals. So authorities needed plans integrating all policies
relevant to their areas of responsibility. Twenty years on, the systems view of planning
(Chadwick, 1971; McLoughlin, 1969) merely added rigour to this view. The assumption
continued to be that the frame for spatial integration was the area of responsibility of an
authority for which the planner was the helmsman (McLoughlin, 1969, pages 8687). The
delineation of such areas needed to be such, however, that common social, economic and
environmental problems are not divided and that all the area dependent upon the city for
its main employment, educational, commercial, recreational and cultural needs should form
an administrative unit (page 302). Reform along such lines was then on the cards in the
UK, but the point to be discussed here is the assumption of territory being identical to an
administrative unit.

3 Territorialism
In debates, the EU territory is commonly seen as the sum of the territories of its members,
a nested hierarchy of bounded spaces. EU policy thus becomes a politics of scale
(Perkmann, 2007, pages 255256) concerning reallocating governance functions from where
they were previously located and in so doing changing the scalar division of labour (Jessop
et al, 2008, page 393). For the underlying assumptions about the organisation of space,
Scholte (2000, page 47) invokes the term territorialism. It means macrosocial space being
seen as wholly organized in terms of units such as districts, towns, provinces, countries
and regions. Each unit is thought to be a container, a view inherent to the classic notion of
territory as an area that has been appropriated, with borders marking the limits of control
(Baudelle et al, 2011, page 16); a rendering of space as a political category: owned,
distributed, mapped, calculated, bordered and controlled (Elden, 2010, page 810). The
institution of boundaries goes hand in hand with the establishment of sovereign authority
wielding exclusive power over a homogenous territory (Perkmann, 2007, page 257). A
border is thus a thin line on a map that marks the ending of one sovereign territory and the
beginning of another, where controls take place over the movement of people, services, and
goods ... . The concept ... orientates the convergence of people with a given territory and
myths of a common history ... about who we are, where we belong, and to whom our loyalties
should lie (Vaughan-Williams 2011, page 185).
This paper rests its case for a fresh look at territory on the claim that such views are
historically contingent, and particularly so where the modern notion of national territories
is concerned. In the past, the people inhabiting the often dispersed territories of a sovereign
lord were not expected to have mutual bonds. The French Revolution and Romanticism
between them led to nations being seen as having birth rights to ancient homelands, with
identities and common languages (Loriaux, 2008). According to Lukacs (2010), the nation
thus appropriated the state and the modern territory emerged as a counter-movement to
other modes of socio-spatial organization such as empire, the feudal system or the city-state
(Badie, 1995, see Perkmann, 2007, page 257).
Territory as a container and the nation inhabiting it having a birthright to it were thus
new ideas, but nowadays citizens base their attitudes, also and in particular regarding
the EU on them, as if territory and nation were part of a natural, nay a divine, order. The
backlash, not the object of this paper, against challenges to it comes in terms of nation,
nationalism, and national identity (Hainsworth, 2008). There is also the radical critique,
not discussed here either, from those hoping for territories and particularly regions turning
into arenas for opposing mainstream ideas about globalisation, state restructuring, and
competition (Antonsich, 2011b, page 333; Jonas, 2012, page 270). Rather, what the paper
does discuss is the reaction to the advent and spread of what are alternately called global,
1306 A Faludi

supraterritorial, transworld or transborder social spaces (Scholte, 2000, page 3). As is

the case with the EU, such spaces are conceived as mosaics of existing territories fitted into
larger, supranational containers. This is an example of a metageographya spatial structure
of thought underlying perceptions of the worldthat casts states as the most important
internal spaces and that treats politicalterritorial developments at other levels largely in
terms of the ideological norms that underpin the modern state system (Murphy, 2008,
page 9). Without invoking the term, Scholte (2000, page 47) discusses the metageography
underlying this statist territorialism where countries hold pride of place above the other
kinds of territorial realms. His point is that in global transactions place is not territorially
fixed, territorial distance is covered in effectively no time, and territorial boundaries present
no particular impediment; in the terms of Castells (2000), the space of flows. Space cannot,
therefore, be understood only in terms of districts, towns, provinces, and so forth, each with
borders marking the limits of the jurisdiction of the responsible authority.
Murphy (2008, page 9) points out that the current cartography of social life is the
contingent outcome of efforts to achieve particular ends with concrete implications
for how things are organized and how people think about the world around them. This
produces a geographical imagination that privileges the nation-states over river basins,
vegetation zones, population concentrations, or other possible regionalizations. He points
out, however, that other metageographies are possible. Scholte (2000, page 57) says likewise:
If contemporary human circumstances have gained a substantial global dimension, then we
need to develop an alternative, nonterritorialist cartography of social life. This must not treat
jurisdictions with fixed borders as the inevitable building blocks; in other words, the new
cartography must transcend the container view, a conclusion which is also applied to the EU.
Others, too, criticise the container view rigidly separating territorial units. Thus, Loriaux
(2008, page 14) shows that the frontier between France and Germany is based on a series
of myths created through speech acts coming not from culture, language, or physical
geography, but from the commitment to transcendent purpose, a telos. Such acts create
mental maps of specific spaces, what the planning literature refers to as planning doctrine:
a durable scheme for the organisation of specific areas (Alexander, 1996; Coop and Thomas,
2007; Faludi and Van der Valk, 1994; Roodbol-Mekkes et al, 2012; Shachar, 1998). However,
we need not be prisoners of just any myth, so Loriaux (2008, pages 298299) critically
examines the myths on which the Rhineland frontier is based, with implications for national
borders generally. He shows that it was the outcome of Julius Caesar, invoking artificial labels
like Gallia and Germania, marking the edge up to which it paid to keep Roman garrisons. The
continuing parcelling out of the common multilingual and multicultural area on both sides
of the Rhine into national entities involved many more such speech acts. However, one may
also deconstruct this frontier, emblematic as such deconstruction is for European integration
(Western, 2012, page 5).
Casting a critical eye on the role of nation-states has led to an argument for empowering
regions, the so-called new regionalism. The problem is not, however, the size of territories-
as-containers; it is the concept as such. Amin (2004, page 33) thus criticises new regionalism
for conjuring up an image of a world of nested or jostling territorial configurations, of
territorial attack and defence, of scalar differences, of container spaces. According to Amin
(page 34), cosmopolitan forces rather produce a world of cities and regions without prescribed
or proscribed boundaries. He thus denies that there is a defined geographical territory out
there over which local actors can have effective control, and invokes a different, topological
rather than topographic reading where the local brings together different scales of practice/
social action (page 36). In so doing, he comes down on the side of a relationally imagined
regionalism that is freed from the constraints of territorial jurisdiction (page 42).
Territorial cohesion, territorialism, territoriality, and soft planning 1307

Amin alludes to a longstanding distinction between absolute and relative space (Harvey,
1969). The issue then was whether geography employed unique ideographic methods, or
whether it should emulate natural-science-type explanation. Fifteen years on, Massey (1984,
page 2) criticised the wave of super-positivism and the mania for quantification which
swept all the social sciences in the nineteen-sixties which ensued from embracing natural-
science explanation, but Harvey (1969, page 208) rather criticised the absolute view of space
underlying the ideographic method. Mapping activities onto a topographic space, the systems
view of planning likewise assumes an absolute view (Faludi, 1973, page 74), and so does the
argument that, by virtue of its being parcelled out into fixed units, each by definition having
limited resources, space must be planned. Harvey contrasted the absolute view with a view
of space as a positional, relational quality of the world of material objects. His example was
the conceptualisation under location theory of cities as shaping the spaces around them. From
this Harvey (1969, page 209) concluded that it was no longer feasible to take a container
view of space . The empirical problem which geography thus faces is to select a geometry
which can deal with the complexities of such fields and forces. The notion of an absolute
space no longer holds. Rejecting the container metaphor, as Harvey does, amounts to no
less than a critique of territorialism.
This section ends with a brief discussion of the related view of the mosaic of spaces
being structured according to a Russian-doll model. The literature on types of multilevel
governance (Hooghe and Marks, 2001; 2003; 2010; Marks and Hooghe, 2004) invokes
it where it discusses type I, with type II reflecting the different spatial logic of functional
regions. Type I thus:
conceives of dispersion of authority to jurisdictions at a limited number of levels. These
jurisdictionsinternational, national, regional, meso, localare general purpose. The
membership boundaries do not intersect. In this form of governance, every citizen
is located in a Russian Doll set of nested jurisdictions, where there is one and only
one relevant jurisdiction at any particular territorial scale (Hooghe and Marks, 2010,
pages 1718).
The Russian-doll figure of speech for nested jurisdictions where each doll/scale is understood
as largely capable of being considered on its own even while located in its (fixed) position
within a preordained hierarchy (Mahon and Keil, 2009, page 14) reminds of Scholtes
territorialism. Of the classicalmodernist order which he criticises, Hajer (2009, page 24)
says likewise: Like the Russian dolls, levels of government are look-alikes that fit inside one
another. Its clarity is a huge incentive for sustaining this view. However, the order which the
Russian doll represents no longer matches economic, social, and environmental problems.
Before discussing this mismatch further under territoriality, it is worth pointing out that
territorialism has consequences for the conduct of research. It leads one to subscribe to
what Jessop et al (2008, page 391) describe as methodological territorialism, the practice
of understanding the world and conducting studies about it through the lens of territorial
geography (Scholte, 2000, page 58; see also Delanty and Rumford, 2005, page 123;
Rosenau, 2004, page 39).

4 Territoriality
Discussing the classicalmodernist view of which he is otherwise critical, Hajer (2009) points
out that the principle of territoriality adds to its clarity. Another mention of territoriality comes
when, talking about a geographic imagination privileging the nation-state, Murphy (2008,
page 9) claims that the multilevel governance literatures preoccupation with institutional
arrangements needs to be supplemented with a concern for the ways in which territorial
understandings and arrangements are shaping how things are organized on the ground and
how people conceptualize Europe as a geographical construct. This means taking seriously.
1308 A Faludi

territoriality. Invoking the same concept, Scholte (2000, page 59) says that the end of
territorialism does not spell the end of territoriality.
According to Sack (1984, page 34), social organisations like nations, cities, and armies
as social facts are often territorial ... . Territoriality here ... means the assertion by an
organisation ... that an area of space is under its influence. Elsewhere, Sack (1986, page 19)
defines territoriality as the attempt ... to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and
relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographical area. This makes its
being a complement, as Clark and Jones (2008, pages 304306) have been quoted to suggest,
of the notion of territory evident. A place thus becomes a territory by influencing behaviour by
means of controlling access and so forth (Elden, 2010, page 802). This involves classification,
requires communication as to where the boundary is, and also enforcement (Sack, 1986,
pages 2122). Elden (2010, page 809) points out that developments in cartography and land
surveying have made this possible. That this was no innocent matter is illustrated by the case,
reported by Robb (2007, pages 35), of a surveyor working on the Cassini Map of France
having been killed by villagers fearing the consequence of in terms of taxing their properties.
Like territory, territoriality, too, is socially constructed: It takes an act of will and involves
multiple levels of reasons and meanings. And territoriality can have normative implications as
well. Setting places aside and enforcing degrees of access means that individuals and groups
have removed some activities and people from places and included others (Sack, 1986,
page 26). So defined, territoriality is a constitutive element of the modern state. However, as
the ESDP (European Commission, 1999, page 7) has pointed out: With growing economic
and social integration, internal borders are increasingly losing their separating character and
more intensive relationships and inter-dependencies are emerging between cities and regions
of the Member States. Indeed, the spatial decision-making frame has become qualitatively
different, the result being that a long-established national patterning of decision making
gives way to a European patterning, which over extended periods has consequences for
domestic governance and institutions (Jones and Clark, 2010, page 11).
Without doubt, aiming for a Europe without borders, European integration does
challenge state territoriality, but this is but one example of what Hajer (2009, page 27) sees as
a general challenge to territorial synchrony. The challenge means that the unity of political
centre, public, and problem is lost. Even large states may thus lack the power to solve policy
problems due to discrepancies between the geographical reach of political institutions and
the scale of public problems (page 29). Propagating the systems view, McLoughlin has been
shown to opt for the apparently obvious solution, adapting geographical reach to the scale of
problems, but this is not normally an option and, if so, then reforms are unlikely to keep up
with the pace of change. Referring to issues like migration, international crime, HIV/AIDS,
or ecological sustainability, Hajer (2009, page 30) says, therefore, that the varied search for
effective and legitimate solutions involves interactions among researchers and practitioners
searching for efficacy and salience in a non-orchestrated and dispersed process of trial and
error. Indeed, much policy work takes place next to or across established orders, including
the growth of a civic politics and the emergence of new citizen-actors and new forms of
mobilization (Hajer, 2009, page 33). All this shifts policy makingand territoriality
into an institutional void which Marks (1992, page 233) saw as evidence of changes to the
Weberian ideal-type of the state, so called after Max Weber. That ideal-type is rooted in
the monopolistic control of the legitimate means of coercion within some given territory
which, however, reveals less and less about the realities of political power.
Burgess and Vollaard (2006, page 1) ask the question, which Scholte has already been
quoted as answering in the negative, whether state territoriality no longer being a monopoly
means that territoriality as such is no longer a useful concept. Their answer is that territoriality
Territorial cohesion, territorialism, territoriality, and soft planning 1309

becomes fluid and dynamic. Thus, the process of unbundling territoriality on one level might
imply that a simultaneous process will occur at another level, as for example in the case of the
continuous ceding of competences from the national to the EU level (pages 78). This is of
course a common reading of European integration. However, echoing Hooghe and Markss
writing on two types of multilevel governance, Burgess and Vollaard (page 8) point out
that the unbundling of territoriality may also entail non-territorial forms of organisation.
Obviously, nonterritorial, so-called functional areas are also territorial but the point is they
are not the exclusive responsibility of multipurpose territorial administrations, and thus
not part of their territoriality. So territoriality must be shared but, then, governing turning
from a monopoly into what is called governance is accepted wisdom and the object of a
growing literature (Bevir, 2011; Levy-Faur, 2012). This is particularly true for the EU where
governance has been the object of a White Paper (European Commission, 2001).
Discussing the territoriality specifically of European integration, Mamadouh (2001,
pages 420421) asks whether the EU represents a new form of political governance. Now,
if European integration had reproduced the characteristics of state territoriality, then the EU
could be regarded as a state-like entity. In fact, it produces new kinds of territoriality, so it
should be acknowledged as a new form of governance, which is, as has been pointed out,
a common view in the literature. Indeed, owing to the fact that, although selected powers have
been transferred, the EU does not directly control a territory, EU territoriality is mediated and
multiple. Also, the territory of the European Union differs from the territory of a state: it is
expanding without threating other states, and it is variable (Mamadouh, 2001, page 433). Its
territoriality is aspirational (Bialasiewicz et al, 2005, page 346; see also Bialasiewicz, 2008;
2011). Integration
creates its own political landscape of territoriality. The EU has no borders of its own:
(member) state borders are the ones that matter, but the process of integration has
differentiated them. Formerly all-encompassing boundaries have been replaced by
shifting borders that delimitate variable territories. In addition, borders are not conceived as
dividers any more. Cross-border co-operation is stimulated (Mamadouh, 2001, page 434).
So, in being less fixed, less exclusive, territoriality differs from state territoriality, thus
supporting the common view that the EU is emerging as a truly new form of political
governance with its specific form of territoriality.
Summarising the argument so far, it is clear that the critique of territorialism questions
whether territories should be treated as if they were containers. Likewise, any exclusive form
of territoriality must be rejected. The next section discusses how this affects planning.

5 Soft planning
Relying on state territoriality and, within legal and constitutional limits, on the territoriality
of subnational governments, planners deal with development within, but not outside, their
jurisdictions. However, territories-as-containers cannot be the privileged units of analysis
and action. In dealing with emergent soft or, as the academic literature also has it, relational
spaces, rather than relying on statutory powers and government funding, which is what
hard planning does, planning must become soft, reaching across borders, but in so doing it
must avoid lowest-common-denominator compromises. Rather, it must seek synergies with
actions of others.
This section starts with Amin arguing that cities and regions no longer offer territorially
defined public spheres. Rather, any particular geographical site can only be a nodal connection
in a hydra-like network space that never coheres into a local public sphere. An obvious
implication is that there is no pre-given place for a politics of regionalism (2004, page 38).
Rather, there are varied geographies. Working with and through them, the proper response is
thinking of regions as spatially diffuse. This calls for a politics of place, of which planning
1310 A Faludi

is of course part, that works through this constitutive condition, not one that fakes, as does
the new regionalism, a minor national politics of assumed territorial insides and outsides and
an imagined regional identity (page 40). His work with the equally famous geographers
Massey and Thrift (Amin et al, 2003, page 2) questions assumptions underlying UK regional
policy, the assumption that politics has to be territorially bounded amongst them. Instead,
Amin advocates cosmopolitan regionalism, cosmopolitanism being a concept discussed by
Beck (2006) and the topic of a new handbook (Brown and Held, 2011). Delanty and Rumford
(2005; see also Western, 2012) see cosmopolitanism as a hopeful perspective for Europe, but
in the current climate this is a distant ideal.
Obviously, a relationally imagined regionalism that is freed from the constraints
of territorial jurisdiction (Amin, 2004, page 42) has implications for spatial planning and
territorial cohesion understood as the pursuit of added value due to territorial development
policies being integrated. It means that there cannot be just one geographic scale, one spatial
framework for integrationthe territory for which an administration is responsiblebut
there need to be several, with each representing a different, and quite likely competing,
perspective. The planning literature is picking up such themes.
Challenging Euclidian planning with its axiomatic assumptions about space, Friedmann
(1994) was early in factoring conceptions of space into the equation. He claimed that
classic planning locating itself in a world of stable entities was being superseded by non-
Euclidian planning operating in many spacetime geographies. Graham and Healey (1999),
too, criticised the Euclidean conception of space. Continuing where Friedmann had left off,
they reviewed notions of space under which places became complex arenas. In Splintering
Urbanisma telling titleGraham and Marvin (2001) took this further: cities depended on
manifold infrastructure provisions incorporating not only technical but also sociotechnical
systems. State monopolies oriented towards equitable provisions are being superseded by
market provisions. Together with the hub-and-spokes structure of many such provisions,
this makes for a relational geography: cities becoming fragmented, with relations with
distant places sometimes becoming more important than those with contiguous ones. The
tendency of fencing off nodal points exacerbated fragmentation, thus spelling the end of the
integrated ideal of comprehensive urban planning, precisely the ideal behind integrated
spatial development: territorial cohesion.
Davoudi and Strange, recent authors who address the relational literature, talk about
space, not as nested containers but as depending on the processes and substances making it
up. Invoking an increasingly popular concept, they consider place formation as the carving
out of permanences from the flow of space-creating processes. The organising spatial
principle is one of multiple overlapping networks with continuous flows of people, resources,
and knowledge (2009, page 38). In the same vein, Healey (2010, page 32) points out that
those with a stake in what happens in a place are not only local residents, or citizens, of
a specific administrative-political jurisdiction. Stakeholders may come from other places.
Furthermore, place refers not only to material objects, nor is it the same as a jurisdiction.
Indeed, the latter may not be coterminous with the key relations that need to be mobilised
to address particular place-management and development problems and potentialities
(page 69). Healey views the place-based governance with a planning orientation which she
is promoting as improving the conditions of life for people in terms of their relations. In
so doing it is important to move away from conceiving such relations as a kind of nested
hierarchy of systems . Instead, systems are better imagined as overlapping, loosely
bounded and loosely coupled sets of relations (page 226). It is clear that Healeyand this
also goes for the other authors discussed hererejects the territorialism of Russian-doll-type
arrangements as well as any exclusive reliance on state territoriality.
Territorial cohesion, territorialism, territoriality, and soft planning 1311

This type of thinking has gelled under the flag of soft planning for soft spaces. In their
study of Thames Gateway, Allmendinger and Haughton point out that it shares its boundaries
with no other statutory body; that the emphasis is thus on scales other than those of the
statutory planning system. The clear geographical and professional boundaries of planning,
plus the hierarchical and silo ways of behaving are already planning history (2009b,
page 618). The authors review literature on rescaling, the likes of Brenner (2004) and Jessop
(1997; 2000), arguing that rescaling involves
not simply a shifting of emphasis across existing scales of the statutory planning system,
but the insertion of new scales for planning intervention, plus an apparent predilection for
promoting new policy scales, initially at least through the device of fuzzy boundaries. ...
The emergence of these soft spaces is an important trend ...
So 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 (page 620).
Soft spaces also appears in the title of the book which followed this article (Haughton
et al, 2010). Like the work of Davoudi and Strange (2009) it is based on an analysis of
emergent strategic planning practices in the British Isles. Without couching his analysis in
terms of soft spaces, Harrison (2013), too, analyses practice: in his case regional planning
in North West England influenced, as it has been, by the relational thinking of the likes of
Amin. Harrison discusses the interplay between soft and hard planning. Referring to key
maps illustrating an array of strategies appearing within a short timespan, he shows how
relational thinking is waxing and waning under the staying power of territorialism, a point
also made in a similar study of his of the Atlantic Gateway (Liverpool and Manchester)
presented at the 2012 Annual European Conference of the Regional Studies Association.
In a parallel paper coauthored with Growe and that also refers to the works above on
soft spaces, Harrison comes to more positive conclusions concerning the opportunities for
relational thinking being brought to bear. Discussing the concepts and strategies for spatial
development in Germany adopted by the federal government jointly with the governments
of the Lnder, their analysis rests once more on an examination of relevant maps. The
policy focus in Germany is on so-called European Metropolitan Regions, soft spaces with
no equivalent politico-administrative bodies. In the face of pressure to safeguard equality
of opportunities, a constitutional goal and a concern that German territorial authorities are
keen to be seen to be promoting, the city-regional policy was made spatially inclusive
by identifying areas of influence which are inclusive of the rural areas located beyond
the metropolitan region but are to varying degrees functionally connected (Harrison and
Growe 2012, page 14). The study lends support to the contention that territorial and relational
viewpoints are not mutually exclusive and that new regional spaces are mediated through
existing institutions.

6 Conclusions
The previous section discussed studies of soft planning of the type of which elsewhere
(Faludi, 2010, 172f) I have said that it points the way for European spatial planning. They
are innovative in conceptualising new territories criss-crossing existing jurisdictions leading
to an unusual regionalism, the term coined by Deas and Lord (2006, page 1850) who
also refer to the admonitions to develop imaginative configurations that straddle national
and regional boundaries in line with spatial planning imperatives by the Commission. All
this means challenging territorialism and state territoriality by deconstructing borders. By
deconstruction, Loriaux in his work on the Rhineland frontier means interrogating myths of
self and others, and the discovery of new possibilities that are more powerfully mobilizing
1312 A Faludi

and legitimizing. That such interrogations do not necessarily imply wholesale change; that
established ways, like those in North West England, persist and are at best integrated in new
ones is taken as read. None of these authors assumes wholesale change.
As far as European spatial planning is concerned, its practice so far has been couched in
terms of member states versus the EU, as if only these scales were relevant, an example of
Russian-doll-type thinking. So the choice has apparently been between surrendering spatial
planning to the EU or retaining it as a member state competence: a zero-sum game. This
has been the bane of the ESDP process, and this also holds for the positioning game around
territorial cohesion, with some member states seeing advantage for themselves in an EU role,
giving conditional support to Commission thinking and others holding it at bay. However,
there is much soft planning occurring, often with active support from the Commission,
at cross-border and transnational scales, implying a new understanding of territory and of
territoriality.
Indeed, keen on transcending borders, the Commission promotes soft planning in soft
cross-border and transnational spaces as part of its Cohesion policy. Spatial visions for
each of the INTERREG transnational cooperation areas have been only a partial success
(Zonneveld, 2005). Macroregional strategies are of a different alloy in that, on the request
of the member states concerned, no less an authority than the European Council invited
the Commission to become active. The latter coordinates its relevant policies and brokers
agreements on concrete actions. A disclaimerno new money, no new legislation, no new
institutionsmeans that macroregional strategies are examples of spatial rescaling (Stead,
2011, page 163) and of soft spatial planning at the EU level. If Metzger and Schmitt (2012)
signal a tendency for planning in the Baltic Sea Macro Region to veer back towards hard
planning, then this only goes to reiterate the complicated interplay between the two forms
of planning.
The question remains whether, without the prospect of funding, soft planning at
European level has a future. Some signals are positive. Commission proposals for beyond
2013 (European Commission, 2011) foresee that macroregional strategies will play an,
albeit unspecified, role in the allocation of funds. This is, of course, how it should be: soft
strategies that shape the minds (Faludi, 2008, page 1479) and in this way influence the
way the taxpayers money is spent and other hard measures are taken, including measures
designed to shape places.
In conclusion, it is clear that territory can no longer be understood as a fixed entity
enveloping all major aspects of social and political life but rather as the object of negotiation
and compromise, open to multiple and contested interpretations. In European spatial planning,
too, one must realise that, far from being a state monopoly, territoriality must be shared.
Spatial planning is then about inserting imaginative visions into the on-going reconstruction
of the spatial fabric of life, including the plurality of territories which this implies.
There is an exciting aspect to this. Loriaux (2008, page 2) whose work on European
Union and the Deconstruction of the Rhineland Frontier has been quoted says that the
terms we use so casually are rooted not in nature, but in the poetic imagination, adding
that this has the effect of freeing deliberation and debate from a vocabulary of obfuscation
and reveals ... the contours of a Europe that is about deconstructing frontiers so as to bring
to light a civilizational space that is intensely urban, cosmopolitan, multilingual, and less
hierarchical than in the past. Planners should thus engage in novel speech acts, taking the
positions of various territorial configurations and also of the stakeholders concerned as
the points of departure for multiple spatial visioning. Surely, this is as promising a perspective
for European spatial planning as one can ask for. The challenge that flows from this is to
visualise networks and flows through the use of scenarios and fuzzy maps (Davoudi
and Strange, 2009, page 38) representing the untidy and complicated situations that are the
Territorial cohesion, territorialism, territoriality, and soft planning 1313

everyday reality of the 21st century. Realism demands, though, that the limits of what is
possible are taken into account. Hard spaces are entrenched because they are the bases for the
organisation in wards, constituencies, electoral districts, and so forth, of democratic decision
making. For as long as there are no convincing alternatives to this manner of producing
legitimacy, hard spaces will remain the primary building blocks for territorial organisation.
Acknowledgements. The author wishes to recognise the unusual quality of the three anonymous
reviews. They have given him a boost in improving his understanding of the issues involved in
any policy to promote territorial cohesion. An earlier version of this paper has been presented at a
plenary of the Annual European Conference of the Regional Studies Association, Networks, Regions
and CitiesTimes of Fragmentation: Developing Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Places at Delft
University of Technology, 1316 May 2012.
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