Diminishing borders and conflating spaces: a storyline to promote soft planning scales

Investigating the partnership approach in the EU Urban Agenda from the perspective of soft planning

“…Due to its complexity and plurality, spatial development at the European scale is often associated with soft spaces and soft planning (Allmendinger, Chilla, & Sielker, 2014;Faludi, 2010aFaludi, , 2010bMetzger & Schmitt, 2012;Purkarthofer, 2018;Santamaria & Elissalde, 2018;Stead, 2014). Soft spaces refer to new geographies transcending administrative entities, often characterized by fuzzy boundaries and not associated with established governmental organizations (Allmendinger & Haughton, 2009).…”

“…The EU promotes the idea of soft spaces crossing administrative borders on a discursive level but also through the spatialization of its policies, e.g. through the support of cross-border regions through the INTERREG programme (Luukkonen & Moilanen, 2012;Purkarthofer, 2018). Faludi (2010a) claims that '[t]hese soft spaces require, not hard planning that invokes statutory powers, […] but soft planning that relies on a joint formulation of strategy, while retaining dispersed, and thus flexible, powers of action' (p. 21).…”

“…There exists no dedicated urban policy in the European Union but nonetheless the EU has addressed urban issues through different means over the last decades. While a stronger focus on urban issues could be observed during the last years, exemplified for instance through the renaming of the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy and the earmarking of a share of the European Regional Development Fund for sustainable urban development (Purkarthofer, 2018), urban policy has a long history in the EU context (van den Berg, Braun, van der Meer, & Mingardo, 2007;Verdonk, 2014). On the one hand, urban issues have been incorporated into the funding schemes related to EU cohesion policy.…”

City-regional policies in the planning systems of Finland and Austria: National initiatives and European opportunities

“…The existence of explicit city-regional policies, irrespective of the specific national approach, affirms that city regions are regarded a relevant planning scale across Europe. This has likely been supported by the discourse on city regions and other functional geographies at the European Union level (Purkarthofer, 2018a). Yet, EU funding instruments that could be used to support cityregional cooperation seem to be to date underused, at least in the case countries of this study.…”

“…While such soft spaces are said to better represent the real geographies of problems and opportunities (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009), the implementation of policies in these new regions is particularly challenging, as responsibilities and jurisdictions are not clearly defined. While some processes of regionalisation emerge in a bottom-up manner, also the European Union (EU), and national governments have started to promote new regional delineations (Purkarthofer, 2018a). To this end, these superordinate levels of government stimulate the cooperation between existing municipalities and regions, be it through financial incentives, legal provisions or other measures.…”