Planning Inequality: Social and Economic Spaces in National Spatial Planning

Abstract

While traces and techniques of power and contestation around the understanding and production of spaces are clearly recognized in the sociological and planning research literature, there has been little rigorous attention to how socio-spatial inequality is put at stake in strategic mobilization around particular spatial imaginaries. In an analysis of the German Spatial Planning Report, the paper examines how inequalities are represented in relation to space and movement in spatial strategy. The analysis shows how, in the report, the spatial dimension of the social is represented as a territorial container, in which the social merges into regional and national entities. Correspondingly, movement is only interpreted as a derived demand, ignoring its integrative aspect as precondition of participation and part of network capital. On the other hand, the spatiality of the economy is represented as something outside and fluid which is meant to be channelled into the territorial containers by means of regional development and spatial planning. These representations of the social suggest a territorialized culturally integrated society as the unquestioned frame of reference which has lost its adequacy and explanatory power against the background of a qualitatively and quantitatively increase of border transgressing relations and movements. However, this view  covers the economic forces producing inequalities and reduces the political space of manoeuvre to redistributions within territorialized socialities, thus sustaining the dominant neoliberal paradigm.

Notes

Although the focus of this paper is on geographic space, the theoretical assumptions apply to other social spaces (cf. Manderscheid, 2009a).

“The term ‘automobility’ captures a double sense, both of the humanist self as in the notion of autobiography, and of objects or machines that possess a capacity for movement, as in automatic and automaton. […]. ‘Auto’ mobility thus involves autonomous humans combined with machines with capacity for autonomous movement along the paths, lanes, streets and routeways of one society after another. What is key is not the ‘car’ as such but the system of these fluid interconnections” (Urry, 2004, p. 26).

International migration, one of the most important large-scale movements in the contemporary world, is only shortly mentioned as a challenge for west German cities (BBR, 2005, p. 36) and in terms of acculturation of migrants and their offspring (BBR, 2005, pp. 93, 98, 135f.) which supports the argument that the socio-spatial formation is represented as a potentially culturally integrated territorially framed national society.

Although phrased in apparently gender-neutral terms, the idea carries a gendered subtext with the household consisting of a male breadwinner and a dependent female housewife and children. The seemingly genderless concept of the individual has been criticised in various debates by feminist theorists (cf. Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1992).

In Germany, employees pay tax at their place of residence.