A practice theoretical perspective on the Europeanization of spatial planning

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a practice theoretical approach for examining the processes of the Europeanization of spatial planning. While the supply of studies on the questions of how, where and when the Europeanization of spatial planning takes place is rich and diverse, the temporal and spatial aspects of the processes have been studied from a rather narrow perspective. In many of the studies, time and space have been examined as objective, pre-existing features of the processes, which has resulted in interpretations of Europeanization as a temporally successive and spatially scalar process. The paper has two main goals. First, it seeks to outline European spatial planning as a distinctive field of political and academic interaction whose central constitutive elements are interconnected policy and research practices. Second, as a more general theoretical goal, the paper develops a practice theoretical approach for examining the processes of Europeanization. In this paper, it is argued that the policy and research practices constitute a temporal–spatial infrastructure for Europeanization. This infrastructure consists of both objective configurations of the practices and the existential temporal–spatial dimensions opened in the practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Activity timespace
• Europeanization
• European spatial planning
• social practices

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Conventional Europeanization studies (sometimes referred to as the ‘first generation’ – Bache, 2003 – of Europeanization studies) have seldom explicitly engaged with the policy transfer literature. However, the second generation of Europeanization studies has put more emphasis on interconnections, transfer mechanisms, language and the role of agency in the processes. Among them, there are various studies that associate Europeanization explicitly with policy transfer (e.g. Holzinger & Knill, 2005; Ladi, 2011; Wishlade, Yuill, & Mendez, 2004). While the views on Europeanization differ remarkably between these studies, ‘transfer’ (of ideas, concepts, norms, authority, etc.) and ‘change’ seem to be the most common denominators among them.

2. The idea of Europeanization as a finite process underlies many of the studies that seek to answer the questions ‘How is Europeanization measured?’ or ‘How much is something Europeanized?’ to measure or evaluate the ‘degree’ of Europeanization. This presupposes the idea that there is a stage or level of complete Europeanization, that is, that something is ‘fully Europeanized’.

3. Schatzki calls the ensembles of entities as ‘social orders’ to emphasize that it is only the context or the site where both the entities and the given practices enjoy meaning and identity and are related to each other (2002, p. 38).

4. In defining the spatiality, Schatzki leans on Heidegger’s notion of the world as a nexus of meaningful entities connected to human activities, where the world refers to the world around ‘amid, with, and toward whose entities the person proceeds’ (Schatzki, 2010, p. 51). The entities – or material arrangements in Schatzki’s terminology – compose the aroundness of the world and, consequently, make up the spatiality of human activity.

5. Technical Assistance and Information Exchange instrument (http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/taiex/).

6. Schatzki differentiates between dispersed and integrated practices. Dispersed practices refer to the practices that are ‘widely dispersed among different sectors of social life’ (Schatzki, 1996, p. 91). Examples of these are the practices of explaining, ordering and describing. Integrated practices are the ones that are specific to particular domains or fields of social life (Schatzki, 1996, p. 98). Integrated practice’s doings and sayings are linked or organized by shared or common understandings; by shared or common rules, principles and instructions; as well as by shared or common teleoaffective structures which refer to particular ends, tasks, projects and beliefs peculiar to the domain in question (Schatzki, 1996, p. 99).

7. A good example of that kind of chains of actions is the development of the so-called Territorial Impact Assessment (TIA) toolbox for assessing and monitoring the territorial impacts of the EU’s and domestic sector policies. The need for assessing these impacts was brought to the fore in the political documents of the European Spatial Development Perspective and the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion, and the ESPON programme was selected for developing the TIA instrument. The instrument has been developed in several ESPON research projects and the final booklet involving the practical guidance for evaluating the territorial impacts was published in December 2012. Meanwhile, the concept of TIA has become a popular study object also within the academic planning research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [grant number 272168].