The bigger the better? The new ‘macro’ regions in France in the lens of territorial changes in Europe

Rescaling and modifying territorial organization are recurrent activities for policy makers, which is a continuous subject of both reflection and action for the planning community. In this regard, European Planning Studies constitutes a stimulating scientific arena to inform and discuss such phenomena and to envisage lessons from them, with a distinctive comparative approach.

More than five years after a nouvelle vague of territorial reform in France, this special issue is the opportunity to reflect and to open prospects not only about this specific episode, but also about territorial reforms and changes in other European countries: Italy, Poland, United Kingdom. The contributors deliver insightful theoretical approaches and documented empirical case studies, which allows to better grasp the impact of territorial reforms on planning policies – not to say polities. Most of the papers focus in particular on a regional, intermediate scale, at a time when we can observe a renewed interest for regions, regionalization and regional planning (Perrin 2017; Abels and Battke 2019 ; Perrin and Seys 2019a, 2019b; Lingua and Balz 2020; Perrin 2021; Harrison, Galland, and Tewdwr-Jones 2021 ; Purkarthofer, Humer, and Mäntysalo 2021; Neuman and Zonneveld 2021).

With the reform conducted in 2015, the French government set up ‘macro-regions’ by merging 16 of the 22 regions that existed previously, reducing the number of regions in mainland France to 13 (see in this issue the maps in the articles by Bourdin and Torre; Négrier and Simoulin). Some of these new regions are larger and more populated than European states. In fact, planners and experts have long discussed and questioned the size and perimeters of the regions in France. Since the creation of the first contemporary regional divisions in the 1950s, numerous proposals asked to revise them and to reduce the number of regions (Perrin 2012).

Regions in evolution

In 1990, François Mitterrand evoked the idea to reduce the number of regions to ten or so, which preceded a prospective work on interregional cooperation and arrangements by the national planning agency DATAR (Leclerc, Paris, and Wachter 1996). In 2000 the governmental report ‘rapport Mauroy’ about territorial decentralization advocated interregional cooperation so as to surpass the shortcomings of the regional division. The report also indicated that, according to a survey, 60% of French people were in favour of maintaining the existing regions as opposed to 31% in favour of grouping them into seven or eight regions – a result which underlines all the challenges that newly created regions face so as to recreate adhesion among the populations they administer. Almost a decade after the rapport Mauroy, the geographer Jean-Marie Miossec (2008) delivered a geo-history of regionalization in France and promoted the vision of ‘large regions’ in the European context. Further governmental reports (Balladur report in 2009, Krattinger-Raffarin report in 2013) proposed to reduce the number of regions to between eight and fifteen in order to reach a critical size in economic and demographic terms.

We can also find proposals for the creation of such big – or macro – regions elsewhere in Europe, with for instance in Italy a study by the Agnelli Foundation in 1994 and a bill proposed by two MPs in 2014. In Sweden and the Netherlands, the government unsuccessfully tried to reduce the number of counties or provinces to create larger regions. In Denmark in 2007, five regions replaced the sixteen counties, sometimes changing their boundaries. Since the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, there has been a debate about merging some of the Länder, in order to rationalize the number of governments, parliaments and administrations that compose the Federation. There were plans for a Northern State from Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, or for merging Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. Resistance is strong and attempts have so far failed, with for instance the 1996 referendum that concerned a merger between the city-state of Berlin and the Land of Brandenburg. Today the focus is rather on voluntary cooperation between territories and authorities, in particular within the European Metropolitan regions (Europäische Metropolregionen) that recompose and sometimes cross the Länder boundaries (Kawka 2016). In Spain, the Constitution excludes any federation between autonomous communities. Given the country’s geo-history, this rule would prevent, for example, any attempt to union between Catalan-speaking regions – sometimes called the Països Catalans – the ‘Catalan countries’ (Prytherch 2009), or the reconstitution of a Great Navarro-Basque Country.

In spite of these European dynamics, the French reform can be considered to be an exception, for territorial merging usually concerns the municipal level: between 1973 and 2013 fifteen European countries reduced the number of municipalities by 29% (Ebinger, Kuhlmann, and Bogumil 2019). In France, the 36,000 municipalities remain and the choice has been made to favour inter-municipality. Aside the remapping of regions, the last reform installed the inter-municipal status of ‘métropoles’ for the main urban agglomerations of the country.

This reform provoked a considerable amount of publications – quite ironically in regard of the few experts and specialists who were consulted in preparing the reforming acts. The majority of observers underline the bad preparation and imperfection of this reform, in particular the parameters of the new regional divisions and the focus on metropolitan competitiveness. They show that the main motivations presented by the government eventually prove to be rather invalid, notably: correlation between the size and the dynamism of a region, administrative efficiency in the distribution of capacity among the different authorities, budgetary rationalization linked to merging operation.

One point is nevertheless consensual: the reset of the regional map gave more prominence to the regions in the public debate. It confirmed their place as fully recognized territorial authorities in the opinion, whereas they had been the least socially anchored territorial authorities due to their relatively recent creation in the 1980s. Still, the rather low turnover for the regional elections nuances such an evolution.

The contested and polemical dimension of territorial rescaling and reforms is also present in the other cases addressed in the special issue, like for instance the contrasted visions and projects for city-regions in England and in Italy, or the conflicts between State and territorial stakeholders in the organization and re-organization of Poland’s tiers and divisions.

Contents and findings

Arnaud Brennetot exposes in details the particular path dependency of regionalization in France. He analyses the co-existence of two contradictory agendas of regional planning, between neo-liberalism and quest for solidarity. The uncertain quest for an improbable balance between these action lines can hinder the functioning of regions while alienating citizens’ perceptions and representations. André Torre and Sébastien Bourdin underline the failures and shortcomings of the reform of French territorial organization. In particular, they discuss how setting up bigger regions and consolidating large urban agglomerations do not automatically increase economic competitiveness and innovation. On the contrary, these political choices can deepen interterritorial discrepancies and inequalities, and the yellow vests movement significantly illustrated this situation. Their findings echo a certain evolution of regional planning references and discourses in France, with a move from the ‘metropolises take it all’ to the ‘alliance between all territories’ (Bernié-Boissard and Perrin 2021). Roman Matykowski and Barbara Konecka-Szydłowska present the reform that fixed the three-tier territorial organization of Poland and, at the same time, distributed capacity between sub-national autonomous bodies and territorial offices of the central State – a type of distribution that is quite similar to the situation in France. Based on the case of the voivodeship of Wielkopolska, they give a thorough account of the multi-level stakeholders’ relations and negotiations in establishing a region composed of diverse territorial entities. Vincent Simoulin and Emmanuel Négrier show the effect of the merging operation on some regional policies, in the newly created French region Occitanie. Policy reinvention is not a one-sided process: it does not imply only loosers or winners and conveys both difficulties and potentialities. Moreover, Occitanie is a significant case to illustrate not only the drawbacks of a merging operation, but also the multiple possibilities to the interpretation of a merging.

Indeed in different proposals for the reorganization of the regional map, the position of the two former regions Midi-Pyrénées and Languedoc-Roussillon that make up the current Occitanie has varied greatly. A prospective work by the agency DATAR on ‘France in 2020’ recommended, almost two decades ago, to gather Aquitaine and Midi-Pyrénées into a Val de Garonne region, while Languedoc-Roussillon was included in a Mediterranean and Alpine ‘Midi’ region with PACA and Rhône-Alpes. The same agency later carried out studies within the framework of a Greater South West, stretching from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, from Bordeaux to Montpellier. For the geographer Jacques Lévy (2015, 288), ‘the Lyon region (Rhône-Alpes + Auvergne), the Greater Languedoc (Midi-Pyrénées + Languedoc-Roussillon) or the Greater Aquitaine (Aquitaine + Poitou-Charentes + Limousin)’ are ‘spaces that make sense’. We can also note, from a geo-historical point of view, that the territories of the current region Occitanie have formed common entities during centuries according to different configurations (Bernié-Boissard, Courouau, and Perrin 2018, 12–26): Roman province Narbonnaise in the Antiquity, continuous interpenetration between the county of Toulouse, Septimanie and northern Catalonia during the medieval times. The Ancien Régime province of Languedoc was polarized by the duopole Toulouse-Montpellier and at the same time, the jurisdiction of the parliament of Toulouse corresponded roughly to the present-day Occitanie region. The situation of this (neo)region then confirms that in a world of flows, networks and multiple relational affiliations, there is no point in idealizing a geo-historical past in order to reinvent a regional narrative or to justify such or such regional division. Moreover, regional forms and constructions vary over time and any division is subject to incompleteness, dissatisfaction and instability, which calls for pragmatic and constructive adjustments by regional planning.

We then move to another type of regional scale, the metropolitan scale or city-region. Christophe Demazière discusses the specific institutional statuses created for large urban agglomerations as a response to the challenges of planning at a metropolitan scale: combined authorities in England, métropoles in France and città metropolitane in Italy. His comparative view of the different situations and systems helps identifying, beyond variety, common and key issues for metropolitan planning, especially in the European context. Alexander Nurse and Olivier Sykes consider the development of city-regions in England. Their analysis sheds light on the fluctuating attention to this topic from English planning policies, and focuses on Liverpool City Region. Magdalena Szmytkowskaa, Łukasz Kubiakb, Przemysław Śleszyńskib and Ewa Korcelli-Olejnicza decipher the process of cooperation – and conflicts – between two Polish municipalities that are expected to recombine into a metropolitan functional area so as to receive a European Union funding. The situation intertwines historical tensions, local ambitions, State-municipalities relations, Europeanization dynamics and economic interests. We finally go back to France with the case of the recently created ‘collectivité européenne d’Alsace’ that Guy Baudelle and Olivier Vergne address. The emergence of this particular entity with some specific attributions is directly linked to the 2015 reform. The officials of the two counties (départements) of the former region Alsace refused to be part of the new immense region Grand Est, and undertook a strong – and successful – lobbying. They obtained to merge the two counties and to form a new territorial authority that nevertheless remains within the region Grand Est – so far. The peculiar situation of Alsace at the French-German border, its specific culture linked to a binational geo-history, reveal how progressively in France the State tends to adopt a more flexible and diversified approach to territorial organization. The question remains open to which extent such a ‘territorial differentiation’ is compatible with the Republican egalitarian norm.

Thanks to these contributions, the special issue highlights and deepens some salient topics for the research in regional planning, from which we can quote, for instance, the resilience of the State capacity to order and regulate the organization of ‘its’ territory. Movements of devolution, EU lines and directives, or global economic forces do modify the balance of power between central governments, subnational authorities or socio-economic actors. Still the different articles show that, in most of the cases, central States’ positions remain prevalent in installing or modifying regional entities, even though they are negotiated with other levels of decision and linked to discourses on sub-national empowerment. Rescaling does not only mean a redistribution or transfer of capacity, but also a possibility to transpose capacity to renewed territorial settings – while retaining a good part of it (Brenner 2004).

Another finding that we can observe from the researches presented here is the importance of territorial cooperation, of cooperative governance and arrangements, so as to operate regional planning systems that gather several multi-situated stakeholders, each with specific and different prerogatives and spatial perimeters; in others words to combine territorial and relational constitution of spaces and regions. Which confirms the relevance of the approaches of ‘soft spaces/soft planning’ (Zimmerbauer and Paasi 2020) or ‘interterritorialité’ (Vanier 2008; Perrin 2010), even though when it comes to cooperative governance, the transition from discourse to effective practice is far from a smooth ride. But this would be a topic for another dedicated special issue.

Towards post-complex planning

Be it the macro-regionalization ‘à la française’, the three-tier organization of the Polish territory or the attempts to organize and plan metropolitan regions, the special issue confirms the critical function of regional planning as a pragmatic and constructive response, to adjust, stabilize and rationalize territorial policies in complex societies. We consider rationalization here not in the budgetary neo-liberal sense of lowering costs or increasing profits, but in the dialectical sense advanced by the philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron of a ‘compromise between the imperatives of science and those of action’ (compromis entre les impératifs de la science et ceux de l’action) (Marcotte-Chénard 2016, 726). Comprehending complexity is an essential step to tackle the challenges of contemporary regional planning (Friedmann 2019). Moreover, making such complex systems operational implies a renewed approach to regional planning, and in this sense we suggest to adopt a ‘post-complex’ approach (Perrin 2021).

This proposal is inspired by interdisciplinary concepts like simplexité (Berthoz and Petit 2014), or ‘non simplying simplications’ (Ang 2011), and by the advocacy to consolidate regional geographies and surpass the actual disciplinary and conceptual fragmentation (Paasi and Metzgern 2017; Paasi, Harrison, and Jones 2018). These analyses underline a need to reintroduce legibility and coherence following the post-modernist and deconstructionist conceptual breakdown. They converge in the call to go beyond the observation of complexity and to link theory and practice, science and action.

In the realm of regional planning, the aim of a post-complex approach is to reconcile complexity and pragmatism, in order to ‘operationalise the complex’ and to respond to the challenges of regional development in a complex or even hyper-complex environment. To make planning decisions and mechanisms not only more accessible and legible, but also more coherent and effective. A first step in this post-complex agenda can be to decipher the functioning and dynamics of a given regional ensemble, by identifying the three major fundamental parameters of a planning system: the decision-making actors – including civil and non institutional actors, the statutory documents or regulations, and the contractual and cooperative multi-level arrangements. The next step consists of defining the crossroads between these different parameters, the interactions, synergies or overlaps, which then make it possible to clarify and select common objectives and determine the way to achieve them. The notion of post-complex approach is above all a heuristic proposal that contributes to open perspectives on the possible evolutions of planning theory and practice according to the evolutions of territorial dynamics.

Finally, beyond the ‘pros and cons’ about macro-regions or city-regions, and considering that the perfect perimeter or the ‘territorial optimum’ are myths, the question also lies in the capacity of regional planning to deliver an adapted, legible and efficient service in spite of the evolving and unperfect nature of the regional ensembles.