Making European Space Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity

"Making European Space crystallizes and critically examines the key policy ideas emerging in the new field of European spatial planning, and explores the arguments surrounding policy themes such as polycentric development, sustainability, mobility and peripherally. It develops a theoretically informed critique based on discourse analysis and cultural sociology of space.
The book is divided into four general sections. The first section, "Theoretical Framework," contains a general introduction to the themes, followed by two theoretical chapters on respectively European integration and the approach used for analyzing spatial policy discourses. "Representations of Space" contains the empirical analysis of the cases. This analysis is thematic and covers the language and images representing the analyzed cases which are drawn widely from the emerging literature on the implementation of the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) as well as the authors' own empirical research. "Spatial Practices"deals with the practices, institutions, governance structures and questions of implementation relating to these policy fields. In the final section, "Power, Rationalities and Knowledge," the underlying rationalities of these spatial policy discourses are presented and wider implications for European integration are discussed.

Making European Space explores how future visions of Europe's physical space are being decisively shaped by transnational politics and power struggles, which are being played out in new multi-level arenas of governance across the European Union. At stake are big ideas about mobility and friction, about relations between core and peripheral regions, and about the future Europe's cities and countryside. The book builds a critical narrative of the emergence of a new discourse of Europe as 'monotopia', revealing a very real project to shape European space in line with visions of high speed, frictionless mobility, the transgression of borders, and the creation of city networks. The narrative explores in depth how the particular ideas of mobility and space which underpin this discourse are being constructed in policy making, and reflects on the legitimacy of these policy processes. In particular, it shows how spatial ideas are becoming embedded in the everyday practices of the social and political organisation of space, in ways that make a frictionless Europe seem natural, and part of a common European territorial identity.

Part I: Introducing the Construction Sites of European Space 1. Introduction 2. European Integration and the Emergence of European Spatial Policy 3. Linking Discourse and Space Part II:Analysing the Discourse of Monotopia 4. Languages of European Space 5. Being on the Map: the New Iconographies of Power Over European Space Part III: Spatial Practices 6. Shaping a Pan-European Spatial Planning System? 7. Creating New Knowledges of Europe 8. The Europeanisation of Spatial Planning Part IV: Power, Rationalities and Knowledge 9. A Europe of Flows: Creating the Preconditions for Monotopia 10. Dimensions of Monotopia: Exploring the ^D' 11. Conclusions: Making European Space?

Ole B. Jensen, Tim Richardson