Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the Netherlands, underpinned by geographical and technical necessities and a
strong multi-level state. Within France and Germany, notions of settlement hier-
archy and regional identity were sustained by the long-standing cultural recognition
of local territorial identities. In the UK, planning was focused on the defence of the
countryside. In all cases, the cultural identities and lifestyles of elites gave support
to spatial organising concepts.
But since then, according to Healey (2006), the force of sectoral policy
development, the critique of the narrow determinism of architectural concepts of
spatial organisation and the growing influence of neo-liberal economics in national
politics and administration has undermined the traditional 'spatial consciousness'
associated with planning. Planning practices in the 1970s and 1980s moved
increasingly away from plans and strategies to focus on projects and regulations,
and traditional spatial concepts were sealed in governance processes. Healey
(2006) argued that this lack of explicit spatial consciousness was particularly
strong in highly fragmented states where individual property owners were privi-
leged, as in Belgium, or in highly centralised states, such as England, where in
addition public policy has been strongly shaped by the commercial and financial
sectors. The example of the connections to the Channel Tunnel rail link in France
and Britain illustrates the differences in spatial thinking:
On the French side, [the] spatial relationship to the TGV system was thought
through in a way that led to a national strategy for transport and infrastructure,
while the UK was totally preoccupied with the issue of the rail link to London
and exhibited a total lack of thinking at the national spatial scale. (Williams,
1996: 98)
The shortcomings of a non-spatial approach to planning are increasingly recog-
nised in many European countries. However, efforts to reawaken a spatial con-
sciousness in contexts with a more project-oriented or sectoral policy-guided
approach to planning have been problematic. For example, in Flanders, Albrechts
(2001) has highlighted the political effort needed to develop a capacity to 'see' the
Flanders region/state in spatial terms. He emphasised the importance of reawaken-
ing traditional concepts of landscape (such as river valleys), and combining these
with a new image of unity in polycentricity in the 'Flemish Diamond'.
THEORIES ON THE CONCEPTION OF SPACE AND PLACE
The debate about the 'network society' (cf. Castells, 2000; Graham and Marvin,
1996) has also prompted the planning discipline to question their underlying
assumptions about space and spatial relations, and how this is visualised in plan-
ning instruments and strategies. This section will focus on setting out the two con-
