Making European Space

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 Practicesdeals 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.