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As a governing process in which 'European political space' is dissected and regulated, the EU's nascent spatial planning opens up a number of empirical and conceptual challenges for research. Even if the 'governmentalization of Europe' and the associated mechanisms, tactics, instruments, vocabularies, and technologies through which the power and rule of the EU are effected have been examined, the concept of governmentality offers a useful perspective to explicate European spatial planning. We analyze European spatial planning through the lens of governmentality and offer an ethnographic take on the issue of European spatial planning by problematizing the manifestations of the EU in spatial planning practices in northern Finland.

Despite the fact that spatial planning forms one of the key constituents of territorial politics, territory and territoriality have been largely neglected in the studies of European spatial planning. This article seeks to address this shortcoming by considering spatial planning through the recent research on territories and territorial politics in political geography. The article suggests that European spatial planning ought to be conceptualized as a political technology of territory of the European Union, whose effectiveness is not dependent on the acquisition of formal policy status but stems from its capacity to fuse populations and geographical areas into manageable entities, from its reputation as apolitical management of space as well as from its resonance with current political tastes.

This chapter’s authors conduct a critical review of academic and policy engagements with the concept of territorial cohesion as the guiding principle for the European Union’s regional policies. The authors discuss the limitations of the idea of territorial cohesion and frame some conceptual and more policy-related benefits that could arise from the notion of spatial justice. The authors argue that paying more attention to the academic literature on spatial justice, human capabilities and agency might help to spatialise the European Union’s social model in more effective ways. The authors conclude that applying more plural and long-term conceptions of ‘development’, ‘well-being’ and ‘justice’ could help to formulate regional policies that contribute more directly to the well-being and welfare of people in various parts of Europe.