European spatial planning as governmentality: an inquiry into rationalities, techniques, and manifestations

Abstract

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.

Integrating regional development and planning into “spatial planning” in Finland: The untapped potential of the Kainuu experiment

“…Despite this often vague identity associated with Finnish regions, regional councils have recently actively used and shaped the regional identity rhetoric. The brought up themes often echo EU narratives, highlighting how the European Union is intertwined with the Finnish regions, albeit in many cases only on a discursive level (Moisio and Luukkonen 2015;Paasi 2009).…”

Notes on spatial transformation in post-Cold War Europe and the territory work of the European Union

“…Faludi, 2004). These techniques have sought to enable effective policy evaluation and learning through peer review and peer pressure in a number of policy sectors at the European level (Moisio & Luukkonen, 2015).…”

“…Fourthly, the development of the EU's foreign policy and the recent building up of the European External Action Service (EEAS) has prompted both questions and analysis of the role, image, and power of the EU in international affairs (Bachmann, 2016b;Kuus, 2014;Moisio et al, 2013). Finally, the European integration process has witnessed the emergence of a nascent European spatial planning agenda (and an associated drive towards policy coherence) which discloses efforts to produce a unified territorial lexicon and practices in the name of European territorial cohesion (Moisio & Luukkonen, 2015). In this chapter, we discuss some of these themes explicitly while we only scratch the surface of some others.…”

Reterritorializing the global knowledge economy: an analysis of geopolitical assemblages of higher education

“…Foucault 2007: 108-9). Second, geopolitics refers to the processes of reterritorialization; it focuses on various micro and macro spaces where ideas, rationalities and technologies intersect (Agnew and Corbridge 1995;Kangas 2013a;Moisio and Luukkonen 2015) and scrutinizes the relevance of these spaces with respect to forms of political subjectivity. Geopolitical analysis thus involves an 'investigation of the intertwining of the economic space of capitalism with political and legal spaces, which are no longer fully conjoined in the territorial form of the state' (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: 66).…”