Abstract

A wide diversity of events and processes have transformed Europe in a number of ways since the industrial revolution. Raising urbanisation rates, increases in personal wealth and car ownership, higher expectations regarding housing quality and a movement of population away from agriculture towards the industrial and services sectors have increased development pressures dramatically. Legislation has been introduced in each country to establish the principle that public authorities should be empowered to monitor and control territorial development and prepare plans, identifying what types of development will be permitted and where they would be most appropriate. This happened at different times in different countries from the late nineteenth century onwards, depending on political attitudes to the acceptability of such powers, which may be regarded as infringing individual rights to exploit private property, and diverse perceptions of the value of planning in different contexts. Hence, the specific histories and geographies of particular places, and the way these interlock with national institutional structures, cultures and economic opportunities contributed to generate a high heterogeneous set of territorial governance and spatial planning systems in Europe. Also the European Community (European Union since 1993) has had an implicit territorial agenda since its inception and, since the late 1980s, the increasing need to consider the spatial impacts of sectoral spending programmes fostered the development of an heterogeneous set of spatial planning concepts, tools and processes at the continental scale. This event has attracted the attention of European planners increasingly, because of the new tools, approaches and methodologies introduced at EU level. For researchers and scholars in planning, the whole set of phenomena included under the umbrella term 'European spatial planning' is further interesting because the EU does not have formal competences for spatial planning. Moreover, spatial planning processes and practices promoted on the EU level have triggered a complex mix of intended and unintended effects in the EU countries' planning systems. This led, on the one hand, to a progressive mutual learning among domestic spatial planning traditions in Europe and, on the other hand, to a renewal of domestic planning practices and institutions in most of the EU countries, induced through growing phenomena of “Europeanization”. The fascination of taking an international view of planning lies exactly in the great diversity to be found within spatial planning systems and approaches that have evolved in the different countries, as well as on the differential impact produced by the reciprocal influences intertwining the EU and the various domestic contexts in the field of spatial planning. In this light, the aim of the presentation is to introduce and unfold the institutional, political, technical and cultural implications of the reciprocal interactions between European spatial planning processes and practices and the domestic spatial planning systems active in the different EU Member States.