Diminishing borders and conflating spaces: A storyline to promote soft

planning scales

Eva Purkarthofera

aDepartment of Built Environment, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

Eva Purkarthofer, Department of Built Environment, Aalto University, P.O. Box 14100,

Espoo, FIN-00076 AALTO, Finland. Email: eva.purkarthofer@aalto.fi

ORCiD: orcid.org/0000-0002-9038-8285

Funding: The study has received financial support from the Academy of Finland

(project 288848).

Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was identified.

1

Diminishing borders and conflating spaces in Europe: A storyline to

promote soft planning scales

At the latest since the argumentative turn, the crucial importance of language,

narratives and discourses in the field of planning and policy-making is widely

acknowledged. This can be particularly important for European spatial planning,

for which the European Union (EU) does not have any formal competence. Thus,

instead of enacting directives or regulations, the EU and its member states release

legally non-binding documents, which contain ideas and objectives relevant to

planning. In these documents, certain storylines can be identified, for example

regarding sustainability, balanced development and competitiveness. This article

argues that there is another storyline, advocating the reduction of borders and the

creation of new, soft spaces across Europe, such as city regions, cross-border

regions or macro-regions. If picked up by national or sub-national actors, this

storyline can play a crucial role in contributing to establish the legitimacy that

soft spaces often lack. Based on empirical findings from the city region of Graz

in Austria, the article aims to identify the elements of a discourse coalition, i.e.

what the EU does to support soft spaces, who the actors reproducing the storyline

are and how the storyline supports soft planning in practice.

Keywords: soft space; European spatial planning; discourse analysis;

governance; legitimacy; territorial cohesion

2

Introduction

Planning practice today is increasingly dealing with new planning scales that have

emerged outside the formalised, statutory planning system. These ‘soft spaces’

(Haughton & Allmendinger, 2007) are based on functional areas rather than

administrative entities and cut across municipal, regional and national boundaries if

needed. Through their fuzziness, soft spaces are able to better address the real

geographies of challenges and problems, and through their inherent flexibility, they

offer an alternative to the rigidity, bureaucracy and inflexibility of the traditional sphere

of planning.

However, the democratic legitimacy of soft spaces and soft planning remains

contested (Faludi, 2015). Due to the lack of a legal and institutional framework,

accountability of politicians and inclusive modes of participation in the planning

process cannot be ensured. Moreover, the ambiguous relationship between statutory,

hard planning and informal, soft planning poses a serious problem if planners face an

impossible choice between legitimate rigidity and illegitimate flexibility (Mäntysalo,

2013). While statutory planning is based on clear jurisdiction, formal authority and

legally established rights and obligations, informal approaches to planning derive their

legitimacy from considerably different sources, typically relying on processes rather

than legal acts. This is often manifested as ‘storytelling’, aiming to produce legitimacy

through the development of storylines, discourses, metaphors and common

understanding (Hajer, 2006; Healey, 2007; Throgmorton, 1996).

This article first provides a theoretical overview of the role of discourse in

planning and policy-making. Based on these theoretical concepts, it introduces the

storylines associated with European spatial planning and through qualitative analysis of

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documents published at the European level, it arrives at the conclusion that there exists a

to date overlooked storyline dealing with diminishing borders and conflating spaces in

Europe. The article proceeds to illustrate the potential of this storyline to justify soft

spaces and legitimise soft planning. Ultimately, the article demonstrates, based on

empirical findings from Austria, what the EU does to promote soft spaces, who are the

actors reproducing the storyline, and how it can be used to support soft planning in

practice. To answer these questions, the article uses information obtained in 17 semi-

structured interviews with Austrian public officials, employed at national, federal,

regional and local level.

A discursive link between the European and the sub-national level can be

regarded beneficial in two ways: On the one hand, ideas, objectives and linguistic

expressions regarding spatial planning have been developed and are being constantly

reformulated by the European Union (EU) and its member states. If these ideas are

integrated into domestic policies at national, regional and ultimately local level, and

thus successfully brought to the ground, discourse serves as an element of

Europeanization (Adams, Cotella, & Nunes, 2011; Dukes, 2008). On the other hand, a

connection might be beneficial to national and sub-national actors, who can refer to

certain storylines and utilize them to justify their plans and actions. Especially actors

outside the statutory planning system, which are not able to derive their legitimacy from

traditional democratic mechanisms, could thus find a powerful ally in the EU. However,

this empowerment could potentially interfere with domestic administrative structures

and contribute to a contestation of authority (Dukes, 2008).

It is necessary at this point to briefly reflect on the role of the European Union in

European spatial planning and the understanding of ‘the European level’ in this article.

As is well known, spatial planning or urban policy are not established as EU

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competences in the treaties, hence they remain sole responsibility of the member states.

Nonetheless, the EU has created a framework in which the ministers responsible for

spatial planning and urban development of the EU member states meet regularly.

Though the ministers have no authority beyond their national jurisdiction, they can

jointly draft and enact legally non-binding policy papers, which are then acknowledged

in the whole EU. These informal ministerial meetings have brought about the most

important milestones in European spatial planning, such as the European Spatial

Development Perspective (ESDP), the Territorial Agenda or the Urban Agenda.

Although the EU institutions are not decision-makers in this context, the processes are

clearly framed by the respective EU presidency and partly driven by the European

Commission. It would thus be flawed to view these processes entirely separate from the

EU, though it would be equally flawed to understand them as EU policy-making. In

addition, the EU shares the competences for social, economic and territorial cohesion

with its member states. Especially territorial cohesion is often understood as relating to

spatial planning and territorial governance (see e.g. Faludi, 2010). Although cohesion

policy is primarily a redistributive tool, it is framed by funding regulations and

accompanied by reports, events and speeches, all of which contribute to the agenda

setting within the policy and the promotion of specific storylines. In this article, both

community-led and intergovernmental debates on planning will be taken into account

and, unless stated otherwise, no further distinction will be made between the two (see

e.g. Waterhout (2011) for more details on the differences).

Storylines as source of legitimacy for planning?

In the last decades, the influence of language on policy-making has been increasingly

acknowledged, especially regarding the framing of problems and the corresponding

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policy responses. This discursive turn has also reached planning theory and governance

studies. Well-known examples include Fischer and Forester’s ground-breaking

collection The Argumentative Turn (1993), which highlights through theoretical

contributions and empirical cases how rhetorics shape policy and planning, or Fischer’s

later work Reframing Public Policy (2003), in which he analyses the role of discourses

in constructing reality, framing politics and fostering deliberation. Throgmorton (1993,

1996, revisited 2003) has coined the image of planning as ‘persuasive and constitutive

storytelling about the future’ (Throgmorton, 2003, p. 126). In order to convey their

ideas, planners thus develop narratives, which, in order to be attractive to the general

public, grant interpretative space for diverse, locally grounded narratives as well as a

diverse readership with different understandings and contextualisations. More recently,

Sandercock (2003) has argued that planners use narratives in order to imagine space,

life and languages of the city and make them legible for others. Planning is thus

performed through story, and a city’s narration becomes constitutive of its urban reality.

Based on Foucault’s work, Hajer (1993, 1995; Hajer & Versteeg, 2005) has

developed a theory of discourse analysis, in which he defines discourse as a ‘specific

ensemble of ideas, concepts and categorizations that are produced, reproduced, and

transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to

physical and social realities’ (Hajer, 1995, p. 44). Discourses therefore play a

constitutive role in political processes as they contribute to create and reproduce power

structures and relationships between different actors and institutions. In order to

overcome Foucault’s shortcoming to address the role of agency in discourse analysis,

Hajer introduces the concepts of storyline and discourse coalition. He understands the

former as an established narrative on social reality that actors can turn to at any point in

time, giving a certain permanence to debates while suggesting a common understanding

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between actors using the same storyline (although their interpretation of the same

storyline might in fact differ considerably). Discourse coalitions, in turn, have a

threefold meaning according to Hajer: They can be defined as ‘the ensemble of (1) a set

of story-lines; (2) the actors who utter these story-lines; and (3) the practices in which

this discursive activity is based’ (Hajer, 1995, p. 65). The concept of discourse

coalitions is especially interesting in comparison with traditional political alliances, as

actors do not need to reach deep agreement and share political interests, as long as they

can agree on a common storyline. Moreover, discourse coalitions potentially include

locations, actors and practices outside the traditional political realm. Storylines might

thus be introduced by scientists, journalists or activists instead of political actors, and

correspondingly, practices might take other forms than political negotiating and law-

making.

While all these contributions clearly emphasise the relevance of story and

discourse for planning, they seemingly tiptoe around issues of legitimacy and the

question whether legitimacy in planning can be (partly) derived from storylines and

narratives. However, even without mentioning the term legitimacy itself, three aspects

contributing to the idea of discursive legitimacy can be identified: Firstly, discourse is

understood as constitutive (Throgmorton, 1993) and as an essential medium to create

the world (Hajer, 1993). Secondly, discourse contributes to a better understanding,

making ideas legible (Sandercock, 2003) and giving meaning to physical and social

realities (Hajer, 1995). Thirdly, discourse affects power structures and can lead to

political change, as some actors might benefit from the emergence, use, reuse and

transformation of particular images, phrases or storylines or the re-ordered

understanding of an issue they trigger (Hajer, 1995). The ways in which storylines

contribute to the creation of social-spatial realities, the understanding of ideas, and the

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rearrangement of power structures can hardly be understood as traditional political

legitimacy, i.e. the authority to make, apply and enforce laws within a jurisdiction

(Buchanan, 2002). Nevertheless, they could point towards what Faludi calls ‘ “soft”

democratic legitimacy’ (2015, p. 15). In a time, where conventional and newly

emerging forms of governance co-exist, democratic concepts such as legitimacy and

accountability are not given but need to be constantly renegotiated (Hendriks, 2009).

Though democratic and procedural requirements remain important regarding ‘hard’

legitimacy, discourses and storylines might well contribute to a new, ‘softer’ form of

legitimacy.

It is of course not sensible to jump to conclusions at this point. Relying on

diverging sources of legitimacy might further the detachment of statutory and non-

statutory planning, potentially causing a multitude of tensions between the formal and

the informal side of planning (Mäntysalo, Jarenko, Nilsson, & Saglie, 2015). However,

discourses and storylines might provide justifications for the existence of new planning

spaces and promote soft planning practices. This is in line with Steffek’s findings

regarding discourses in international governance, who claims that new types of

governance arrangements ‘might receive legitimacy and support through the use of

good justifications’ (2003, p. 250).

European Union storylines connected to spatial planning

Over the course of its existence, the EU has introduced and promoted a multitude of

discourses when it comes to spatial planning. While discourses are of importance in all

policy fields, as they increase awareness of problems, make policies more accessible,

and support the implementation of EU policies at national and sub-national tiers of

government, their existence is especially crucial in areas where the EU does not have

8

formal powers regarding law- and decision-making. This became apparent for instance

during the making of the ESDP, when talk about ‘implementation’ was quickly replaced

by ‘application’, illustrating the importance of interpretation and reproduction instead of

formal adoption (Faludi & Waterhout, 2002). With the EU lacking any formal

competence in the field of spatial planning, rhetorical elements (potentially in

combination with financial incentives) thus seem to be the only way to promote

European ideas regarding spatial development.

Various scholars have identified European discourses related to planning and

studied their crucial role for European integration and territorial governance (see e.g.

Adams et al., 2011; Böhme, 2002; Cotella & Janin Rivolin, 2011; Davoudi, 2003;

Dukes, 2008; Gualini, 2006; Luukkonen, 2010; Moisio et al., 2013; Peters, 2003;

Waterhout, 2008). In the field of transport, Jensen and Richardson (2004) illustrate how

the European discourse contributes to the creation and transformation of policy

language and conclude that the policy discourses reveal power relations and construct

rationalities, which in turn legitimise the policy (p. 58). Regarding spatial planning,

Moisio and Luukkonen (2015) highlight interconnections between discourses at the

European level and local decision makers and planners in Finland. They reveal that

since European spatial planning is present at the level of routines, discourses and

political rationalities, ‘the EU’s impact on the content of policies has been wider than its

impact on the political systems or institutions of the union’s member states’ (p. 830). In

the context of the UK, Shaw and Sykes (2005) go one step further and not only

investigate the discourses within the ESDP but its active use as a ‘device to shape,

inform and support the arguments of regional actors’ (p. 196). All contributions

highlight the necessity to not only analyse European discourses, but also their

embedding into domestic planning and reuse by domestic actors.

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Despite the indisputable merit of all these publications for this article, its most

fundamental reference point is Waterhout’s Territorial cohesion: the underlying

discourses (2007). Based on Hajer’s discourse analysis theory, Waterhout identifies four

storylines feeding into territorial cohesion: ‘Europe in Balance’, ‘Coherent European

Policy’, ‘Competitive Europe’ and ‘Green and Clean Europe’. He understands territorial

cohesion as an emerging concept, originally linked to services of general interest but

potentially turning into an umbrella term summarising the EU’s involvement with

spatial development. While territorial cohesion was a relatively new concept at the time

of Waterhout’s research, it has since then found its way into several European

documents such as the Territorial Agenda or the Urban Agenda. Nonetheless, territorial

cohesion remains a fuzzy concept that leaves room for interpretation, and its lack of

definition has been addressed by many scholars (see e.g. Abrahams, 2014; Faludi,

2013a, 2013b; Van Well, 2012). This article claims that in addition to Waterhout’s four

storylines, there is a fifth storyline present at the European level, which relates to spatial

development and territorial cohesion: ‘Diminishing borders and conflating spaces in

Europe’.

A storyline on ‘diminishing borders and conflating spaces in Europe’

This storyline promotes cooperation across external and internal borders and emphasises

the importance of new spaces of governance such as functional regions, metropolitan

areas and city regions. One might argue that cooperation across borders and rescaling

within countries are inherently different processes, which should not be considered

jointly. While this is true to a certain extent, for example when thinking about legal

issues associated with activities crossing national borders, both processes follow the

same narrative: In order to address today’s challenges, we have to overcome

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administrative boundaries, no matter whether they are between or within countries. The

diminishing importance of borders is in turn inseparably linked with the becoming and

recognition of new spatial entities.

The existence of a storyline addressing the reduction of borders and the creation

of new spatial units becomes apparent when analysing intergovernmental documents

published at the European level. Already the ESDP, published in 1999, ‘endorses

existing transnational cooperation for spatial development, applauding the participation

of regional and local authorities and recommending strengthening it’ (Faludi, 2001, p.

667). Subsequent documents, such as the Territorial Agenda and the TA2020, stress the

importance of city regions and state that ‘[c]ities should, where appropriate look beyond

their administrative borders and focus on functional regions, including their peri-urban

neighbourhoods’ (TA2020, 2011, p. 6). Similarly, the Urban Agenda advocates

‘governance across administrative boundaries and inter-municipal cooperation: urban-

rural, urban-urban and cross-border cooperation’ (EU Ministers Responsible for Urban

Matters, 2016, p. 8).

The European Commission report Cities of Tomorrow (2011) emphasises that

‘administrative boundaries of cities no longer reflect the physical, social, economic,

cultural or environmental reality of urban development and new forms of flexible

governance are needed’ (European Commission, 2011, p. VI). Figure 1 illustrates how

neighbourhoods, metropolitan areas, macro-regions and ultimately the EU itself are

understood as such new spaces, which relate both to fixed tiers of government and other

flexible spaces of governance. However, the report stresses that there is no need to

reshape the formal government system in order to match the functional regions. Rather,

the existence of both administrative city (‘de jure city’) and metropolitan area (‘de facto

city’) should be acknowledged and new ways of combining formal government

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structures with flexible informal governance structures should be sought in order to

address challenges at different scales (European Commission, 2011, p. 68).

Figure 1: From fixed to flexible boundaries; from government to governance (European

Commission, 2011, p. 87)

The aim to diminish the separating force of borders is also deeply embedded in

the distributional dimension of European policy-making, i.e. cohesion policy, through

which the EU has been an active advocate of cross-border thinking and the creation of

transboundary regions. Some of these regions date back to the 1950s, although the most

significant increase could be observed in the 1990s when the famous INTERREG

initiative was introduced as instrument for the first time (Perkmann, 2003). Under the

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umbrella term European Territorial Cooperation, one of the EU’s priority objectives

since 2007, support is currently available for cross-border, transnational and

interregional cooperation as well as for networks (Petzold, 2008). As a result,

transboundary spaces have taken a variety of forms: Traditional cross-border regions

have been complemented by large-scale macro-regions and networks of cities and

regions without apparent geographical connection. The EU has furthermore introduced

new tools to formalise transboundary cooperation, such as the possibility to establish

European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC).

While the EU has a long tradition of addressing regions (see e.g. Keating, 2008;

Luukkonen, 2011; Paasi, 2009) – either within a country or crossing borders –, its

interest in soft spaces such as city regions is fairly recent. This occurred simultaneously

with a heightened attention for urban issues in general and the promotion of urban

development as a potential policy field of the EU. Between 2010 and 2014, Johannes

Hahn acted as European Commissioner for Regional Policy and put great emphasis on

the role of cities, for example by renaming the Directorate-General for Regional and

Urban Policy. In May 2016, the long-term goal of establishing an EU Urban Agenda

was finally achieved (EU Ministers Responsible for Urban Matters, 2016), adding a

policy document with an explicit urban focus to the list.

As part of the latest cohesion policy reform in 2013, the European Commission

pushed to earmark 5% of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)

investments for integrated sustainable urban development and to establish integrated

territorial investment (ITI) and community-led local development (CLLD) as tools for

the implementation of funds. Both instruments follow a place-based approach and aim

at a more integrated use of different EU funds. The biggest innovative potential,

however, lies in the governance arrangements ITI and CLLD allow: intermediary

13

bodies, including local authorities, regional development bodies or non-governmental

organisations can carry out some or all of the management and implementation tasks,

according to the administrative arrangements within a member state (European

Commission, 2014). ITIs hold a lot of potential to provide funding for new conflated

spaces: Their territorial scale and target area can be chosen freely, opening up the

possibility to establish ITIs for neighbourhoods, city-regions, metropolitan areas,

functional areas, cross-border conurbations, EGTCs or even interregional territories

with common characteristics. While part of the cohesion policy framework, ITIs could

thus potentially overcome the container approach of administrative NUTS territories

and support a move towards diminishing borders and conflating spaces.

Whether the EU has in fact been successful in diminishing borders within and

between countries and creating new spaces is, however, a different issue. The separating

force of national borders and potential reduction thereof has led to an extensive

academic discussion on borders, resulting in partly diverging conclusions. While some

scholars are convinced that the EU-induced process of ‘debordering’ has resulted in the

rescaling of state spaces and governance arrangements (Perkmann & Sum, 2002; Sohn

& Giffinger, 2015), others claim that it has not affected all different dimensions of

borders (Haselsberger, 2014). Others again acknowledge the EU’s contribution to

diminish the importance of borders but warn not to disregard the crucial contribution of

local actors in this process (Anderson, 1997; cf. Perkmann, 2003) while some even go

as far as to claim that the EU cross-border approach might hinder cross-border

cooperation (Terlouw, 2012). Nonetheless, there seems to be general agreement that the

EU aims to diminish borders in Europe. Guy Verhofstadt, a long-standing member of

the European Parliament, restated this intention recently in the course of the Brexit

negotiations: ‘Borders, it seems to me, are best when they are just lines on maps. And

14

reducing borders to lines on maps is in many ways what the European Union is all

about.’ (European Parliament, 2017).

Compared to the border discussion, the academic discourse around the creation

of new spaces or reduction of internal borders is not as prominent, and it is in general

less closely tied to the European Union. The EU is thus not necessarily understood as a

driving force or factor of success in such processes, making it difficult to evaluate

whether the implementation of a given storyline has been successful. Nonetheless,

several scholars have highlighted connections between the EU and the emergence of

soft spaces (Allmendinger, Chilla, & Sielker, 2014; Metzger & Schmitt, 2012;

Purkarthofer, 2016; Sielker, 2016). One could argue that although the EU contributes to

the creation of new spaces, these areas are again territorially defined in some way, for

example as delineated areas of cooperation, thus creating new borders. These

boundaries, however, are often fuzzier than those of traditional state spaces (Dühr,

2007; Zonneveld, 2005) and can be more easily amended if need be (Stead, 2014). The

ever-changing nature of new governance spaces is also acknowledged by the European

Commission itself, who states for instance that ‘governance systems need to be adapted

to evolving circumstances and take into account various territorial (e.g. supra-urban as

well as infra-urban) and temporal scales’ (European Commission, 2011, p. VII). Again,

one might argue that administrative entities still dominate spatial development and

governance. While this is true in most cases, this section has argued that the European

discourse promotes the creation of soft spaces. Similarly, Waterhout’s storyline on

‘Europe in Balance’ undoubtedly exists, while a truly economically balanced Europe

remains an ideal, even if regional disparities are narrowing slowly (European

Commission, 2017).

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Empowering and legitimising soft planning scales: The what, the who and the

how behind potential discourse coalitions

While the previous section has illustrated that a storyline dealing with diminishing

borders and conflating spaces exists, this section focuses on the question whether such a

storyline holds the potential to empower and potentially legitimise soft planning scales.

This can only happen, if a discourse coalition around the storyline materialises.

Returning to Hajer’s definitions, a discourse coalition can refer to an ensemble of

storylines, actors who utter them or practices within which the discursive activity is

based (Hajer, 1995, p. 65). Similarly, Waterhout characterises his storylines according

to key concepts, discourse coalition1 and operationalisation (Waterhout, 2007, p. 114).

To bring both approaches together, this section explores what arguments the storyline

provides, who are the actors using them, and how the storyline is applied in practice.

What: A European storyline advocating soft spaces

As illustrated in the previous section, a storyline on diminishing borders and conflating

spaces is present in European policy documents, funding systems and public discourse.

The storyline revolves around the idea of the ‘big picture’ that is necessary to address

the challenges Europe is facing. As challenges do not adhere to national borders and

administrative boundaries, a European perspective as well as new geographies are

needed to find effective and efficient responses regarding spatial development and

governance.

While the storyline is unambiguous when arguing in favour of a functional

understanding of space and the reduction of borders, it remains vague regarding how

these functional regions should be defined or institutionalised. Moreover, the storyline

1 Waterhout only refers to the actors supporting a specific storyline as ‘discourse coalition’

and does not use the three definitions Hajer provides.

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does not disregard existing government levels and administrative spaces, but sees new

spaces as additional scales – without elaborating on how they relate to existing

administrative entities. The storyline thus fulfils the premise of multi-interpretability

and gives different actors and regions the freedom to interpret it in their own context

and according to their own interests. In addition, the storyline complies with Hajer’s

criterion of sounding right (Hajer, 1995, p. 67) as there is little opposition to the

functional approach itself: It is easy to grasp that a relational perspective has certain

advantages over a strictly territorially-bound perspective, be it increased flexibility,

efficiency or accuracy regarding spatial delineation of challenges.

The discourses at the European level provide good arguments why such new

spaces should be taken into account, and thus suggest the existence of a discourse

coalition between European and sub-national actors. This can be crucial, given that soft

spaces remain contested in many countries, especially when it comes to the potential

devolution of planning tasks and competences2.

Who: Actors (with interest) in soft spaces

However, a discourse coalition can only be formed if actors (with interest) in soft spaces

actually exist. To date, this remains an issue with diverse responses across Europe. In

some cases, advocates of soft spaces can be found mainly at the national level.

Representatives of governments, ministries or national agencies often regard city

regions as something that should be established, cross-border regions as a necessity to

obtain EU funding and macro-regions as something they would not want to miss out on.

2 The potential devolution of planning tasks to soft spaces should not be viewed uncritically.

As e.g. Olesen (2012, 2014) has shown, soft spaces can potentially serve as vehicles for

neoliberal transformation while bypassing planning responsibilities such as environmental

protection or social justice.

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In order to persuade municipalities to form such soft spaces, some states have developed

incentive schemes to support collaboration. In Finland, for example, the central

government provides funding for projects – often costly transport infrastructure – if

municipalities commit themselves to working together as a city region on issues such as

land use, housing and transportation. Although this agreement-based model involves

both national and local actors, the commitment towards city regions is clearly

imbalanced. City regional cooperation in Finland thus reflects mainly the interests of the

central state while municipalities often cling – either openly or secretly – to their own

political agenda (Kanninen & Akkila, 2015).

In other cases, sub-national actors endorse the creation of soft spaces, although

responses and attitudes of individual jurisdictions might differ considerably. As regards

city regions, for example, central cities might advocate functional regions while

surrounding municipalities are reluctant to participate. For those municipalities, a

system based on administrative boundaries in which central cities provide most of the

services while dwellers pay taxes in other municipalities is clearly more beneficial in

economic terms. Besides economic explanations, central cities might also be feared for

social, political and electoral reasons or for their behaviour as ‘prima donnas’ (Salet &

Thornley, 2007). Smaller, peripheral municipalities might worry that the central city’s

vision is imposed upon them and their own local interests are overheard or ignored

(Cremer-Schulte, 2014).

In a study focusing on the Netherlands, Dukes (2008) claims that cities are often

depicted as important partners to the European Commission and the EU views itself as

‘a natural ally of the European city’ (Trojan in Dukes, 2008). To date, however, city

governments have rarely seized the opportunities to position themselves as partners to

the EU. European policy discourses seem to be largely absent at the local level and the

18

strategic value of teaming up with the EU is either overlooked or played down (Dukes,

2008, p. 114). However, with the Urban Agenda and its implementation partnerships in

place, another opportunity for cities to liaise with the European level has opened up.

As a third option, soft spaces might have their own advocates, coming neither

directly from national, regional nor municipal level. Citizens, businesses or associations

might show interest in overcoming administrative boundaries in order to facilitate their

daily life, improve access to services, customers and business partners, or increase their

competitiveness. A European storyline on diminishing borders and conflating spaces

can significantly contribute to the empowerment of these actors. Other than formal

actors, which constantly aim to prove their irreplaceability in order to keep their

competences, informal actors have nothing to lose by aligning their arguments with the

EU policies, as they have no competences to begin with. For the time being, studies on

the relation between actors in soft spaces and the European Union are rare. This is partly

due to the fact that soft planning spaces are often still managed through traditional

jurisdictional units (Luukkonen & Moilanen, 2012).

In all cases, the question of who is inevitably linked to concerns regarding

legitimacy. If soft spaces are not associated with a certain public institution, but instead

institutions from above or below take decisions for a territory that is not identical with

their spatial jurisdiction, institutional ambiguity arises (Bäcklund, Häikiö, Leino, &

Kanninen, 2017; Bäcklund & Kanninen, 2015). Even if these institutions enjoy

legitimacy and trust within their legal and spatial boundaries, they cannot assume to

stretch this legitimacy to the informal political space between them. If the governance of

soft spaces lies with organisations outside the state apparatus, democratic legitimacy is

even more difficult to ensure.

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How: Empowering and legitimising practices

Storylines only gain importance when they are used and reproduced, i.e. when they are

embedded in practices. For the European storyline on diminishing borders and

conflating spaces, these practices could take place at the European, national or sub-

national scale. At the European scale, documents, funding instruments and public

discourse promote and constitute the storyline, as the previous section has

demonstrated. Through discursive practices, the EU can be regarded as a setting that

fosters deliberative democracy (Antalovsky, Dangschat, & Parkinson, 2005). Through

public discussion and deliberation, actors who are not formally included in decision-

making procedures can potentially influence the European agenda and ultimately

contribute to the discourses and storylines the EU promotes. However, as Behagel and

Turnhout (2011) argue in the context of the EU water framework directive, legitimacy is

not automatically achieved by means of public participation, particularly when

participation is limited to an elite or select group of actors. Additionally, it seems that

the claim concerning deliberative democracy has to be reviewed with regard to scale.

While debates might bring together different actors in the course of European policy

making, potentially resulting in collective reasoning and more legitimate and publicly

oriented outcomes (Hendriks, 2009), the deliberative aspect might not necessarily be

present when EU storylines are reproduced and used at national and sub-national level.

Instead of fostering public discussion, EU storylines could thus have a contrary effect

and contribute to such debates being bypassed. Hence, if deliberation takes place at a

European scale, negotiations take place between potentially very different parties than at

the national or sub-national scale, where policies are implemented.

Practices empowering and legitimising soft planning scales at national and sub-

national level are difficult to highlight, since they might vary greatly across Europe.

20

However, concrete case studies help to exemplify the processes. For instance, Perkmann

(2007) elaborates on the construction of new territorial scales in a Dutch-German cross-

border region and the practices of political mobilisation, governance building and

strategic unification, all supported by the policy framework of the EU. Zimmerbauer

and Paasi (2013) claim that advocates of municipal mergers in Finland ‘fluently adopted

the rhetoric of regional development and planning developed in national and European

spatial policy’ (p. 39) when it supported their interests. In the context of the macro-

regional strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, Stead (2014) argues that the strategy’s

appeal is its multi-interpretability, suiting a range of political agendas. Even if the

strategy in principle addresses the whole region around the Baltic Sea, the spatial

coverage of individual actions and projects varies significantly, thus not only supporting

one but several complementary and overlapping new planning scales.

Potential discourse coalitions around soft spaces: Empirical findings from

Austria

After introducing the storyline on diminishing borders and conflating spaces and

elaborating on its implications for the legitimacy of soft spaces, this section presents

empirical findings from Austria in order to investigate the actual use of the storyline.

The empirical data consists of 17 semi-structured interviews with Austrian public

servants, employed at national, federal, regional and local level, conducted in December

2016 and January 2017. All interviews were conducted, fully transcribed and translated

from German to English by the author. To ensure anonymity, direct quotes are not

linked to the interviewees’ names. The aim of this section is to exemplify the use of the

storyline and its embedding in the context of one specific case. To this end, it briefly

touches upon the topic of city regions in Austria generally and the case of Graz

specifically.

21

City regions: The general Austrian discourse

When talking about soft spaces, city regions or functional urban areas are commonly

used as examples, since functional linkages and the need for coordination are most

apparent and tangible at the city-regional scale. Correspondingly, city regions are also

prominently broached at the European level, as this article has demonstrated. In Austria,

city regions have existed as statistical agglomerations since 1971, but have only recently

received increased attention, when a working group addressed the topic in the course of

the Austrian Spatial Development Concept (ÖREK) in 2011 (Humer, 2018). As a final

output, the working group published the ‘Agenda for Urban Regions in Austria’ in

January 2016, a legally non-binding document containing recommendations for and

expert opinions on city-regional cooperation. While there are only a few direct

references in the agenda to the EU, mainly emphasising the possibility to get financial

resources for urban regions through the funding programmes of cohesion policy, the

underlying message of the agenda resonates with the European storyline on diminishing

borders and conflating spaces. However, as city regions are at present a ubiquitous

topic, this congruence is not necessarily an indication for a discourse coalition between

European and Austrian actors.

When asked about connections between the European discourses and the

developments in Austria, several interviewees acknowledge that the issue is present at

the European level but their perceptions regarding the effects on the Austrian debate

differ.

‘Yes, of course we are referring to these things. Because we are part of the EU, we are a member, we are a shaper, and of course this is an essential reference for us. And of course one has to try, as a national policy maker, to stay connected. We cannot implement a spatial development policy here in Austria that does not correlate at all with what is happening at the European level. Of course we will also pay attention to our specific issues, but in the end we are part of the bigger picture and we have to

22

acknowledge that and also bring our ideas to the European level. […] And in the other direction, we of course make use of the impulses at European level, if we feel there are initiatives that could be meaningful and useful for us, then we pick those up.’

[interviewee A, Austrian Conference on Spatial Planning]

‘The topic of city regions has never been more prevalent at the European level than it is now. One couldn’t ask for more. So this can definitely not be used as an excuse why nothing is happening, or why so little is happening. But of course, this is all the way up there and for something to make it to the ground… well, I don’t have to tell you how long this might take. […] I could say it like this: The discourse at the European level has contributed more to the increased debate on the topic than the actual pressure on city regions.’

[interviewee B, federal state of Styria]

‘It is politically extremely difficult, because there is no politician who says, “this is something that is important to me”. Out of everything that is being discussed at the European level, hardly anything arrives in Austria.’ [interviewee C, city regional management Vienna/Lower Austria]

‘Of course, there are all kinds of papers, white papers, green papers, other things. There are different initiatives, originating from the Austrian association of cities or from the pan-European city associations, aiming to position certain things. There are papers from the Committee of the Regions that are being discussed, ESPON results are being discussed. […] However, here in Lower Austria, this hasn’t arrived in planning reality, in planning practice yet, and neither in politics. And I think that is the crucial point.’

[interviewee D, federal state of Lower Austria]

‘Well, the support could be stronger. In the Urban Agenda, there is definitely some talk about urban regions, but if you look at the funding system, they could offer more funds for city-regional issues. Because this is a fundamental mechanism, EU policies and funding systems shape our strategies and in the long run also our planning goals, because subconsciously they shape our way of thinking, and we know that we can get funding from there, under certain conditions. And in that sense, if there were more references to city regions [at EU level], one would have to automatically think about it and pay attention to it.’

[interviewee E, Austrian associations of cities and towns]

The interview segments illustrate that public officials acknowledge the European

discourse on city regions but in some cases remain sceptical about its effects within

23

Austria. In addition to obstacles self-inflicted by the institutional and political situation

in Austria, interviewees criticise the lack of EU funding for city regions. However,

Austrian actors decided against the use of ITI as funding instruments, which could be

applied to city regions.

The city region of Graz and its ties to the European level

When looking more closely at a concrete city region, Graz as the second biggest

Austrian city and capital of the federal state of Styria poses an interesting example. In

the last decade, Graz and its surrounding municipalities have increasingly embraced city

regional thinking, a process motivated by population growth, development pressure,

environmental problems and a fundamental administrative reform in the federal state of

Styria. As the latter included municipal mergers, municipalities were more inclined to

engage in voluntary inter-municipal cooperation as a ‘show of good will’ and thus avoid

being merged with one another. Simultaneously, the federal state of Styria reorganised

its regional structure and the corresponding organisational arrangements between the

municipal and the federal level. Although not identical with the functional city region of

Graz, the newly created ‘Central Styrian Region’ and the associated regional

management provided another useful frame for cooperation across municipal borders.

While the pressure for city-regional cooperation originated from the challenges

associated with population growth and administrative restructuring, public officials in

Graz quickly found a way to use the rhetoric and financial support they could obtain

from the European level to their advantage. In the 2007-2013 cohesion policy

programming period, EU funding was used as an incentive for city-regional cooperation

regarding transport, land management and flood prevention (in the course of the

URBAN+ priority in the Styrian operational programme). Interview partners, both from

the city and the federal state, describe these projects as very successful:

24

‘What worked well in Graz was to realise individual projects via URBAN+. These projects directly affected the city, partly as structural measures in the urban fabric, so they had immediate effects on Graz and the surrounding municipalities. So they used an EU funded programme to pursue urban and spatial development, to realise concrete measures. This worked well. And of course, the ideas what to do, also partly originated from the programme, by checking what one could get funding for.’

[interviewee F, federal state of Styria]

‘For us, the projects in which we could go around the federal state of Styria and the state of Austria and in which we could communicate with Europe directly, those have always been the most successful ones.’

[interviewee G, city of Graz]

In addition, Graz was involved as (lead) partner in a multitude of projects and

knowledge exchange networks dealing with the topic of city regions and governance of

urban-rural cooperation (FunReg – PolicyNet 2007-2013, City Region Net 2008-2011,

City Network Graz-Maribor 2009-2013, City Regions 2012-2014, RURBANCE 2012-

2015), all of which were co-funded by the EU. While one could argue that the city

regional theme was picked up in order to obtain EU funding, an interviewee from the

city administration of Graz describes the situation just the other way around:

‘I can only emphasise how important the city region is, in the projects we oversee, because this is always a requirement from our side. Sometimes there was no other option than to push, to break the boundaries yourself. For example in the RURBANCE project, we placed our pilot project deliberately outside of the border of the city, and inside the city region.’

[interviewee G, city of Graz]

However, while actors in Graz might have sometimes felt they have to bend the

rules in order to obtain EU funding, they succeeded in using the European debate to

their advantage. In 2013, Graz organised the ‘First Austrian Urban Regions' Day’, a two

day conference bringing together a broad range of actors interested in city regions. The

fact that EU Commissioner Hahn was participating as a keynote speaker clearly

highlighted the European dimension of the city-regional discourse in Graz. In his

25

speech, Hahn praised the achievements of Graz and promised more possibilities for

cities and city regions to obtain EU funding in the 2014-2020 programming period.

Although the newly created tool of ITI, tailored to enable integrated funding strategies

in functional regions, did not come into use in Austria, other ways to get EU support

were found in Styria: Within the Austrian operational programme for cohesion policy

2014-2020, the federal state of Styria launched a call for projects dealing with urban-

rural cooperation, urban regions and urban growth impulses, thus anchoring the city-

regional theme at federal and European level. Styria also showed its commitment to city

regional thinking in a more formalised way: Since the latest reform of the Styrian spatial

planning act in 2010, city regions and their importance are anchored in the law.

Currently, the federal government of Styria is drafting a proposal for a federal and

regional development law that should provide a legal framework for the cooperation of

municipalities, regions and the state. Though the draft law is not yet published, it is

expected that functional urban regions are an important theme in the new law.

The processes towards city-regional cooperation in Graz were supported by

politicians and administrators from different organisational levels. At the level of the

federal state, the Styrian government initiated a far-reaching reform aimed to increase

regional competences and overall efficiency of administration. This spirit of reform

empowered regional actors, such as the regional manager of the Central Styrian Region,

and thus strengthened cooperation initiatives at the regional level. As described

previously, the administrators in the city planning department of the city of Graz have

proactively sought out funding to further their attempts at city regional cooperation. In

addition, also the mayor of Graz has taken an increased interest in planning related

matters, which is not always the case in Austrian municipalities. Politicians in the

surrounding municipalities of Graz were in general less eager to cooperate. However,

26

the spirit of reform – or in other words, the threat of municipal mergers – has increased

their willingness to cooperate.

The empirical findings from Graz suggest that a discourse coalition with the

European level exists: The European storyline is both used to support city-regional

cooperation as a means to an end, i.e. to solve functional challenges, as well as to

establish the city region as an end in itself, manifested in several projects researching

city-regional cooperation. Actors uttering the storyline can be found in the city of Graz,

both among politicians and administrators, as well as in the regional management of the

Central Styrian Region. To a lesser degree, also the surrounding municipalities and the

federal state of Styria have supported the storyline. Regarding the practices, Graz has

not only cleverly used European funding mechanisms but also the administrative reform

as a lever to further cooperation. Additionally, the storyline has been reproduced in

cooperation networks with other urban regions and in publicity activities, contributing

to create the spatial imaginary of a new spatial scale.

This section has given a brief overview of the what, the who and the how in the

discourse coalition around the city region of Graz. It has also shown how the European

dimension has been incorporated deliberately to support the processes of city-regional

cooperation. One interviewee sums up his impressions as follows:

‘This is the added value and this is the thing that helped Graz. There you have [a city planning official], one could call him Mr. URBACT, I think he is known in the whole EU as an expert, and he understood this right from the beginning: “Okay, so this way we can offer the surrounding municipalities a service. And we, from the city of Graz, we will try to get the surrounding municipalities on board through these projects regarding transport or something else.” And this is exactly the right way.’ [interviewee C, city regional management Vienna/Lower Austria]

Undoubtedly, the developments in the city-region of Graz are an interesting and novel

example for new planning scales and informal planning processes in the Austrian

27

context. However, one cannot ignore that political tensions still exist in the city region.

In many cases, cooperation did not go far enough to actually respond to the challenges

of a growing city region. Nonetheless, first successful projects indicate that

administrative boundaries can be overcome in order to find better planning solutions.

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated how the European Union advocates the reduction of

borders and the creation of new, soft planning scales that differ from administrative

entities. These efforts can be summarised as a storyline evolving around diminishing

borders and conflating spaces in Europe. While it is easy to comprehend the existence of

such a storyline, its consequences are more difficult to assess. This article argues that

the storyline can play a crucial role in providing the legitimacy that soft spaces often

lack. As Luukkonen and Moilanen (2012) state, ‘[s]tronger legitimacy to these new

territories would be important to further enhance their relative position in space as

frameworks of spatial development’ (p. 496). Findings from the Austrian urban region

of Graz have shown that the European discourse offers possibilities to support city-

regional thinking both rhetorically and financially, if sub-national actors actively create

a connection with the European level and thus transform the storyline from mere words

into a framework of policy- and decision-making.

Nonetheless, there remains the overarching question how these new conceptions

of territory and soft planning scales relate to traditional modes of government and

spaces of administration. This dilemma captures well both the strong and the weak point

of storylines: Due to their vagueness and interpretability, storylines are approachable for

many actors who can relate to the narrative, or at least parts of it. Upon closer

inspection, however, storylines do not provide any concrete advice, suggestions or

28

measures, making it extremely challenging to act upon. While these limitations apply

also to the storyline discussed in this article, the establishment of new funding

instruments at the EU level must not be overlooked. For instance through the use of ITI,

soft spaces such as city regions could not only get ideas from the EU level but also

funds contributing to their implementation – provided, of course, that a country’s formal

planning authorities are willing to hand over responsibilities to actors outside the

formalised planning system.

Although EU funds supporting soft spaces still only account for a small share of

the cohesion policy budget, and intergovernmental documents at the European level are

not legally binding, the storyline adds weight to the idea of new spatialities and gives

permanence to the policy debates. Moreover, it indicates commitment of all EU member

states, even if the actual degree of commitment might in fact vary considerably across

countries. While this article exemplifies the legitimising force of the storyline in one

case, further research is needed to shed light on the use and reuse of the European

storyline in different countries and at different spatial scales. If sub-national actors utter

the storyline and practices around it exist, European spatial planning clearly affects

planning in the member states, despite the lack of a legal competence at the EU level.

Furthermore, if soft planning spaces succeed in deriving their legitimacy partly from the

European storyline, the European level actually contributes to reshape planning systems

and practices.

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