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Planning the development of metropolitan areas makes use of various forms of cooperation between associated territorial units. Regardless of the cooperation form adopted, dialogue is a factor that significantly facilitates solving spatial problems and gaining social acceptance for the selection of project locations. Its characteristics, including content, course, and participants, additionally determine the specificity of governance in a particular metropolis. The article aims to suggest a study of the emergence and improvement of an institutional dialogue and soft planning by comparing the experiences of selected Polish and French metropolitan areas. They represent different approaches to the use of dialogue in emerging metropolitan spaces resulting from different legal conditions, the length of time it takes for units to integrate, and the scale and orientation of strategic or operational interconnections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims towards a paradigm shift in how societies are organised in space, formulated in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, faded away. Nevertheless, the pandemic contributed to ongoing changes in how people settle, live and work, calling for a shift from traditional territorial governance models to softer approaches able to tackle non-standard geographies. This commentary reflects on trends boosted by the pandemic and discusses functional approaches introduced at the EU level. We argue that the post-pandemic recovery should be seen as a 'window of opportunity' to consolidate innovative territorial governance instruments into a more coherent framework for place-based action. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how newly-conceived soft spaces – typically with fuzzy boundaries and less formally organized institutional structures – are 'commodified' through visualizations in promoting practices. By discussing those practices, the article argues that promotion and branding are fundamentally processes where these soft spaces become hardened. This hardening is embedded in branding-related 'speech acts' and visual framings in particular. The article states that although new soft spaces are considered highly useful in competitivity-enhancing spatial policies where flexible spaces and fuzzy boundaries are typically emphasized, paradoxically their 'softness' gradually decreases as a result of branding process consisting of elements of expressing, mirroring, impressing and reflecting. It thus needs to be asked whether soft spaces can be branded without using framings and speech acts that harden them. The soft regions of the Bothnian Arc, a Swedish-Finnish coastal region around the Gulf of Bothnia, and the Region Foodvalley, an agrarian region in the middle of the Netherlands, are used here as examples to discuss how soft spaces transform in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City-regions in Central Eastern Europe are still underrepresented in academic debate on metropolitan planning and governance. However, they may provide a valuable insight into the early stages of creating planning partnerships that struggle to cope with problems arising from uncoordinated spatial development in the period of post-socialist transformation, which was not addressed adequately by formal planning systems and regular territorial-administrative units. The paper presents a comparative analysis of six city-regions in Central Eastern Europe based on a review of strategic and planning documents, and direct interviews with representatives of key stakeholders in each area. The main findings of the paper include the significant but underestimated role of the second-tier local governments in metropolitan institutional setups and the crucial position of emerging coalitions of academics, metropolitan-oriented officials and planners for establishing a sustainable planning agenda in the city-region. City-regions in CEE do not follow the categorization of soft spaces of planning that is derived from other territorial contexts. This is because the spatial planning efforts within city-regional soft spaces in CEE are more sustainability-driven than growth-oriented. Yet, more ambitious spatial visions may be overshadowed by a strong focus of local elected politicians on infrastructure projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on the emergence of new institutional structures and geographies within the context of complex processes of state rescaling characterized by 'hollowing out' and 'filling in'. It explores the regionalization of transport policy within Wales post-devolution and examines the potential of Haughton et al.'s concepts of 'soft' and 'hard' spaces as useful tools in furthering our understanding of state rescaling. The paper suggests that the case of transport policy in Wales post-devolution provides a useful example of the evolution of 'soft spaces' through processes of hardening and softening, and that 'stickiness' of regional spatial imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, soft planning has become an increasingly visible concept in planning literature. Since the term soft spaces was firstly coined, soft planning has been used to describe a growing number of practices that occur at the margins of statutory planning systems. However, as soft planning-related literature proliferates, so does the diversity of approaches and planning practices it encompasses. Such diversity fuels long-standing questions about what can or cannot be considered as soft planning as well as about its usefulness for today's planning theory and practice. To shed light on this still unclear conceptual outline, this article divides the soft planning debate into five contextual components (ethos; governance; politics; policies; spaces; and scale) while paying particular attention to the relationship between soft planning and strategic spatial planning. The aim is to foreground soft planning as a concept, and add clarity and awareness on the challenges, the risks and opportunities, planning currently faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosciutto di Parma, Bavarian beer and Roquefort—Geographical Indications (GIs) have been systematically protected at the EU level for 30 years and are now an important part of the farm2fork strategy. The article analyses how the integration of the EU GI system can be explained from an institution and discourse theoretical perspective and ties in with the soft spaces debate. In doing so, scalar shifts in competence from a German perspective and the role of discursive spatial relations are examined in more detail. The empirical results are based on a mix of methods that includes the evaluation of secondary statistical data, document analyses, participant observation and expert interviews. The study shows that the European Commission (EC) is increasingly acting as a spokesperson for GIs, but that regional actors are also playing a more important role in implementation and enforcement. This development is fed by the influence of the agricultural policy instrument in terms of competition, but also consumer protection and trade policy. Overall, there are three development layers: protect and systematise, legitimise and expand and open and defend. A more independent development of the EU GI system as an instrument of quality policy and for the development of rural areas could give greater weight to the sustainability-relevant, environmental policy aspects currently demanded by society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Redes (1414-7106) is the property of Associacao Pro-Ensino em Santa Cruz do Sul - APESC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

National borders constitute barriers to social, economic and political processes and thus, tend to contribute to the peripheralisation of border regions. The paper compares the evolution of two euroregions in peripheral central European border regions, whose objective is to overcome such negative border effects by promoting cross-border cooperation at the regional level. On a theoretical level, the paper argues for an understanding of euroregions as soft spaces. Rather than viewing them primarily as instances of state rescaling, the paper emphasizes their role as adaptive service providers for local constituencies. It is suggested that their long-term stability depends on their relation to and the internal dynamics of, politico-administrative hard spaces at the regional, national and supranational level. While hard spaces are associated with the notion of the Weberian bureaucratic state, soft spaces combine many of the ideas of the New Public Management literature. Building on an organizational ecology perspective, the paper forwards the argument that stable, resourceful and accessible hard spaces constitute a predictable and engaging environment within which softer arrangements may compete for the delivery of services. However, the interplay between soft and hard spaces tends to have an impact on the euroregion's agendas. While EU cohesion policy provides incentives to strengthen horizontal cross-border coordination, the organizational integration of the two euroregions remained rather loose, testifying to the continued importance of domestic prerogatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban-rural interface is structured by intense social, economic, and environmental interdependencies among urban and rural places. Accordingly, we argue that the rural-urban interface should be governed in a new, hybrid manner -- one that accounts for both place-based and relational exigencies. The United States lacks a coherent, coordinated approach to multi-jurisdictional planning and governance, but multijurisdictional governance can and often does succeed through cooperation at the state and local levels. To illustrate this point, and to ground the theoretical discussion, we present three examples of multijurisdictional planning that are effective at the local level, and one example that has failed to accomplish such goals. Governance of the zone of rural-urban interactions will be more effective and accountable if policies and programs involve not only the constituent municipalities located in this space, but also the social, economic, and environmental relationships in which these communities are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a framework for analysing region-building processes as spatiotemporal constructs, involving competing spatial imaginaries and attempts at consolidating these through institution building. Central here is the performative role of what we refer to as 'soft space imaginaries' in the 'phased' building of regions for planning and economic development over time. We demonstrate how this understanding can be used to examine the phased enactment of successive waves of region-building by tracing the evolution of multiple soft spatial imaginaries in north-west England. The analysis exposes the variable logics, alliances of actors, and tactics used to build momentum and secure legitimacy around preferred imaginaries which advocates often promoted on the grounds that they somehow reflected 'real geographies' or 'real economies'. In this context, soft space imaginaries are seen to play an integral role in intellectual case making about the contemporaneous form and purpose of subnational governance. Yet our analysis also exposes the durability of past soft space imaginaries and their continued impact on efforts to build new soft spaces. What emerges is an understanding of soft space imaginaries as more than just superficial representations. They can help determine where government investment is channelled and into what kinds of policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationships between sport, space and state in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. While the extant literature has predominantly attributed the Russian government’s motives behind hosting the Olympics to showcasing Putin’s Russia, this article provides a more nuanced account of the Sochi project in light of its entanglements with regional development and its implications for Russia’s spatial governance. It argues that Sochi has been an important experimental space for the federal state in its reconstitution and re-territorialisation of the institutions of economic development. The Sochi project signposts a dual process: the return of regional policy to the state’s priorities and a (selective) return of the federal state to urban development. Whilst not without controversies and inconsistencies, this practice signifies a re-establishment of strategies seeking a more polycentric economic development, including through supporting places on Russia’s less developed peripheries. The article also presents insights into the practical operations of the Sochi project and its legacies, including most recent data on the disbursement of its budget. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Macro-regional cooperation in the EU are networks that use the horizontal and vertical dimension of the multilevel governance system to influence both strategic decision-making as well as implementation activities. Drawing on an analysis of expert interviews in the Danube Region the paper scrutinizes stakeholders’ shared views towards expectations, challenges and added values, and thereby seeks to explain why a trend towards macro-regions arises and for what reasons stakeholders are getting involved. The analysis of the drivers for stakeholders’ commitment in the EU Danube Region Strategy shows that new governance arrangements need to be adjustable to different contexts, allow for negotiation and new network creation whilst simultaneously offering the political ability to act. The evidence presented suggests that multilevel governance in the EU is becoming increasingly complex, embracing more and different types of cooperation, with soft characteristics as crucial elements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Floodplain areas across the world have always played an attractive role for residential and non-residential developments. The Alpine regions have a strong pressure to develop new residential and non-residential buildings in hazard areas due to lack of other areas suitable for development. Consequently, the number of elements at risk and vulnerability to flood hazards increased. In order to reduce the vulnerability, the focus of mitigation flood hazards was for decades on structural engineering measures with the problem of spatial misfits between the threat and management strategy. Since the late 1990s/early 2000s, Austrian policy makers have been trying to overcome this spatial misfit with the implementation of an inter-local co-operation approach with the use of so-called ‘new spatial planning’ (Heley, 2013) in the planning process. Therefore, the paper examines what the actors and stakeholders are doing in practice and how the concept of fuzziness helps. Although a partnership approach may be seen as a promising solution, in practice there are many limitations and barriers in establishing these collaborations and making them effective (especially in the long term). Rhetoric may not be matched by reality and a ‘partnership’ agenda may bring more problems (i.e. high transactions costs, high risk of failure, uncertainty in the long term) than it solves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses the concepts of ‘soft spaces’ and ‘soft outcomes’ previously developed in relation to the study of local economic development and planning and applies them to the related, but not identical, field of localised welfare-to-work initiatives. The specific example of the City Strategy initiative in Great Britain provides evidence of these concepts in action. This initiative foregrounded the importance of local partnership working whereby various stakeholders joined together to operate in soft space to achieve commonly agreed goals. The article considers how local partnerships operate in soft space and the appropriate measures of success to be used when assessing the efficacy of their interventions. It is argued that both ‘soft outcomes’ and ‘hard outcomes’ can be used to understand success; but that assessment of soft spaces only in terms of ‘hard outcomes’ is far from comprehensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the conditions under which local and regional governments will establish and sustain cross-border co-operation in the fields of police, fire fighting and emergency health services. It argues that understanding this type of cross-border co-operation requires a focus on the way in which professionals define and apply their professional standards in cross-border contexts. Moreover, it requires a focus on individual organizations and professionals working in them, rather than ‘government’ or ‘the state’ as a whole, since cross-border co-operation in these areas typically develops as a result of disparate and unconnected initiatives taken by governmental actors in a given border region. Based on four studies of cross-border co-operation in Dutch border regions, we argue that differences in legal, organizational and cultural backgrounds between the participating countries can be and are overcome by street-level professionals and their organizations, who act as ‘regionauts’ in exploring opportunities for cross-border co-operation. In this type of ‘bottom-up’ cross-border co-operation, motivation among participants is the key to establishing co-operation, and solutions to differences between work routines will be developed along the way. As a result, the establishment of cross-border co-operation often is an experimental, pragmatic enterprise, which is greatly affected by local intra- and inter-organizational dynamics. This opens the potential for pragmatic, flexible and creative solutions. Yet, at the same time it also runs the risk of producing unaccountable cross-border arrangements that are insufficiently embedded in legal and professional safeguards against error and abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite continuous research efforts, the role of the European Union regarding spatial planning remains unclear. This article proposes to employ the concepts of soft spaces and soft planning to better comprehend how European spatial planning finds its way into the national planning systems. The EU contributes to the creation of soft spaces, differing from administrative entities, while at the same time, it acts as a driver of soft planning, focusing - both for strategic and legal reasons - on coordination, cooperation and mutual learning, rather than 'hard', regulatory planning. The article claims further that instead of depicting the connections between the EU and its member states, research should pay increased attention to the encounter of European and domestic planning within a country. The scales, actors and instruments that deal with EU inputs within a country might prove to be crucial factors that ultimately determine the impact of EU policies on spatial planning. To illustrate the encounter of European and domestic planning in the light of soft and hard planning, the article introduces a conceptual framework and thereby provides an outline for further empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Detractors of European integration and many of its protagonists invoke state territoriality where the social and the spatial come together in a 'Territorial-Administrative Complex'. Like the military-industrial complex claiming once to procure security, protagonists claim to guarantee democratic legitimacy. At the same time, the interests of the territorial constituencies prevail over others. The underlying notion of space is absolute and of territory that of a container. Costs and benefits are calculated in terms pertaining to it. The underlying 'meta-geography' is one of boxes-in-boxes, but rather than viewing space as a container, based on academic literature in the matter, planners now pursue soft planning for soft spaces. In the face of the apparently incontestable claim of the Territorial-Administrative Complex to a monopoly on the production of democratic legitimacy, the article points out, albeit rare examples of constitutional theorists challenge this monopoly. Voting in territorial constituencies, they claim, has never been properly argued for, making it an arbitrary institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch Randstad is known for its polycentric configuration resulting in regional daily urban systems and planning realities that do not match formal government tiers. Over the years many informal governance structures have been proposed to address this issue. Often the rationale behind such informal arrangements is 'to get things done', to overcome the rigidity and inflexibility of formal administrative structures. As many other polycentric urban regions face similar issues, this analysis may help government tiers in the development of a response to the mismatch between urban structure and the architecture of formal government. The southern Randstad is one of the regions which has faced different informal governance arrangements at different scales. We discuss their emergence, aim and the participants involved as well as the reasons for the fact that different arrangements co-exist for approximately the same area to understand the dynamics in polycentric regions as the southern Randstad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macro-regional cooperation in the EU are networks that use the horizontal and vertical dimension of the multilevel governance system to influence both strategic decision-making as well as implementation activities. Drawing on an analysis of expert interviews in the Danube Region the paper scrutinizes stakeholders' shared views towards expectations, challenges and added values, and thereby seeks to explain why a trend towards macro-regions arises and for what reasons stakeholders are getting involved. The analysis of the drivers for stakeholders' commitment in the EU Danube Region Strategy shows that new governance arrangements need to be adjustable to different contexts, allow for negotiation and new network creation whilst simultaneously offering the political ability to act. The evidence presented suggests that multilevel governance in the EU is becoming increasingly complex, embracing more and different types of cooperation, with soft characteristics as crucial elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floodplain areas across the world have always played an attractive role for residential and non-residential developments. The alpine regions have a strong pressure to develop new residential and non-residential buildings in hazard areas due to lack of other areas suitable for development. Consequently, the number of elements at risk and vulnerability to flood hazards increased. In order to reduce the vulnerability, the focus of mitigation flood hazards was for decades on structural engineering measures with the problem of spatial misfits between the threat and management strategy. Since the late 1990s/early 2000s, Austrian policy makers have been trying to overcome this spatial misfit with the implementation of an inter-local co-operation approach with the use of so-called 'new spatial planning' (Heley, 2013) in the planning process. Therefore, the paper examines what the actors and stakeholders are doing in practice and how the concept of fuzziness helps. Although a partnership approach may be seen as a promising solution, in practice there are many limitations and barriers in establishing these collaborations and making them effective (especially in the long term). Rhetoric may not be matched by reality and a 'partnership' agenda may bring more problems (i.e. high transactions costs, high risk of failure, uncertainty in the long term) than it solves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2010-15 UK coalition government's commitment to 'localism' in planning was in marked contrast to the emphasis on cross-boundary strategic planning initiatives under the preceding Labour government. Against this background, the paper examines the implications of evolving economic governance arrangements in three subregional 'soft spaces' in England's South East region. A distinctive evaluative frame derives a set of criteria for 'good economic governance' as perceived by the stakeholders concerned, and a judgement regarding the 'quality' of economic governance in each case is presented. The conclusion triangulates these results against economic growth outcomes across the respective subregions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the coexistence of relational and territorial spaces--soft spaces--through the experiences of EU integration and territorialization. First, we seek a better understanding of EU integration through an engagement with the literature and research on soft spaces. We propose that EU integration is best understood as involving an interplay between territorial and relational understandings and approaches that vary through time, a variation that can be categorized as involving pooled territoriality, supraterritoriality, and nonterritoriality. Second, we seek to add to the current research and literature on soft spaces by focusing upon the changing character of soft spaces and their temporalities. We approach these two dimensions through an exploration of two ex post case studies, the development of which typically shows different stages of softening, hardening, and of differing degrees of Europeanization. With the focus on Europeanization, the paper concludes with three findings: the new spaces of European territoriality are characterized by, first, temporal dynamics, second, their parallel existence with 'hard' spaces, and, finally, they can be employed as a political tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soft skills for the Project Manager have been traditionally identified as a set of cross-cutting skills that should complement the core job of establishing and maintaining reasonable tradeoffs among the elements of the traditional project management iron triangle. Soft skills have been put under the spot in the paper "Beyond the iron triangle: year zero", which, rather, identified in project management the presence of "soft factors" and associated "constrained soft spaces", among them the motivational space, the social ruling space and the analytic/holistic space. In that paper it was highlighted that the project manager needs to extend its integrative role also to "soft factors", so that the traditional "iron triangle" is modified into a "hard-soft pyramid", where "soft factors" are integrated into a constrained environment between themselves and with the traditional "hard factors", like scope, time, cost and quality. Project management can rely upon handy tools for dealing with "hard factors": scope, time, cost and quality can be quantitatively defined and measured. But, what about "soft factors"? An integrative effort into "constrained soft spaces" needs similar tools to manipulate "soft factors". This paper is the result of a research effort aiming to identify viable taxonomies for "soft factors" in project management, along with proxies representing their qualitative/quantitative values, either when demanded by the single individual in the project team, or when provided by the project. The paper identifies "soft spaces" and the "soft factors" that expand into "constrained soft spaces". It provides a description of taxonomies for "soft factors", identifies proxies and metrics, and defines a simple process that might be put in place in any project context where the integrative project management effort is extended from "hard factors" to "soft factors". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Regional Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the proliferation of soft spaces of governance, focusing on planning. We move beyond more functional explanations to explore the politics of soft spaces, more specifically how soft space forms of governance operate as integral to processes of neoliberalisation, highlighting how such state forms facilitate neoliberalisation through their flexibility and variability. Recent state restructuring of the planning sector and emerging trends for soft spaces in England under the Coalition government proposals are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the first ever so-called 'macroregional strategy' developed under the aegis of the European Commission: the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR). Through a drawing together of elements of actor-network theory and regionalization theory, it is argued that the adoption of the EUSBSR can be seen as a milestone within a wider process towards Baltic Sea regionalization, whereby the Baltic Sea region is increasingly 'solidified' through the positioning of the European Commission as a spokesperson for the interests of the region. It is further suggested that, if not seriously contested, the possible acceptance of the European Commission as a designated regional spokesperson might be a crucial step in a process whereby the soft space of the Baltic Sea Region may gradually become more formalized. Nonetheless, caution must be taken so as not to confuse degrees of formal institutional fixity with degrees of durability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]