PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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infrastructures with regard to the EU’s spatial and political integration. They believe that
planning, policy concepts and institutional structures not only matter, but that they can be
shaped and used proactively to positively forge cohesion and integration. Several
specific sub-concerns can be distinguished. For one, most of these scholars are not so
much transport specialists as political scientists and/or planning scholars working on
governance issues, and they are much more concerned with long-term locational
decisions than with the daily movements of goods and people. They agree that largescale
transport infrastructures such as the Channel tunnel or other high-speed rail links
are key re-organizers of European space that have wide-ranging political and economic
consequences. But equally important to them are the locational decisions by the EU and
its member governments regarding their own institutions, notably the emergence of
Brussels as the “European capital” and the relocation of the German capital from Bonn to
the unified Berlin (Williams 1996:93). In emphasizing the need for supranational and
supra-regional planning, they also stress that European transport policy must necessarily
respond to, and be guided by a European-level spatial planning framework. In this
context, several spatial metaphors characterizing the new European landscape of
economic power appear in the literature (see e.g. Masser, Sviden et al. 1992:25; Banister
and Berechman 1993:12; Lemberg 1995:68; Kunzmann 1996; Williams 1996:96), but
Nijkamp (1993:12) warns that these “creative thought experiments ... need to be
substantiated with solid research and proper policy strategies.” 62
Yet another, related
problem with Pan-European transport planning these scholars are always conscious of
62 It should be noted that in relation to the spatial metaphor of a “Northern Arc” of Europe, the
corresponding Via Baltica route from Berlin to St. Petersburg was adopted as the No.1 non-EU TENextension
corridor at the last Pan-European conference of Transport Ministers in Essen in 1995.