PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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6.1 Introduction
So far, I traced the contradictions and biases in key EU documents seeking to
define sustainable development, sustainable transport and sustainable mobility and
thereby demonstrated the conflicted nature of the concept of sustainability. I also
pinpointed the EU’s general, growth-oriented, eco-modernist approach to transport
policy-making and set it in relation to other, alternative discursive frameworks. The
previous chapter then provided a text-oriented discourse analysis of key EU policy
statements on transport, sustainability and land use. This present chapter will continue
this discourse-focused analysis by exploring how growth and efficiency-oriented
arguments play out in the more specific arena of EU transport infrastructure investment
policies and programs.
Given the challenges of multi-level governance and multi-location politics, it is
always quite difficult, if not to say impossible, for any one stakeholder or group to push
through their particular decision-making agenda without first forging alliances with other
groups. This present chapter will elaborate on the topic of the EU’s power-knowledgenexus
by taking a thematic approach. Rather than concentrate on particular stakeholders,
I will instead focus on particular visions and themes that have been formulated with
regard to transport-sector infrastructure support at the European level. I identify three
overarching visions, or Leitbilder, and four “spatial storylines” justifying EU transport
infrastructure investments. The key insight, taken from Foucauldian discourse theory, is
that the investment-related “storylines” most likely have not been formulated by any one
identifiable author / stakeholder alone, but are instead to be understood as the result of