PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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Probably the most successful counter-image to the Blue Banana was developed by
Kunzmann and Wegener (1991) at the University of Dortmund. They argued that instead
of a banana, one should instead conceive of European space as of a “European Bunch of
Grapes” (figure 6.5). The image successfully evokes the notion of a polycentric Europe,
yet the metaphor does not deny that urban hierarchies will persist. To keep with the
metaphor: the individual grapes are part of a larger whole, but are not equally large, and
some are juicier and tastier than others. Kunzmann (1998:101) has since justified “the
normative concept of the European Bunch of Grapes as a mental vision for spatial equity
in Europe.”
Figure 6.5 The Blue Banana versus a European Bunch of Grapes
Source: Kunzmann and Wegener, as reprinted in NSPA (2000)
At the level of European policy-making, the storyline of polycentricity finds its
most concise, yet still contradictory, expression in a document that was published, but not
officially adopted, by the European Commission in 1999. The document, the European
Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) carries the ambitious subtitle “Towards a
Balanced and Sustainable Development of the Territory of the European Union.” Agreed