PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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concentration of economic activity along the “Blue banana” core of Western Europe, and
no Cohesion fund will actually enhance spatial cohesion across European territories if it
primarily directs funds towards national-level priority links between already privileged,
better-off agglomerations.
I agree that new, action-oriented policy consensuses best emerge via ongoing
debates over negative and positive connotations of certain spatial terms, i.e. via discourse,
but these debates must be grounded in empirical spatial analyses. Northern and Western
European countries have a stronger tradition of using spatial images to back spatial policy
proposals than Southern and Eastern European ones. Prominent examples are the “Green
Heart” (groenehart) policy of the Dutch Randstad region, the Leitbild of “decentralized
concentration” (Dezentrale Konzentration) in Berlin-Brandenburg in Germany, or, last
but not least, the “polycentricity” concept of the European Spatial Development
Perspective (which was chiefly promoted by Germany and a few other West European
countries). The experience of the Netherlands, and, to a more limited extent, Germany,
shows that if formulated with strong political backing and translated into concrete dos
and don’ts for local land use and transport investments, such spatial images may be able
to redirect spatial activity at the metropolitan level. At the present time, however, there
are no such efforts discernable at the metropolitan level in the transition countries. Local
pressures on greenfield development still overwhelm nascent regional planning efforts,
and road infrastructure investments are easily instrumentalized for greenfield
development purposes. In such contexts, spatial storylines such as “polycentricity” have
little prescriptive value at the local level. The integrating power of spatial storylines
seems further limited in Poland and Hungary because strategic geopolitical interests favor