European integration, competitiveness and spatial justice: institutional dilemmas and challenges for a European spatial planning

Abstract

The recent gain of interest for a spatial planning policy at a European level has put the question of the relationship between spatial cohesion and competitiveness in the heart of the on going debate upon the themes of the European integration process. This paper examines in the first place the new demands for spatial justice at a european level that have emerged as a consequence of the new forms of regional and inter-urban inequalities and spatial polarizations produced in the European territory the last years. Iη the subsequent parts, it recapitulates the main structural constraints for the formulation and the implementation of a distributive european policy of spatial cohesion and the basic conceptual and institutional reorientations to which the idea of a European spatial justice seems actually submitted under a competitive and market-based integration paradigm. The final argument is that the perspective of a spatial cohesion policy at a european level is nowadays connected to the prospects of the constitutional recognition of a concept of universal public service in the European Union. It is in this difficult convergence that the principles of post-national economic and legal liberalism could meet again the political and institutional traditions of national spatial welfarism.