The new framework of the spatial policy in the 90's: institutional reorientations and incertitudes

Abstract

The recent regeneration of the political and academic debate on spatial policy questions in the European Union as well as in many European countries is, at the institutional level, defined by the restructuring of the relationships between European, national and local on one side and by the restructuring of the relationships between public and private on the other. These two axes of changes converse to challenge the centrality of the traditional state in the regulation of spatial problems appealing parallely for the invention of new institutions (meta-normes) which will permit the communication, the negotiation and the synthesis between political, social and institutional values and orders of different origin or legitimation.