Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

How to ... be a reflective practitioner.

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

The halogen bond occurs when there is evidence of a net attractive interaction between an electrophilic region associated with a halogen atom in a molecular entity and a nucleophilic region in another, or the same, molecular entity. In this fairly extensive review, after a brief history of the interaction, we will provide the reader with a snapshot of where the research on the halogen bond is now, and, perhaps, where it is going. The specific advantages brought up by a design based on the use of the halogen bond will be demonstrated in quite different fields spanning from material sciences to biomolecular recognition and drug design.

The Halogen Bond

Discourse analysis is becoming an increasingly common approach in planning and environmental policy research This paper asserts that the generic treatment of discourse analysis obscures distinct approaches in which ‘discourses’ can combine different elements of text, systems of thought and action Textually oriented approaches have been more prevalent during the 1990s, but this paper explores a different approach, grounded in the theory of Michel Foucault, which broadens discourse to embrace social action Comparing and contrasting two studies that have utilized this approach, the paper suggests that there is considerable room for variation concerning the subjects of study, the institutional scale of analyses, the methods of investigation and process of analysis Nevertheless, this paper identifies certain core elements of a Foucauldian discourse analytic approach The paper concludes that this emerging approach to discourse analysis promises considerable insights if applied more widely in planning and e

Reflections on Foucauldian discourse analysis in planning and environmental policy research

Making European Space explores how future visions of Europe's physical space are being decisively shaped by transnational politics and power struggles, which are being played out in new multi-level arenas of governance across the European Union. At stake are big ideas about mobility and friction, about relations between core and peripheral regions, and about the future Europe's cities and countryside. The book builds a critical narrative of the emergence of a new discourse of Europe as 'monotopia', revealing a very real project to shape European space in line with visions of high speed, frictionless mobility, the transgression of borders, and the creation of city networks. The narrative explores in depth how the particular ideas of mobility and space which underpin this discourse are being constructed in policy making, and reflects on the legitimacy of these policy processes. In particular, it shows how spatial ideas are becoming embedded in the everyday practices of the social and political organisation of space, in ways that make a frictionless Europe seem natural, and part of a common European territorial identity.

Making European Space: Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jurgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

Planning and Foucault: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory

Environmental assessment and planning theory: four short stories about power, multiple rationality, and ethics

Summary. The aim of this paper is to explore how spatialities are ‘constructed’ in spatial policy discourses and to explore how these construction processes might be conceptualised and analysed. To do this, we discuss a theoretical and analytical framework for the discourse analysis of socio-spatial relations. Our approach follows the path emerging within planning research focusing on the relations between rationality and power, making use of discourse analytics and cultural theoretical approaches to articulate a cultural sociology of space. We draw on a variety of theoretical sources from critical geography to sociology to argue for a practice- and cultureoriented understanding of the spatiality of social life. The approach hinges on the dialectical relation between material practices and the symbolic meanings that social agents attach to their spatial environment. Socio-spatial relations are conceptualised in terms of their practical ‘workings’ and their symbolic ‘meaning’, played out at spatial scales from the body to the global—thus giving notion to an analysis of the ‘politics of scale’. The discourse analytical approach moves away from textually oriented approaches to explore the relations between language, space and power. In the paper, we use examples of the articulation of space in the emerging field of European spatial policy. It is shown how the new spatial policy discourse creates the conditions for a new set of spatial practices which shape European space, at the same time as it creates a new system of meaning about that space, based on the language and ideas of polycentricity and hypermobility.

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Tim Richardson

Papers

Reflections on Foucauldian discourse analysis in planning and environmental policy research

Making European Space: Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity

Planning and Foucault: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory

Environmental assessment and planning theory: four short stories about power, multiple rationality, and ethics

Linking Discourse and Space: Towards a Cultural Sociology of Space in Analysing Spatial Policy Discourses