This is a guest post from Horațiu Ferchiu. He is a planning professional and independent researcher with interests spanning from strategic planning, governance, and policy to politics, and federal Europe. He is currently brainstorming his future PhD subject around federalism and development. This article sums up some of his preliminary findings and thoughts, and is [...]
EU Archive
European identity and common values
Cultural values and language define two of the most important characteristics of territorially defined nations or ethnically defined groups. The recent buzz around the EU blogosphere revealed certain cultural and language issues that limit the way in which people react and interact (1, 2, 3). By similarity, this is not different in the spatial planning [...]
Assessing EU Regional Policy: past, present, and future.
There is probably no surprise that the recent EU enlargements that brought the membership count up to 27, have actually pinpointed some major integration challenges that affected both existing and new member states. Considering this context and the EU regional policy’s contribution to the enlargement processes, it is maybe interesting to question how appropriate is [...]
What is this thing called “European spatial planning”?
A very common arrangement of technical terms in some academic and professional circles and a very daunting one in others. European spatial planning creates intense and unending debates regarding what it actually is, and what is its purpose. A majority of these debates spur from cultural and language differences making it difficult to bring everyone [...]