We warmly invite everyone to the forthcoming SPS Seminar with Prof. Andreas Faludi, who will present his work in progress on a new book.
Venue: Room R, BK, TU Delft
Time: 12:15 – 13:45
Date: 6 April 2017
The Poverty of Territorialism: Neo-medieval Spatial Planning
The seminar shares ideas about a book project criticising territorialism, meaning controlling people and resources by controlling area, a function of the modern state. It implies macro social space being “…wholly organized in terms of units such as districts, towns, provinces, countries and regions.” (Scholte 2000) So, administrative rather than real, lived spaces frame public planning. However, as a principle of social organization, territorialism addresses security needs and is the basis for solidarity.
Territory so conceived is a product of modernity. So is the production of democratic legitimacy through national elections. ‘The people’, too, is a modernist construct. But the very bases of governance and planning are up in the air. This is what happens in European integration and planning. Ever-more-complex configurations resemble those in the Middle Ages.
‘Europe as an Archipelago,’ with state territories islands in a sea of functional relations, or ‘Europe as a Cloud,’ with even more diffuse spatial and governance arrangements are new spatial planning metaphors. They have in common the questioning of the exclusiveness of state territories.
The production of democratic legitimacy without state containers remains an issue.
Reference:
Scholte, J.A. (2000) Globalization: A Critical Introduction, Macmillan Press, Houndsmill and London
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