This article proposes a methodological framework for analyzing the Europeanization of national planning, that is, EU influence on domestic planning systems and policies. It seeks in particular to examine whether, where, and how Europeanization of national planning occurs and under which analytic frameworks it may be explained. To this end, the article proposes a three-step research approach. First, it highlights the main patterns of Europeanization in the area of national planning in relation to different modes of EU governance and ideal types of Europeanization. Second, it suggests a typology for the examination of the potential effects of the Europeanization of planning at the domestic level. Finally, it develops some hypotheses on how different institutional, socio-economic and cultural contexts may accommodate or restrain the Europeanization of national planning.

Recently more and more planning scholars adhere to a post-modern and analytical approach. Instead of creating new concepts and new models in the self- referential world of actual planning systems these people try to improve plans and planning from a more profound analytical base. We call them post- modern planners, planners starting from a social constructivist frame of investigation and drawing on the post- modern findings of the humanities (anthropology, philosophy, history, policy studies,..). By doing so they not only show more accurately how planning really works, they also deconstruct many of the dominant modernist theories, concepts and ideas still present within the planning discipline. One would expect that the planning discipline, in parallel with other disciplines like anthropology, policy studies and cultural studies, would undergo a major change towards a more analytical and post-modern approach. Although this seems to be the case at some European Universities, where scientists like Flyvbjerg, Hillier and Allmendinger, seem to become increasingly influential, generally speaking Northern European planners, also in the Dutch planning paradise, tend to cling to the modernist discourse, dominant in planning disciplines and institutions. It is produced and reproduced, seemingly unaffected by the upcoming post-modern frame of thought. In this article we will describe the problems that originate from that modernist discourse and we will elaborate on the need for a post-modern approach of planning. A post-modern scientific look at the planning system reveals the presence of images of self and the outer world that are far from realistic and far form democratic. Consequently there is a real need for change. Next we will make explicit the constraints, power relations and attitudes, which constitute obstacles for change. Making these obstacles explicit is not only a way to critically reflect on planning approaches within the Dutch and Northern European academic context. An analysis of the obstacles for change is simultaneously an analysis of the reproductive mechanisms of the planning discourse and an analysis of the gradual breakdown of the democratic character of planning. A shift from a modern to a post-modern planning approach is therefore not only an academic challenge, but also a struggle for new forms of democratic legitimacy

This paper attempts to provide an analysis associated with the performance of the current Danish national spatial planning framework based on a descriptive overview of its changing institutional arrangements and policy instruments. The Danish planning system has been historically qualified as holding a comprehensive-integrated character, which depicts a harmonized and coherent institutional and policy framework across different levels of planning administration. However, spatial planning in Denmark has been increasingly exposed to profound reorientations over the past two decades, a situation which could be generally understood as the outcome of a series of interrelated political and economic factors shaping and re-shaping spatial planning in different European contexts. In Denmark, the effects of a recent structural reform that changed the geographies of inter-governmental arrangements within the national territory have significantly transformed the scope, structure and understandi...

The idea of planning economy and engineering social life has often been linked with Communist regimes' will of control. However, the persuasion that social and economic processes could and should be regulated was by no means limited to them. Intense debates on these issues developed already during the First World War in Europe and became globalized during the World Economic crisis. During the Cold War, such discussions fuelled competition between two models of economic and social organisation but they also revealed the convergences and complementarities between them. This ambiguity, so often overlooked in histories of the Cold War, represents the central issue of the book organized around three axes. First, it highlights how know-how on planning circulated globally and were exchanged by looking at international platforms and organizations. The volume then closely examines specificities of planning ideas and projects in the Communist and Capitalist World. Finally, it explores East-West channels generated by exchanges around issues of planning which functioned irrespective of the Iron Curtain and were exported in developing countries. The volume thus contributes to two fields undergoing a process of profound reassessment: the history of modernisation and of the Cold War. Global Cold War seen from the perspective of social and economic planning Analysis of circulation of ideas irrespective of the Iron Curtain Fresh look at the transnational history of international organizations in the bi-polar world