Soft Space Planning in Cities unbound: vehicle for effective strategic spatial planning or neoliberal transformations?

This paper analyses contemporary experiments of building governance capacity in new soft spaces in Denmark through processes of spatial strategy-making. The paper argues that new soft spaces are emerging in Danish spatial planning, which set out to promote more effective forms of strategic spatial planning. The Danish case of soft space planning demonstrates how Danish soft spaces at subnational scales fail to fill in the gaps between formal planning structures and provide the glue that binds formal scales of planning together as promised in the soft space literature. This raises a number of critical questions about whether the normative arguments in the soft space literature are unfounded, or whether the significance of soft spaces is simply overrated in the planning literature. Furthermore, it is argued that critical attention needs to be paid to the prevalence of soft spaces in spatial planning, and how their obsession with promoting economic development at the expense of wider planning responsibilities support contemporary neoliberal transformations of strategic spatial planning.