Soft Spaces as Vehicles for Neoliberal Transformations of Strategic Spatial Planning?

This paper analyses how policy agendas are being shaped and reshaped in new soft spaces emerging in Danish spatial planning at subnational scales, and how policy-making in these soft spaces seeks to influence formal planning arenas. The paper demonstrates how the new soft planning spaces in Danish spatial planning primarily are concerned with promoting policy agendas centred on economic development, whilst doing limited work in filling in the gaps between formal scales of planning, as envisaged in the planning literature. Instead, soft spaces seem to add to the increasing pressures on statutory spatial planning, being used as vehicles for neoliberal transformations of strategic spatial planning. This paper therefore argues for a need to maintain a critical stance towards the emergence of soft spaces in spatial planning.