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

In the planning literature, there has recently been much discussion on the new ‘soft spaces with fuzzy boundaries’ perceived to emerge in British spatial planning. So far critical reflections on the implications of the increasing amount of spatial strategy-making being done in soft spaces have focused on the lack of transparency and potential democratic deficits of contemporary spatial planning. Limited critical attention has been paid to how policy agendas are being shaped and reshaped in soft spaces, and how these agendas seek to influence formal planning arenas. These questions seem to be particularly relevant within the current neoliberal political climate characterising many European countries, including social welfare states such as Denmark. In addition, limited attention has been paid to how the concepts of ‘soft spaces’ and ‘fuzzy boundaries’ correspond to contemporary European strategic spatial planning practices. This paper seeks to broaden the soft space debate in a European context by offering an account of the emergence of soft spaces in Danish spatial planning. The paper analyses how spatial strategy-making is carried out at the scale of two new soft spaces emerging in Danish spatial planning at subnational scales. In these soft spaces, the paper explores how policy agendas are being shaped and reshaped, and how these agendas seek to influence formal planning arenas. The central argument running through this paper is that soft spaces in neoliberal political climates might be used as vehicles for neoliberal transformations of strategic spatial planning.
In 2006, the Danish Ministry of the Environment published a national planning report articulating a ’New Map of Denmark’ consisting of two urban regions. The urban regions were promoted by the ministry as new appropriate scales for, on the one hand, managing pressing spatial issues such as urban sprawl and congestion, and on the other hand, promoting economic growth and international competitiveness. In 2008, new multi-level collaborative processes were initiated at the scale of these urban regions, involving the Ministry of the Environment, administrative regions, and municipalities. The aim of these processes was to prepare informal and voluntary spatial frameworks and overall urban structures for the two regions, turning these into ‘soft spaces’ of strategic spatial planning. The paper demonstrates how the state’s ambitions of introducing overall spatial frameworks at the scale of urban regions were downscaled during the processes, as the political climate within the ministry changed as a liberal Minister of the Environment was appointed. At the same time, the municipalities, who primarily perceived the soft spaces as cross-municipal platforms for transport infrastructure lobbying, were successful in reshaping the agenda-setting in the soft spaces towards policy agendas of investments in transport infrastructures and economic development.
The lessons from the Danish experiences with soft spaces suggest a need to pay critical attention to how policy agendas are being shaped and reshaped in soft spaces in concordance with transformations in politics. The evidence from Denmark suggests that the flexible nature of soft spaces allows agenda-setting in them to be reshaped to support policy agendas of powerful actors or reflect transformations in politics. In the current neoliberal political climate characterising many European countries at the moment, there is a risk that agenda-setting in soft spaces are reshaped to promote neoliberal policy agendas, turning soft spaces into vehicles for neoliberal transformations of strategic spatial planning.