The Region is Dead, Long Live the Region: The Øresund Region 15 Years after the Bridge

If it today is commonly accepted that regions are ‘constructs’ – then who or what construct them, for what reasons, and by which means? How are they made manifest and durable as both mental geographies and mundane everyday realities (cf. Metzger, 2013)? Paasi (2010, p.2298) suggests that regions become actualized through “a plethora of practices, discourses, relations and connections that can have wider origins in space and time but are assembled and connected in historically contingent ways in cultural, economic and political contexts and struggles”. Furthermore, he suggests that regions are “performed and made meaningful” through “material and discursive practices and networks that cross borders and scales, often simultaneously giving expression or shape to such borders and scales” (Paasi, 2010, p.2298). In this chapter we will investigate the spatiotemporally distributed heterogeneous practices that have led to the formation and more recently encroaching dissipation of a well-known EUropean region: Öresund. In this endeavour we will make an effort to be sensitive to how Öresund as a spatial entity interrelates with, depends upon or partially challenges/is challenged by other geographical entities, boundaries and imaginations. We will be paying specific attention to the role played (or not) by strategic spatial planning practices in contributing to making the Öresund Region a manifest, seemingly self-evident reality.