ABSTRACT
Bob Jessop (2004), governance stands for developing mechanisms and strategies of coordination in situations where there is complex reciprocal interdependence of autonomous actors. Regulatory planning, too, has brought cooperation into practice even before governance has become a term of good currency. This has been a way of coping with arbitrary boundaries and the fact that planners have limited power to actually shape development. By embracing cooperation, planning has thus been ahead of its time, but it has remained within the context of government dealing with fixed jurisdictions or hard spaces. Being problem-driven, spatial strategies or visions relate to soft spaces. At the other end of the scale from statutory land-use planning – hard planning for hard spaces – we thus find soft planning for soft spaces. One of my conclusions will be that this is what territorial cohesion policy is about.
