ABSTRACT
A significant part of the research carried out by planning scholars in the field of European spatial planning in the past decade has focused on identifying the influence of the activities of the EU on domestic planning systems and on institutions, policies and processes of urban and regional planning. At the crossroad between political science, European integration studies and spatial planning research, a new field of investigation on the ‘Europeanisation of spatial planning’ and the emergence of a European spatial policy field consequently emerged in the 1990s. Research into EU influences on domestic spatial planning has taken various directions. Some scholars have focused on the specific impacts of particular EU initiatives and programmes or on the planning implications of particular pieces of EU legislation (for example, Beunen 2006; Howe and White 2002). (Chapter 18 reviews research on the effects of the URBAN initiative, Chapter 22 summarises the research on the effects of territorial cooperation programmes drawing on the special issue of Planning Practice and Research introduced by Dühr et al. 2007.) Others have focused on: the domestic impact of Structural Fund programmes on regional and urban governance and policies (Gualini 2001, 2004a); the influence of the ESDP on national, regional and local planning practices and policies (ESPON 2007b; Faludi 2001a, 2003, 2004b; Shaw and Sykes 2003, 2005); or the impacts of a wide ranging set of EU policies on one particular country (Tewdwr-Jones and Williams 2001; van Ravesteyn and Evers 2004).
