ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters in this book have concentrated on the formal institutions and instruments of European spatial planning and territorial cooperation. However, many of the challenges of international working between regions and countries are to do with the unofficial but taken-for-granted understandings of what spatial planning is and how to do it that are part of everyday planning practice. When spatial planners from different countries get together in cooperative activities, very different assumptions about the nature of planning quickly come to the surface. They reflect deeply embedded differences in planning culture.
