ABSTRACT
Are we comparing the "ordinary" development processes of spatial planning systems? This first question needs to be preceded by another question: What do we call a "spatial planning system"? The answer is one of the main issues in this book and has already been discussed in Chapter 2, but we would like to emphasize some points again. A "system" is "the patterning of social relations across time and space, understood as reproduced practices" (Giddens 1984: 377). Each European nation-state has a specific spatial planning system, that is, specific "social practices ordered across space and time" (ibid.: 2) that have the built environment as their object. 1 This planning system is part of the social system2 of each nationstate. The diversity of these institutional systems is clearly very large in Europe.
