ABSTRACT
During the 1990s, intergovernmental efforts by EU member states with the support of the European Commission contributed to a growing awareness of the spatial impacts and dynamics of the European project. This culminated in 1999 in the agreement of an indicative statement of principles to guide the balanced and sustainable development of the EU's territory – the ‘European Spatial Development Perspective’ (ESDP). This document was to have a varying impact across Europe in the following years, with different territorial contexts at different state and sub-state scales playing a significant role in conditioning the attention it was accorded, and the ESDP policy principles which were seen as being pertinent in different places. In the mid-2000s, after something of a lull, the momentum for intergovernmental working within the EU on spatial issues returned, with the new debates being increasingly framed in the language of territorial development and the stated objective of achieving ‘territorial cohesion’. For its part, the European Commission increasingly emphasized and sought to give definition to the concept of territorial cohesion in documents such as the Third Report on Economic and Social Cohesion of 2004.
