ABSTRACT
One of the less understood dimensions of soft spaces is why they emerge in some places and not others. What is it about a specific existence and alignment of factors – political, geographic, administrative, cultural – that leads to the appearance of new spatial practices? This is a question that has been around since the early studies of soft spaces. Haughton et al. (2010), for example, found variable examples of soft space and fuzzy boundaries across the UK:
all parts of the UK and Ireland have invented new planning spaces as part of their effort to rework their planning hierarchies. Scotland stands out as the territory which has been least likely to imagine these new subnational planning formations in terms of fuzzy boundaries or soft spaces of governance. By contrast, in both England and Wales there has been considerable experimentation, indeed in Wales it has been very much a central feature of the new spatial planning there that it has sought to imagine and introduce new planning spaces that disrupt the ‘traditional’ spaces of regulatory planning.
(Haughton et al., 2010: 232)