Territorial Division For Public Action

Territorial Division for Public Action

The reader may be amazed when they are faced with the sheer number of territorial divisions associated with public action, and full of questions. What justifies this diversity? What are the problems that arise from these divisions? Why don't the limits of public action simply follow administrative and political subdivisions? Territorial Division for Public Action focuses on the situation in France, proposing three different approaches. First, we consider the functions that are associated with these territorial divisions: equitable distribution of resources across the territory, administration and the management of public services. However, they are also a tool for maintaining power. Lastly, we consider the effects these divisions have on the implementation of public action and on socio-spatial structures. These divisions reflect political projects, which embody the issues as much as the partition design itself does. The recent reform of territorial regions, alongside a gradual imposition of intercommunal links in France, has given rise to political debates at both local and national levels.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning Theory

At a time of potentially radical changes in the ways in which humans interact with their environments - through financial, environmental and/or social crises - the raison d'être of spatial planning faces significant conceptual and empirical challenges. This Companion presents a multidimensional collection of critical narratives of conceptual challenges for spatial planning. The authors draw on various disciplinary traditions and theoretical frames to explore different ways of conceptualising spatial planning and the challenges it faces. Through problematising planning itself, the values which underpin planning and theory-practice relations, contributions make visible the limits of established planning theories and illustrate how, by thinking about new issues, or about issues in new ways, spatial planning might be advanced both theoretically and practically. There cannot be definitive answers to the conceptual challenges posed, but the authors in this collection provoke critical questions and debates over important issues for spatial planning and its future. A key question is not so much what planning theory is, but what might planning theory do in times of uncertainty and complexity. An underlying rationale is that planning theory and practice are intrinsically connected. The Companion is presented in three linked parts: issues which arise from an interactive understanding of the relations between planning ideas and the political-institutional contexts in which such ideas are put to work; key concepts in current theorising from mainly poststructuralist perspectives and what discussion on complexity may offer planning theory and practice.

Mapping the Spatial Divisions of Europe