Navigating through a jungle of IMAJINE

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Navigating through a jungle of IMAJINE – relevant concepts

Making a thorough conceptual review is a good starting point for any academic or intellectual endeavour. Thereby, the first task in the Work Package 1 in the IMAJINE project was to make a critical conceptual review of scholarly contributions on territorial cohesion, inequality and spatial justice. The task was led by Helsinki (FI) and Aberystwyth (UK) universities with excellent help from both Harokopio University (GR) and Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde (DE).

At the first stages of this task we soon realized that we are operating in a jungle of overlapping, undefined, and contested concepts. Within the academic and policy circles there exists a number of concepts that are all broadly referring to spatially uneven distribution of “something” (e.g. economic growth, levels of well-being, or inequality and justice). For example, while the EU policymakers have operated mainly with a concept of Territorial Cohesion the economic geographers have been focusing on theorizing on causes and effects of uneven economic development. Additionally, there exists a body of literature within human geography seeking to contextualize and spatialize the ideas from social justice literature in social philosophy. To make this conceptual jungle even more labyrinthine these thematically overlapping discussions also tend to each focus on different geographical scales ranging from urban to global.

In order to navigate through this conceptual mishmash we chose to focus mainly on two concepts that have the most relevance to the aims of IMAJINE; the policy-oriented concept of Territorial Cohesion and a more academically driven concept of Spatial Justice. The review over the use, meaning and history of these concepts revealed to us that even they do exhibit obvious thematic overlap they haven´t been influencing each other significantly. Instead, Territorial Cohesion has been living a separate life in EU, political geography, and spatial planning literature whereas spatial justice is largely debated within academic circles of human and economic geography.

We concluded the review with notions that this distinction could be dismantled in future. More precisely, spatially (and regionally) focused policymaking and funding of the EU could benefit from taking a stronger notice on the existing rather rich academic literature on Spatial Justice. We presented some initial ideas on how this cross-breeding of ideas could be played out in the “Coping with Uneven Development” conference in Leipzig in 27th to 29th September 2017, which was organized by the EU funded project RegPol².  The atmosphere of the conference was truly inspiring and it had attracted some key scholars in the field including Costis Hadjimichalis from Harokopio University and Andreas Faludi from the Delft University. The intellectually stimulating discussions in the conference led to an invitation to turn our preliminary ideas into a book chapter in a joint publication proposed by Thilo Lang and Franziska Görmar from the RegPol team. The book titled “Regional and Local Development in Times of Polarization – Re-thinking Spatial Policies in Europe” is to be published by Palgrave Macmillan by the end of 2018 including a chapter jointly written by some scholars in WP1.

All in all, we are yet to formulate the concrete suggestion how exactly the ideas of Spatial Justice should be integrated to regional policymaking of the EU but nonetheless the conceptual review revealed an evident need to redefine the concept of Territorial Cohesion. Also, we very much agree with the slogan of the conference printed in its official canvas bags: “Fighting for spatial justice or adapting to uneven development”? This slogan calls for more active policy responses to the increasing socio-spatial inequalities in Europe rather than just passive adaptation aiming to compensate for the locally felt effects of uneven development. As a whole we believe that this first task in the WP1 worked as a solid and inspiring start for the IMAJINE project!

Mikko Weckroth & Sami Moisio on behalf of IMAJINE WP1 Team