European spatial planning and its current challenges

The present paper concerns European spatial planning. Since its distinctive institutional nature, it may be defined an emerging model of transnational planning gushed from a deep community need of territorial governance to face the effects of globalisation. Therefore, spatial planning is potentially precious for Europe even more than what European governors may themselves envisage. Two strictly interlaced challenges seem to be currently at stake so that European spatial planning can act in the interest of European Community: a) a political challenge, which consists in the task of formalising a planning competency at Community level too; b) a technical challenge, dealing with the opportunity to make European spatial planning an effective system of multi-level governance. Territorial cohesion and subsidiarity, two apparently opposed principles that lay at the basis of the difficulties met with by such a double challenge, may become as well the key to overcome it. For this to happen, attention must be paid to the multidimensional nature of European spatial planning in practice, as well as to the experience gained by the existing European planning traditions. For to be effective, European territorial governance should not act indeed as something uprooted from national planning systems and needs in fact to be shared among all territorial institutions representing the Communit