Abstract
Few individuals have made a more seminal contribution to contemporary planning theory than Andreas Faludi. His latest book, The Poverty of Territorialism: A neo-medieval view of Europe and European Planning, provides a synthesis of his ground-breaking empirical and theoretical work on the politics of planning and territorial governance in the European Union. However, the book is also considerably more than ‘just’ a synthesis. As befits one of the greatest visionary and creative minds of planning theory, it also constitutes a deeply personal reflection that, throughout its pages, develops into no less than a testament of sorts, and a passionate declaration of allegiance to the cultural ideals of liberal cosmopolitanism.
With the stylistic grace of the seasoned, self-confident author the text seamlessly flows between essayistically styled personal reflections and quite heavy theoretical excursions. The narrative skillfully situates the practices of European spatial planning within a wider political and cultural context in a way that very few have the courage, let alone competence, to do. To achieve this, the book draws on diverse theoretical resources previously scantly employed in planning theory debates, including but not limited to scholarship in the subject areas of the philosophy of international and constitutional law and historical studies of citizenship, statehood and territoriality on the European continent.
Writ short, the main argument of the book can be summarized thus: the European territorial state has outlived its time, and is therefore consequently withering away – and a good riddance it is, so planners should do all they can to further facilitate its demise. But what is a realistic alternative? With world government being a distant possibility, to say the least, Faludi sets before himself the no-less ambitious task of reasoning around how spatial planning can potentially contribute to ‘re-invent democracy for a networked world’ (Faludi, 2018), arguing that ‘we should no longer think of territories as the privileged frames for organizing our lives’ (p. xiii), what Faludi in the book refers to as the ideology of ‘territorialism’. The most realistic and appealing alternative in the eyes of Faludi is what he labels as an already emergent ‘neo-medieval’ spatial order, which planners should seek to embrace and promote.
In the book, Faludi argues that following the plethora of border-softening interventions and programmes promoted by the European Commission, the EU can today be understood as a ‘Neo-medieval Empire’. Faludi strongly argues that EUropeans in general, and planners in particular, need to accept this as a given reality of ‘multiple, diffuse patterns of authority overlaying the neat boxes into which the state system casts our lives’ (p. 18). More than just a dissolution of borders, Faludi conceptualizes this development as a manner of so-to-say ‘cutting the cake’ of statehood in an entirely different way, focusing on cross-national, trans-scalar agencies and pseudo-/authorities with different sectoral and partial coordination tasks and mandates, spanning all, some, or parts of some of the member states.
Faludi does not provide any singular, distinctive definition of the characteristics of the emerging neo-medieveal European spatial order, but in a passage that perhaps comes the closest to a direct definition Faludi (2018), referencing Zielonka, states that the EUrope of the future will ‘look like a complicated puzzle without a clear institutional structure, legal order and ideological consensus’ (p. 116). This situation will be characterized by divided sovereignty, differentiated arrangements and multiple identities, as well as fuzzy borders and wavering bases of solidarity. Rather than being rule-based, governing practices will be founded upon bargaining, flexible arrangements and incentives (Faludi, 2018: 116). Faludi is very clear on that planners should not only allow the withering away of the established national-territorial order within the European Union, but actively seek to promote it. However, he does also caution that the shift towards neo-medievalism will demand a complete rethinking of how we fundamentally understand the ethos and processes of democracy, conceding that the nation state has ‘one huge asset’, namely, ‘the production of democratic legitimacy being framed by elections taking place in, and by, member states’ (Faludi, 2018: 136). The new bases of democratic legitimacy that are to replace this established institution, however, come across as somewhat more opaque.
Considering the slenderness of the volume it is surprisingly rich in its argumentation, and there is far too much fodder for productive discussion than there is room for in a simple review. To some extent, unfortunately, this richness is also one of the more problematic weaknesses of the book, in that Faludi at times is forced to ‘file the corners’ of the invoked references to make them fit neatly into his own line of argumentation, which at times makes his interpretations of the sources idiosyncratic to a degree that perhaps would have warranted some deeper self-reflection. This becomes particularly problematic for the reader who is well-acquainted with parts of the wide selection of literature that Faludi bases his argumentation upon. To give but one example of the above-mentioned tendency, I have difficulty seeing that Haughton et al. (2010) normatively suggest that ‘soft spaces’ constitute the ‘proper objects of strategic planning’ (emphasis added), as claimed by Faludi (2018: 65). This is but one example of a problematic sliding between the analytical or perhaps carefully critical modality of reasoning, which I would place Haughton et al’.s original work in, and the more explicitly normative embrace of territorial ‘softness’ that permeates Faludi’s book – and which I will return to in greater detail further below.
Having said the above, the exact limits of what constitutes a reasonable interpretation of a piece of literature is of course, to a great extent, a question that is open for debate – and it isn’t productive to dwell extensively on it. Instead, in the remainder of this review, I will focus on highlighting three aspects of the argumentation that I find to be of utmost urgency from the specific angle of planning, which each relate directly to the crucial question that planning always must ask itself: what to do? These three aspects follow on from each other and specifically relate to (1) questions of planning, democracy and equality; (2) questions regarding the relationship between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, or put differently: analytical and normative modalities of reasoning; and (3) the missing proverbial ‘elephant in the book’: capitalism, and related problematics of socio-economic inequality and exploitation.
Relating to issue (1) above, it is beyond doubt, and also recognized by Faludi, that the proposals he presents in the book have quite dramatic political implications not only for planning per se, but also for the fundamental understanding and organization of democracy in EUrope. Considering the radicality of the presented ideas, I fear that a proper, thoughtful work-through of them would have demanded a more substantial tome than the present thin volume. Regarding the substance of the presented ideas, Faludi is commendably open with his own hesitations, particularly with regard to how the type of spatial governance he describes and advocates in the book challenges established notions of democracy and equality. However, I do not find his brief gestures towards solutions for these problems convincing enough to sooth my own qualms. For instance, I find the argumentation problematic even on the fundamental level of defining the phenomenon of democracy. Here, Faludi (2018) follows his paragon, Zielonka, in claiming that the basic principles of democracy can be summarized in the concepts of ‘plurality’ and ‘self-government’ (p. 118). To draw on another reference that Faludi favourably quotes in the book, this claim can be quickly falsified in the spirit of Karl Popper by mentioning numerous political systems that historically have fulfilled these two criteria but that few would today label as ‘democratic’ in any deeper sense.
This unease with the handling of the delicate issue of democracy in the book leads on to the second point above, the problem of a sliding between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. As outlined by philosopher David Hume in his reasoning around the ‘is-ought problem’, one is on very shaky philosophical ground when moving between statements about, on the one hand, what ‘is’ (positive or analytical), and on the other hand what ‘ought’ to be (normative). One must take particular care, to say the least, not too quickly to derive a normative claim about what should be on the basis of analytical claims about what is. In this regard, I find Faludi’s book disturbing, and somewhat surreptitious, in how it slides back and forth between the analytical claim that territorial constructs can be undone, the positive claim that European territoriality is currently being undone to some extent, and finally: the normative position, that such constructs should be undone. A key question that I find myself asking after having read the book is consequently: even if we agree with Faludi (2018), analytically, in observing that the European Union is moving towards diffuse, splintered political authority – why would we necessarily want to celebrate – not to mention, further promote – this? Even if we agree that ‘diffuseness is the new normal’ (p. 135), why would we want to make it our mission to promote further such diffuseness?
Following on from the above, since I do not find the arguments regarding how a neo-medieval form of spatial governance may felicitously impact upon ambitions towards democracy and equality convincing, I also find myself raising numerous concerns on this point and ask myself why it would be wise for someone who sees it as their mission to further these qualities in the world (i.e. democracy and equality) to cast their lots with neo-medieval planning so soon? Why abandon our established notions of these ethical values before carefully thinking through the probable and possible consequences of these new forms of spatial governance for democracy and equality? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume a more cool-headed, agnostic stance, in further analysing the potential positive and negative effects of these developments with a sober gaze, before forcefully arguing that planners should make the dissolution of established spatial boundaries their main professional mission?
Admittedly, there is a degree of expressed ambivalence in the work, with Faludi at times suggesting that the book merely provides an analytical perspective, invoking a sort of ‘don’t kill the messenger’ position. But nonetheless, the book also includes numerous calls for planners to promote the erasure of existing geographic borders, urging them, for instance, to ‘come up with ideas, proposals, scenarios and images subverting territorialism’ (p. 136), and to ‘help loosen the load’ of territorialism (Faludi, 2018: 159). The motivation for this suggestion – that planners should make it their central mission to combat territorialism – is found in a key passage on page 136 where it is argued that all these things are bound to happen anyway, and all that planning can do is to ‘make the process a little smoother, no more’. I find this suggestion disturbingly prophetic and defeatist at the same time. What is particularly curious is that in a warped manner it actually echoes David Harvey’s wholesale condemnation of planning practice and theory as nothing more than a mechanism for smoothly reproducing the fundamental, currently existing, societal dynamics (Harvey, 1985).
By invoking Harvey, I also want to point out what I to some extent find to be the proverbial ‘elephant in the book’, which is completely left out of the narrative. That is contemporary capitalism and the associated dynamics of exploitation and gross inequality. You can have more or less critical views on this, but I do think that in relation to the argument presented in the book, it is difficult to remain silent on the relationship between capitalism and contemporary processes of de- and reterritorialization. Hardt and Negri, who Faludi cite repeatedly throughout the book, never cease to stress that the driving motor behind these developments is the evolution of capitalism. They argue that capitalist dynamics can be liberating in that they tear down old, ossified structures of oppression, and yet, they never cease to produce new forms of ever more sophisticated subjugation and exploitation. Therefore, Hardt and Negri (2000) are at pains to point out that it is of crucial importance to be aware and wary of the workings of contemporary capitalism in any analysis of processes of political and geographical restructuring, for instance when they point out that ‘the decline of national boundaries, does not indicate that social inequalities and segmentations have disappeared. On the contrary, they have in many respects become more severe, but under a different form’ (p. 336). These conclusions Faludi all but completely leaves out (bar a single fleeting mention) in his discussion of Hardt and Negri’s work, which is curious – considering that this is their core message. To be convincing, Faludi’s book would have needed not to ignore this analysis but to counter it, and in a convincing way clarify why planners should nonetheless actively strive to promote these developments, no matter their expectably problematic effects with regard to questions of not only democratic, but also socio-economic equality.
To state my point in crude terms, I am afraid that the vision presented in the book, to some extent dovetails very closely with a neoliberal utopia, in which privatized public services, fractured sovereignty and diffuse governance arrangements primarily serve to provide the optimal conditions for the operation of contemporary feral capitalism. Perhaps this is the direction contemporary societies are currently heading – but if that is the case: why should we call upon planners to make this transition any smoother?