In the late 1990’s the European Commission published the ‘EU Compendium on Spatial Planning Systems and Policies’ which covered the 15 EU member states at that time. Since then, the EU has expanded to 28 member states and there have been significant developments in pan-European territorial and cohesion policies. Territorial governance and spatial planning systems have now evolved to become one of the key components of integrated cross-sectoral development strategies and policy delivery mechanisms among ESPON member and partner states. For further reading please see below.

Policy questions

• What changes in territorial governance and spatial planning systems and policies can be observed across Europe over the past 15 years? Can these changes be attributed to the influence of macro-level EU directives and policies?
• What are best-practices for cross-fertilisation of spatial and territorial development policies with EU Cohesion Policy?
• How can national/regional spatial and territorial development policy perspectives be better reflected in Cohesion Policy and other policies at the EU scale?

Policy brief and spin-offs

• Policy Brief: Cross-fertilisation of cohesion policy and spatial planning | ESPON
• Cross-fertilisation between spatial planning and EU Cohesion Policy in the Czech Republic.pdf (espon.eu)
• ESPON COMPASS interactive dialogue process report.pdf

Contractors

• TU Delft, NL (lead contractor)
• ARL, DE
• Institute of Geography, Polish Academy of Science, PL
• Nordregio, SE
• Politecnico di Torino, IT
• Center for Economic & Regional Studies, HU
• Spatial Foresight, LU
• University College Dublin, IE
• ÖIR, AT
• Omgeving, BE
• National Institute of Geophysics, BG
• University of Thessali, GR
• Czech technical University, CZ
• University of Tartu, EE
• Anna Geppert, FR
• ILS Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development, DE
• Georgia Giannakourou, GR
• London Southbank University, UK
• Lithuanian Social Research Centre, LT
• Architecture Project Ltd, MT
• Centre for Geo. Studies, PT
• Inst. Geography, SK
• Ipop, SI
• Mcrit, ES
• Istanbul Technical University, TR

Project Support Team

• Ann Pisman, Belgium (Flanders)
• Romana Mynarikova, Germany
• Blanka Bartol, Slovenia

Deliveries

• Inception delivery, 1 November 2016
• Interim delivery, 1 May 2017
• Draft Final delivery, 15 January 2018
• Final delivery, 31 May 2018

You can find the final report and all deliveries of the project on the archived website of the ESPON 2020 Programme.

Contact: 

• Gavin Daly (Senior Project Expert) [email protected], 
• György Alfoldy (Financial Expert) [email protected]

Further information: the full description of this applied research activity is available below.