Eva Purkarthofer

• Doctor of Science
• PostDoc Position at Aalto University

Many references to policy paradigms and paradigm shifts can be found in the transport studies literature. Within this literature, diverse ways of interpreting and measuring paradigms and paradigm shifts are evident. This article critically reviews how paradigms are conceived in the transport studies literature and compares these interpretations wit...

European Union policies are intertwined with all sectors of public administration and governance in the member states, including spatial, urban and regional planning. Legal regulations like the Natura 2000 Directives, funding programmes associated with EU Cohesion Policy or strategies such as the Territorial Agenda 2030 all leave their mark on plan...

Abstract Introduction Materials and Methods Results Discussion Conclusion Declaration of Conflicting Interests Funding ORCID iDs Footnotes Appendices References Biographies PDF / ePub Cite article Share options Information, rights and permissions Metrics and citations Figures and tables Abstract Neighborhoods are typically conceptualised as static...

In the face of the climate crisis, cities have committed to ambitious sustainability targets. The UN Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a globally shared language for decision-makers and policymakers regarding their sustainability objectives. Espoo, Finland's second-largest city, has become a pioneer in implementing...

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed urgent challenges for educational institutions. The sudden shift from on-site teaching to online distance learning offered the possibility to examine new settings of the studio, a core element of planning and architecture education. Although the pandemic is now over, online learning has secured a fixed place in univers...

This article introduces the AESOP Thematic Group “Transboundary Planning and Governance” and its recent organisational and thematic changes. It also scans recent research from the viewpoint of two interlinked key dimensions of transboundary planning and governance: scale and scope. By doing so, the article aims to highlight promising research persp...

There is extensive literature on the agency of actors in urban and regional planning which draws on a wide range of theoretical lenses and concepts. One of the recurring themes is the relationship between agency and structure-the mutual interdependence between individual actions and collective institutions, rules, and norms. This article provides a...

Sustainable urban development is currently a ubiquitous objective in spatial planning (not least due to the UN Sustainable Development Goals). However, the concrete actions to achieve sustainable urban development vary greatly. This chapter looks at the topic of agency in planning and discusses how actors have been conceptualised in planning resear...

Regional planning typically refers to various activities aimed at steering spatial development at the subnational level, for example, through regional land-use plans, economic development programs, or the coordination of infrastructure investments. However, the scope and style of regional planning are subject to change and reform, as can be observe...

Studio courses are a common way to teach problem-based and applied skills in the field of urban and regional planning. In this article, we reflect on the experiences from a planning studio course that builds on the idea of gradually increasing student autonomy, peaking in the final phase of the course when the whole class self-organizes the content...

After almost two decades of life, the EJSD has come to an important shift in its organisation. This piece is the expression of the editorial team’s wish to guide the readers through the changes that have occurred, both in the journal’s editorial structure and in its technical arrangement. At the same time, it is an occasion to highlight the ideas u...

Both planning practice and research increasingly acknowledge the existence of new scales and governance arrangements alongside and between statutory planning systems. Examples of new scales of non-statutory planning are large-scale megaregions and macro-regions. Drawing on examples from North America and Europe (Southern California and the Danube R...

This chapter addresses the processes of spatial framing underlying EU Cohesion Policy and spatial planning in the EU member states, which shape the spatial delineations of programmes, plans and projects. While administrative, fixed and hard spaces continue to exist and to be relevant for both policy fields, functional, flexible and soft spaces are...

This article furthers the unconsolidated theoretical discourse on planning cultures, focusing on the region as a highly dynamic planning scale. The article discusses regional planning cultures, distinguishing two meanings: regional planning cultures in regions, referring to regionally specific approaches visible in planning practice, and cultures o...

This article analyses the academic concept of "soft spaces" from the perspective of traveling planning ideas. The concept has its origin in the United Kingdom but has also been used in other contexts. Within European Union policy-making, the term soft planning has emerged to describe the processes of cooperation and learning with an unclear relatio...

This special issue approaches regional planning as a contested arena of strategic planning. With this view, we transcend the idea that regional planning is purely a matter of scale and approach the complexity of regional planning from three perspectives: interests, institutions and relations. The perspective of 'interests' reveals the various under...

Economic geographer Andrés Rodríguez-Pose argued recently that declining peripheries are increasingly becoming 'places that don't matter' in the formation or implementation of national or European Union (EU) regional policies. In turn, this might result in a triumph of populist anti-establishment movements in peripheries, posing a threat to well-be...

A policy paper in German language, hosted by the Institute for Urban and Regional Research/ Austrian Academy of Sciences. Cite as: Humer, A. & Purkarthofer, E. (2020) Stadtregionen als Funktionale Handlungsräume: Kontexte des föderalen Österreichs und unitarischen Finnlands im Vergleich; ISR-Bulletin 8/2020; https://doi.org/10.1553/isr-bulletin20-...

The impact of European policies strongly depends on their interpretation and application by domestic actors. This is especially true in fields such as European spatial planning and development, which are characterised by informal agreements and fragmented competences. Consequently, EU policies only gain importance if domestic actors consider them r...

This symposium presents the results of a roundtable of well-known European spatial planning scholars critically engaging with Andreas Faludi's The Poverty of Territorialism. A Neo-Medieval View of Europe and of European Spatial Planning (2018). The book allows readers to rethink the current debates surrounding territorialism in the context of the E...

The potential of city regions to frame spatial development is widely acknowledged, and lately increasingly supported by top-down policy interventions. This article investigates and compares national city-regional policies in Finland and Austria. Owing to differences in their administrative systems, planning traditions and political agendas, the two...

At the European level, several strategic documents concerned with spatial and urban development have been published during the last decades. While these documents are essential to communicate European ideas and objectives, they are often regarded least influential in practice due to their abstract nature, legally non-binding status and lack of allo...

Despite more than two decades of debate about European planning policies, the ways in which the European Union affects urban and regional planning in its member states remain ambiguous. Under the terms Europeanisation, European spatial planning and territorial cohesion, researchers have investigated activities at the European level and, to a lesser...

With Finland’s accession to the European Union in 1995, a regional level of admin-istration responsible for regulation-based land-use planning and incentive-driven regional development policy was introduced. The administration of both policies on the same spatial scale and within the same organisation suggests increased coordi-nation of spatial imp...

At the latest since the argumentative turn, the crucial importance of language, narratives and discourses in the field of planning and policy-making is widely acknowledged. This can be particularly important for European spatial planning, for which the European Union (EU) does not have any formal competence. Thus, instead of enacting directives or...

Despite continuous research efforts, the role of the European Union regarding spatial planning remains unclear. This article proposes to employ the concepts of soft spaces and soft planning to better comprehend how Euro-pean spatial planning finds its way into the national planning systems. The EU contributes to the creation of soft spaces, differi...