Structure, tools, discourse and practices: a multidimensional comparative approach to EU territorial governance

The concept of "EU territorial governance" has been recently adopted by planners and decision-makers to indicate the occurrence of a complex, multifaceted and largely undefined process of spatial planning and development activities guided, at various levels, in the European Union's institutional context. Building on a EU territorial governance conceptual framework elaborated by the authors in previous work, which individuates the specific „channels‟ of interaction that convey change in European countries, on the one hand, and institutional progress at the EU level, on the other hand, the contribution aims to shed some light on the differential impact exerted by such channels as they manifests in relation to different Member States domestic contexts. It does so by adopting three different national contexts as case studies, representative of as many „ideal types‟ of planning system traditions existing in Europe – namely , „comprehensive integrated‟ (Germany), „urbanism‟ (Italy), plus a supposed „Central and Eastern European socialist transition‟ type (Poland) – and providing a comparative analysis of the elements that, in relation to each of them, influence the evolution of European spatial planning and spatial planning domestic contexts within the complex framework of EU territorial governance.