Series 2010/11

The Alexander von Humboldt lectures are an initiative of Prof. dr. Huib Ernste
Series organisers: dr. Krisztina Varró, M Eng. Joren Jacobs, Prof. dr. Huib Ernste

The Department of Human Geography at the Radboud University of Nijmegen cordially invites you to our Lecture and Seminar Series on the theme of ‘Making European Space(s)’:

Recently one could witness an emerging sense of necessity to renew our institutions and our ways of life in the face of global environmental, financial, and political crises. Long-standing processes such as climate change, migration flows, growing inequalities at different spatial scales, transport problems, urban sprawl and inner city decline, to name but a few, ask for urgent responses. There is increasing agreement today that in order to deal with these issues we need to develop more responsible forms of governance that address questions such as: How can we move towards territorial cohesion at different spatial levels? How should we balance spatial equity and autonomy at various scales? How should we recognise (which) cultural allegiances? How can we ensure that our policy choices do not affect negatively distant-but-related ‘others’?

However, by becoming a new catchphrase, ‘responsible governance’ runs the risk of losing its potential of reinstating a meaningful debate about the above-mentioned questions (and many others). This lecture series intends to create a room for discussing the challenges entailed by current societal concerns particularly in view of ‘responsible spatial governance’. Spatial governance refers here both to the way societies organise their spatial environment in the more concrete sense of the term, as well as to the way issues of development, democracy, solidarity and identity-building are ‘translated’ spatially. More specifically, the series proposes to frame the discussion about the shift towards responsible forms of spatial governance in terms of the making of European space(s).

Certainly, the notion of ‘Europe’ has been invested in various ways in scholarly work dealing with spatial governance. To highlight some points of divergence, some scholars take the interchangeability of Europe and the EU for granted; others point out that such a slip masks the way the EU as a contested but powerful project of ‘integration’ shapes understandings of ‘Europe’ (e.g. Böröcz, 2001). At the same time, there are various (albeit partly overlapping) views concerning the nature of the EU as a project in continuous formation. Many scholars treat the EU principally as a functional space conceived to design policies that enhance societal and individual welfare. For others, the EU is (also) a socio-cultural space and a (potential) source of identity. Others again regard the EU first and foremost as a (geo-)political project that can only be understood within a global context and that, precisely because it is embedded in such a global context, can hardly achieve any economic, political and social unity (cf. Delanty-Rumsford, 2005).

In light of this variety of understandings, framing our discussion of social-spatial challenges in terms of European spaces might appear of questionable use. However, we can also argue that the variety of scholarly approaches expresses the very tensions in our socio-spatial reality, as well as the corresponding contradictions inherent to ‘EUrope’ (Antonsich, 2008) as an undetermined ‘project’. From this point of view, the contested nature of EUrope is not an obstacle to overcome, but the grounds on which often-contradicting responses to the questions of responsible governance can and should be renegotiated. Arguably, the (re)making of European space(s) in the face of today’s multiple crises does not sufficiently acknowledge the inherently contested nature of EUrope. This lecture series calls for taking EUrope as an open-ended project and invites to explore how European space(s) can and should be (re)made in a way to address the urgent issues of our present and to move towards genuinely responsible forms of spatial governance.

Issues to be addressed are for example:

• Crises and risk as European challenges
• Questions of citizenship and post-national loyalties and European integration
• The representation of new European spaces and identities
• European integration, territorial cohesion and new forms of uneven development
• Transnationalisation and Europeanisation of spatial governance

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Earlier thematic programmes in this series:

Other earlier Alexander von Humboldt lectures can be found here.