TWISTED THORBECKE (OR HOW OLD RIVALRIES BETWEEN THE ‘BIG CITIES’, THE PROVINCES AND THE STATE WITHIN THE CAN COMPROMISE POLICY INNOVATION, SEEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A REGIONAL, RAILWAY-BASED TRANSPORT SCHEME)

Casabella, Nadia (ULB Faculty of Architecture, [email protected])

Keywords: scale, spatial policy, Stedenbaan

The nested model that allowed Thorbecke (1848) to lay the ground for the administrative organization in municipal, provincial and national scales does no longer seem relevant to contemporary spatial processes. Scale seems rather to proliferate and get entangled in different temporalities as well as spatialities (Jessop, 1998). To devise jointly those different scales seems far from evident both conceptually and as regards political-administrative arbitration. Further, as the means to gear spatial transformation are not fully seized by those who would benefit from them, aberrant effects are likely to appear. This aspect is particularly pertinent in transit infrastructure projects, as the scale at which networks are owned and/or managed rarely corresponds to the territorial boundaries within which their structuring effects are felt. Here, we will review the repeated efforts of South-Holland Province to emancipate from the national- local dominance in the Randstad context, starting with its first regional spatial vision (1994), strongly axed on regional transit, but that failed because of the lack of explicit support from the big cities. It was not until the creation of the Southwing Administrative Platform in 2003 that the Province enjoyed an entente cordiale. This support bore its fruits in the form of the Stedenbaan (the City Line), an ambitious transit oriented development scheme that has been recently compromised by the big cities of and .

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The aim of this paper is to review the policy evolution of Stedenbaan, an important rail infrastructure project extending between and Dordrecht, framed by the tension between transport and land- use disciplines. This scheme portrays all the characteristics of a full-fledged transit oriented development (TOD), joining in one planning solution: - a high-quality transit system, fast, frequently riding and accessible on ground level; - a comprehensive approach to mobility, trying to integrate door-to-door trips (before and after reaching the railway station); - and diverse and high-density urban developments around railway stations.

One of the things the Stedenbaan project shows is that the scale question underpins substantial innovations in the field of spatial policy. Our particular approach to scale attempts to grasp which role it has played in recent transformations of socio-spatial organization in which urban regions and not just cities are considered to be the new sites of spatial planning regulation. Certainly, as Jessop et al. (2008) emphasize in a by now polemic paper, we also agree that scale ought not to be the dominant issue when discussing space and its (social) production but rather be taken as a relational element in a complex mix that includes territories, places and networks. However, when analyzing transit infrastructure projects, this aspect seems particularly pertinent as the scale at which networks are owned and/or managed rarely corresponds to the territorial boundaries within which their structuring effects are felt (Reigner & Fernandez, 2007).

As we try to reveal in the following paragraphs, the Stedenbaan project, conceptually framed by the Dutch concept of ‘corridors’, and subsequently of ‘urban networks’ (van Duinen, 2004), can be considered a good example of the way planning contributes actively to the construction of scale. Stedenbaan, the City Line, promises a new type of city rather than a new physical configuration. Because it takes the scale-jump of urbanization as its starting point, it succeeds to incorporate other issues, like functional cohesion and regional accessibility, along those more familiar to the Dutch planning doctrine (Faludi & van der Valk, 1994), concerned with urban containment and preservation of open areas. The tensions between transport, economic and spatial functions that appear as the result of this scale-jump are not resolved by pulling in policy sectors defined along the lines of separate disciplines (Priemus, 1999; Priemus & Zonneveld, 2003), but rather by attempting to interpenetrate scales while simultaneously looking at their possible interdependencies.

The paper is structured as follows: first we outline some of the later contributions to the scale theorization advanced for the most part by scholars working in the field of human or political geography. And second, we will review the repeated efforts of South-Holland Province to emancipate from the national-local dominance in the Randstad context, starting with its first regional spatial vision (1994), and until the endorsement of the Stedenbaan scheme (the City Line), placing it against the backdrop of planning policy discussions that took place simultaneously.

2. (socially produced) Scale

Due to the progressive expansion of the geographical scale at which some socioeconomic processes occur, administrative boundaries come to fall short when some kind of comprehensive regulation is to be implemented. This is particularly true in the case of city-regions, where daily activity patterns continuously transgress the (territorial) borders the making and delivery of policy used to be aligned to. Beside this, the rediscovery by a group of social scientists (the LA School) of the region as the fundamental unit and motor of society in contemporary capitalism heralded an extended reflection on regions, regionalization, new regionalism and scales of regulation (Storper, 1997). Above all, their approach served to alter the perception of the region from being the outcome of deeper political- economic processes to become an area functionally organized around one or more (urban) poles, basis of economic and social life, and therefore appropriate level for state intervention.

The increasing significance of the region caused important questions to appear in the planning discipline, like the definition of the most relevant scale at which to plan or how to actually define the spatial reach of regional planning. Following Jessop, the reality reveals “a proliferation of scales, related in tangled hierarchies rather than simply nested, with different temporalities as well as spatialities.” (1998, p.40) Hence there might be no predominant scale at which to plan. Rather, spatial policy should focus on those different scales simultaneously if it is to produce any degree of coherence. This adjustment is far from trivial as it creates major challenges for spatial planning, vertically organized in national, regional and local levels, both conceptually and as regards political- administrative responsibilities.

Our interest on scale is related to the way it has influenced and can still influence the regional project, and away from its institutional design, topic which has been the focus of an abundant literature (Salet et al., 2003; Salet, 2006). Therefore this paper accepts as a given the clash between administrative perimeters and planning concepts, or between functional areas and political constituencies, arguing that if the diverse actors are to take position and engage politically, an indispensable step is to allow spatial imaginations to happen independently of those established boundaries. In a way, territorial claims come as a result of specific social practices and their specific spatial reach, and not the other way round: starting from a static scale and defining therein your stakes. What is more, actors can mobilize not because they are bounded to a specific territory but because they participate in networks that may or may not exhibit territorial claims but that in any case operate at a regional scale.

The way states seek to achieve their goals proceeds exactly from abstract scales to concrete mechanisms (institutions, networks, procedures, modes of calculation and norms) in and through which they assure their hegemony (Jessop, 1998). An explicit distinction has been made between states as polity, as broadly all the governing institutions with sovereignty over a definite territory, and nation state, as a state whose territory coincides with a nation. Besides, such hegemonic construction happens unstably, simply because the scales of state regulation are endlessly redefined in ongoing acts of state formation (Jessop, 2005; Cox, 1996). This clash seems particularly pertinent when analyzing transit infrastructure projects, as cities, metropolitan regions or city-regions are only partly owners and/or managers of the transit networks traversing and structuring their territory. Inevitably their transit plans will take account, if only by ignoring, of the territorial representations other actors have, or of the purpose other users have towards them, at other scales. Depending on the scale of reference, challenges and goals vary (Reigner & Hernandez, 2007, p. 22), sometimes becoming irreconcilable – which demonstrates the existence of deeper and well-rooted divergences between political interests.

In fact it is the state which ultimately decides which scales need to be visible (Judd, 1998) or even the one participating in their construction (Brenner, 1999; Brenner, 2003) to disguise the overall spatial control it exercises by partitioning it into a multiplicity of administrative levels (local, regional, national, global), disconnected as well from each other. Those administrative levels are the separate sites of state actions, the sites where policy is made and delivered (Lefebvre, 2000, p.366). The reverse is also true: scales getting established “to accomplish particular policy results and political ends” (Judd, 1998, p. 34) and to convey particular interests. The stable territorial matrices that derive from scale partitions are articulated by flows and networks that interlace the entire world-system. Despite their articulation, they remain the distinct, albeit multiple and entangled, spatial scales in and through which nation-state power is organized.

This conception of scale as a vertical, nested hierarchy of differentially sized and bounded spaces has been recently contested by a growing number of human geographers, who propose instead more horizontal, network models of social processes (Marston et al., 2005). Relations between scales are indeed so puzzling that they risk “making any claim for some relation between socio-spatial bases of different political interests and the territorial partitioning of the state hazardous at best” (Cox, 1998, p.20). However, it is far from accidental that agents in charge of transformation find difficult to escape this scale partition and the constraints the state imposes by defining it, in terms of actions and alternatives available, and above all in terms of defining an arena, or building a scale, which could be more advantageous for them to act (Judd, 1998, p. 30). As we endeavor to discuss in the following paragraphs, this tightly applies to the evolution of the Stedenbaan project, a regional rail network that needed for its realization the reassurance the region was indeed the pertinent scale at which to address spatial regulation, and so the consensus among all administrative levels.

3. The pertinent scale

The provincial council of South-Holland launched a regional vision in 1994 anticipating a tendency for the urban regions of The Hague and Rotterdam to merge, and for the other towns to evolve towards polycentric or networked structures more and more functionally integrated. The goal: to support the development of a South Wing of the Randstad as an internationally competitive network city –a term, the South Wing, this was only formally introduced in the 4th National Spatial Memorandum (VINO, 1988). It gained then the commitment of the affected municipalities, including the big cities, and approached the central government for financial support. Short after having backed the provincial vision, the four big cities of the Randstad (The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht and ) forged a new coalition with the central government. This change of partner strived to assure that all new urbanization would happen in them, framed by the national policy of ‘urban nodes’ –and tangentially to assure their economic and tax base. Their dependency upon national funds made urban development an extra, attractive source of income for most municipalities. Municipalities’ property development possibilities have been though severely curtailed ever since –e.g. they have lost their quasi-monopoly on the urban land market.

This provincial vision contemplated for instance the creation of a Park City in the in-between space between The Hague and Rotterdam, the realization of a regional rail network to complement the intercity rail service and join the separated city transit services, the enlargement of the coastal area and the construction of urban functions in there, as well as the creation of an integrated system of green areas intended for nature and recreational uses at the scale of the entire region. Interestingly, this vision was published in a moment in which the Ministry of Spatial Planning was contemplating to reinforce the autonomy of urban regions (stadsgewesten) vis-à-vis both the provincial and the municipal tier, with the goal of smoothing the negotiation process for the implementation of the 4th National Spatial Memorandum Extra (VINEX, 1990). The main issue to address was the lack of maneuver space left to big cities when they needed to expand, as periurban municipalities would generally oppose such developments, understanding them more as a hindrance than a benefit for their growth.

Back then the central government initiated a series of administrative reforms that gave on one hand more leverage to the national tier, and achieved through an amendment of The Spatial Planning Act (Wet op de Ruimtelijke Ordening, 1965) brought forward in 1994. On other hand those reforms gave more leeway to the cities when they had to address their extension over neighboring municipalities, by enforcing co-operation among them. The co-operation was intended for the fulfillment of administrative functions in the terrains of spatial policy, public housing, transport, economic development and environment. This bill, called “Authorities on the future” (Kaderwet Bestuur in Vernadering), was introduced by the Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations in 1994 but only formally adopted in 1999.This new form of cooperation, envisaged as city-provinces (Salet, 2006), which would have deprived existing provinces of their urban cores (and of their main source of income), came to halt due to its rejection in two referenda celebrated respectively in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The reform though proceeded with the enforcement of inter-municipal cooperation, but this time the provincial tier was charged with defining the boundaries within which the inter-municipal collaboration was to happen, as well as with coordinating it.

The province of South-Holland attempted on three consecutive occasions to gain support from the big cities in order to get through its own spatial vision. The unpredictability of the big cities’ choices can be partly explained by their strong dependency upon national funds, as only up to one fourth of their revenues comes from local taxes, while around half of it comes from specific grants –like the ones allocated for the realization of the ‘urban nodes’ policy. A similar pragmatism may explain why, in 1997, when the province came back with its previous vision, The Hague and Rotterdam decided to back it up. At that moment the national government had begun to draft the next national spatial memorandum and the guesses were it would shift from a full support of the compact city towards new, urban network concepts better suited to the more complex dynamics of urbanization. Once again, the four big cities sailed away and joined a new coalition: the Delta Metropolis Foundation, aimed at lobbying for “a new agenda of metropolitan-wide action” (Salet, 2006, p. 974) which was soon followed by many public bodies and private organizations. This lobbying bore fruit in the 5th Memorandum (2001), which embraced a metropolitan narrative for its environmental policies. Thus the second attempt of the provincial council to support the formation of a South Wing of the Randstad was yet again bypassed by a coalition between the national and the local scales.

Finally in 2003, the provincial council managed to get all potential stakeholders involved in a voluntary administrative platform for the support of the South Wing of the Randstad (Bestuurlijk Platform Zuidvleugel, BPZ). Simultaneously, the Ministry of Spatial Planning submitted for parliamentary approval a new National Spatial Memorandum (Nota Ruimte), 6th in order, in which the division of responsibilities between the national and provincial and local tiers was further developed. In fact, it made provinces and municipalities answerable for their own urbanization strategies and plans. The other crucial change it introduced was the splitting up of the Randstad into three zones: North Wing, South Wing and Utrecht. Therefore this time all new measures that were introduced by the nation state were clearly assisting the consolidation of a regional scale for spatial planning, as well as were profiling a new agent to carry out spatial transformation.

The repeated efforts of the provincial tier to emancipate from the national-local dominance illuminates the theoretical issues previously introduced: from the state role in the visibilization of new scales to the continuous entangling and interpenetration of scales and the mismatches this generates between spatially attached political interests and nested territorial hierarchies. Scales are historically contingent and not a naturalized category for ordering the world in vertically nested spatial units. Furthermore, as Paasi stresses, they are far from established, rather “they are produced, exist and may be destroyed or transformed in social and political practices and struggles.” (Paasi, 2004, p. 542) However, some scale arrangements, as we could infer from the previous paragraphs, might show a bigger endurance: this is clearly the case of Dutch city-nation state coalitions and their hegemony in the process of urban transformation (Salet, 2006).

4. Political consensus for a conceptual break

As already mentioned, Stedenbaan is a project led by the South Wing Platform (BPZ). The South Wing is not a region geographically bounded; it can be rather defined as an administrative coalition, among the Province , the city-regions, and the municipalities within the South Wing – extending from Leiden to Dordrecht, and from Westland to Gouda (BPZ, 2004). This denomination, as we already mentioned in the previous section, is relatively recently. Its 3.5 million inhabitants and 1.5 employments make it one of the densest regions in Europe, yet spread out in multiple centers that lay never far away from each other.

This informal governance structure, established as a voluntary co-operation platform in 2000 with no legal status, signed a collaboration agreement aimed at reinforcing the competitive position of the South Wing in 2003. Crucial building blocks therein were to diversify the housing market, to strengthen the ‘urban culture’ offer, and to improve the (inter)national and regional accessibility – regional distances correspond to 10-40 Km, and imply more than 70% of daily displacements in the South Wing (BPZ, 2004). The overall aim was defined as the achievement of a cohesive urban system, referred to in policy documents as the South Wing network city, by realizing a sort of integrated transport and land use backbone that would reinforce the polycentric urban structure already in place. Complementarily, this project was thought as contribution to the sustainable development of the region, chiefly by helping to reduce private car displacements –now representing 60-70% of total travelers, against 10-20% by train.

The first step in the realization of this backbone consisted on improving public transport on the regional scale. At present, metro and tram networks do not usually reach out into surrounding municipalities, impeding traveling by public transport within the city-region. Moreover, train connections happen only between city centers, and rail capacity is one of the most underdeveloped of all the metropolitan areas in Western Europe (OECD, 2007). RandstadRail (a light rail connection operative since 2007 between The Hague and Rotterdam) worked as first showcase for this ambition. Stedenbaan (BPZ, 2006) was intended as the next stepping stone, without involving the need to put up new rail connections but using the free capacity of the existing railway between Schiphol and Rotterdam –created by moving the HST line between Amsterdam and Paris to its own track. Further, it displayed a comprehensive approach to mobility, trying to integrate a high-quality transit system at the scale of the South Wing of the Randstad (with 6 trains every hour in the corridor Leiden-Dordrecht and 4 in the other two corridors leading to Gouda) together with diverse and high-density urban developments around its 36 railway stations (http://www.stedenbaan.nl).

The South Wing ambitions for a regional rail network are not recent, and their origins have been already traced back to 1994 in the former section. The South-Holland Province (PZH) published then its first strategic vision, shifting away the responsibility of drafting separate regional plans, in which national planning goals were translated, and proposing instead a more envisaging role for itself (PZH, 1994). Maybe because of fear of being simply relegated to a coordinating role between urban regions and the nation state, or because they felt threatened, particularly if the proposal of detaching the main urban regions from the rest of the provincial territory would have succeeded. The case is that the province of South-Holland profiled itself differently, arguing that the increasing functional and spatial cohesion between the urban regions for which the province used to make separate regional plans demanded an approach that would render more explicit the plus value of such spatial –ultimately, this aspect is what could legitimate the attempt of the province for planning at this scale, or so the province saw it.

The document points at a fundamental dilemma: a spatial policy exclusively based on urban containment and expansion of existing settlements is at odds with the exploitation of potentials present in the region, clearly weakened after a long process of de-industrialization. The document follows along the lines of the 4th National Spatial Planning Memorandum (VINO, 1988), which confirmed the role of cities as motors of growth in a context of internationalized economy, but points to the need to see them within their agglomeration, since daily activity patterns surpass strict city boundaries. On this regard, it fully aligns to the national planning policies around ‘urban nodes’. However, the paper stresses, urban regions are by far not confined but entertain functional interdependencies at the scale of the entire Randstad, and within each of its wings, an aspect that calls for increased policy attention: (i) on a programmatic level, seeking complementarity and diversification between urban functions; (ii) on an infrastructural level, improving the public transport service at this level, mainly by exploring the possibilities of a regional network made out of pieces of the NS and the intra-urban networks; and (iii) on a morphological level, questioning the emphasis on the compact city, proposing instead new urbanization knots around rail stations. Therefore, the document concludes, a policy only articulated around ‘urban nodes’ has important shortcomings as it fails to recognize the need to provide suitable locations to economic activities outside them.

In fact, the province of South-Holland, being one of the economic declining provinces, was particularly sensitive to interpretations bringing together spatial planning and economic prosperity. A good example is the claim put forward by the Ministry of Economic Affairs or the Ministry of Transport, who saw in the increased road traffic congestion a burden for economic growth (Zonneveld, 2005). The investigation of the relationship linking urbanization and mobility was strongly encouraged by that last Ministry, who already in 1995 proposed to allocate all new residential areas in the Randstad along the existing bundles of rail infrastructure. This reflection was nothing new, as the 4th National Spatial Memorandum Extra (VINEX, 1990) had already worked out two scenarios for the construction of new residential areas: one based on building around existing settlements, but sacrificing on the quality of public transport; the other on building around train stations, even if not strictly placed around existing settlements (van Duinen, 2004, p. 180). The choice was quickly made: the first option would compete less with the cities, would consume less open space, bikes could alternatively used to private cars due to reduced distance to the cities, and could be later upgraded in terms of public transport service. Nevertheless, the second scenario, called the ‘rail track model’, made a life in other official documents who saw in it an alternative to the excessive focus on propinquity of the first –like it is the case with the three visions issued by the Bureau Planologisch Strategische Visievorming between 1994 and 2004, on parallel to the drafting of the “Provinciale Ruimtelijke Structuurvisie Zuid-Holland 2020-2040”.

Something that needs to be stressed is the fact that the dominant function spatial planning was occupied with was housing, indeed the construction of new housing units and neighborhoods, and geared very little towards economic claims. The functional cohesion on a regional scale was no important topic for the Ministry in charge of spatial planning (Korthals Altes, 2001). The 4th Memorandum, by placing spatial development in an international context, in which cities and metropolitan regions were forced to compete against each other, opened up the way for planning policies and concepts to focus on a broader scale than that of the city. The state made the regional scale visible, so to speak. Such visibility could only lead to give a renewed importance to the way cities interact functionally as well as to the (physical) networks sustaining it. The logic step for the PZH was therefore to lobby for the betterment of a regional rail network that could cohesion all existing and planned urbanized areas in the region, inasmuch as it was sensible to concurrently demand a renewed approach to urbanization: from the compact city to the compact urban region (PZH, 1994a).

Basically, Stedenbaan materialized a shift of focus, from the city to the region, and from urban containment to networked urbanization, which took some fifteen years to process inside the Dutch planning doctrine, all the way from the VINEX ‘rail track model’ (1990) to the national government financial backup of Stedenbaan, signed in 2007. In turn, this shift of focus could only be realized when the connection between the different policy levels became institutionalized –when not simply enforced. Stedenban could not happen before the political legitimacy of the provincial council was made dependent on the harmonization between local developments and regional ambitions. Hence visibility is not sufficient to assure that new scales come into play, rather a political strategy needs to emerge and consolidate (if only temporarily) in order for inherited scalar arrangements to be reconfigured.

5. From potential to concrete ambitions

In terms of public transport, this networkization of the urban region poses numerous challenges. Among them, the higher interurban coherence and increased functional interaction in terms of housing, employment opportunities, culture and recreation facilities that it demands. While labour and recreational markets largely overlap each other, the housing market was for a large part restricted to the territory of the city regions, the scale at which housing corporations used to work. A closer integration between infrastructure and spatial policy needed to be put in place. The Ministry of Planning, with the help of scenarios, addressed the issue in one of the preparatory documents converging in the 4th Memorandum, known as the RUVEIN report (RPD, 1986). As a matter of fact, these scenarios (Figure 1) became one of the major difficulties for obtaining green light during the many parliamentary and cabinet discussions that preceded its incorporation to the 4th Memorandum (Korthals Altes, 1995), as they were seen as counter to the traditional concerns of Dutch spatial planning –i.e. the preservation of the Green Heart and the pursuit of compact urbanization.

Figure 1. The three RUVEIN scenarios for the Randstad; ring, network of cities, and city-regions (RPD, 1986).

The South-Holland Province, on its side, revamped one of the scenarios, the one called “network of cities” (netwerk van steden), into its own “network” scenario (netwerkmodel), in which the South Wing appears as a network of connections and economic poles (Figure 2). This scenario was viewed as an opportunity to physically support the scale-jump of urbanization processes and their articulation by means of a regional transport network (both road and rail based). Even though this scenario, together with the other two brought in by the province (cradle and carpet) were uniquely conceived as exploratory exercises for the strategic vision (PZH, 1994b), they ended becoming the building stones of the regional strategy-to a point that the network model still resonates in Stededenbaan.

Figure 2. The network scenario for the South Wing of the Randstad (PZH, 1994b).

A this point, and in order to capture the innovative aspects of successive spatial policies in the Netherlands, we need to take a closer look at them. As a matter of fact, VINEX brought in the need of creating suitable actors to steer the implementation of national spatial policies, making it an explicit policy component. As Korthals Altes states, this move was motivated by the realization that “the ones who draft the relevant spatial policy documents are not the same as the actors who take the relevant spatial decisions.” (1995, p. 136) In the Netherlands, national spatial memoranda are required to coordinate all the rest of sectoral policies, and to assure this they had to rely for their implementation in other ministries –as Korthals Altes concisely explains, “national spatial policy reports ought not to be implemented, but should impinge on the policies of others.” (2001, p. 101) In the case of VINEX (4th Memorandum EXTRA), instead of letting other administrative levels translate the general aims in their own policies, as it used to be the case, the cities and city-regions were appointed as the key actors to bring policy about. Seen retrospectively, it was a logical step too, since VINEX deployed a project- based approach that benefitted from concrete realizations to showcase the overall policy aims. Additionally, VINEX focused on a definite area for its realizations: the immediate surroundings of existing cities, which made it easier to identify stakeholders and to negotiate timely agreements with them.

Consequently, VINEX worked out diverse possibilities to enforce collaboration between municipalities when it came down to spatial planning decisions (Korthals Altes, 1995), in the hope to oil the planning and building permits machinery. At the end, because VINEX lacked a uniform approach to how policy should be implemented, and was rather considered as an in-between result in the negotiation process involving all the actors in charge of implementation (Korthals Altes, 1995), a lot of room was left for finding tailored solutions. In a way, the traditional horizontal system (via the planning sectors on national level) and the vertical one (the cascade of planning levels corresponding to administrative tiers) was replaced by a diagonal one, in which the responsibility assigned to the urban regions became much bigger than that of the diverse ministries, which finally were only in charge with providing content to the negotiation process.

The publishing of the National Spatial Strategy (Nota Ruimte, 2003), 6th in order, confirmed the progressive decentralization of governmental tasks, whereby the responsibility for spatial and economic planning, including the management and monitoring of the urbanization programme, was shifted from the central government to the provinces. The other major change was linked to the redefined function of spatial planning: from controlling to stimulating and enabling development, which transformed the province into an initiator and leader of a number of large, supra-regional developments and infrastructural projects. Such a role change typically necessitates reinforced coordination for effectively reaching the desired outcomes, since actions will be carried out by multiple actors (public and private).

The building of institutions (which assume responsibility for handling spatial development) and the creation of conceptual frameworks as well as regulations appropriate to the tasks at hand (Healey, 1997) are the common answers given to reinforce such coordination. Here, we would dare to add a third aspect: interscalar coordination. The case of Stedenbaan clearly demonstrates the complexity of such task. At a central level, the Ministry of Spatial Planning needs at the same time to remove specific policies that restrict or even ban urban development around railway stations and stimulate urban development in them. The Ministry of Transport needs to accommodate the national concession for the use of railways to regional ambitions. At local level, municipalities need to create incentives for development carried by private parties to happen in the sphere of influence of railway stations – defined within a 1200-metre radius around the Stedenbaan railway stations (Atelier Zuidvleugel, 2006). At the level of the agglomeration, complementary public transport services need to be introduced in order to smooth door-to-door mobility, connecting straightforwardly all displacements before and after the train.

Notwithstanding the change of direction in the way spatial transformations were to be orchestrated and implemented, introduced in both the 4th Memorandum (VINO, 1988) and the 4th Memorandum Extra (VINEX, 1990), a nested understanding of spaces and, complementary, of political responsibilities clearly prevailed. As a result, even if the province had engaged to give support to the networkization of the South Wing, when the moment was ripe for the preparation of detailed plans of an integrated transport and land-use regional rail network, the first thing it did was to parcel responsibilities for the execution of the different stations and their surroundings (PZH, 2002). And it did so by ordering them according to a vertical hierarchy of international, supra-regional and regional stations, depending on the extent they were likely to influence the overall functional relations across the South Wing (Figure 3). Thus, it was fully inattentive to the issue of interpenetration of scales and planning for interscalarity, even if politically it was fully entangled into it.

Figure 3. The mapping of nodes and potentials in a hierarchic, vertically nested way (PZH, 1994a)

6. A spatial survey for the reinvention of the South-Wing

The granting of funds to Stedenbaan was made dependent on the results of a survey that needed to satisfactorily answer (i) if Stedenbaan could be joined together to the Randstad mobility network; (ii) to which extent would it contribute to solve the housing problem in the South Wing; and (iii) how to incorporate the new urban developments around the railway stations to the existing urban settlements. The spatial survey was realized by Atelier South Wing, an independent think tank instigated by the provincial government, operative between June 2005 and December 2007 (http://www.atelierzuidvleugel.nl). The survey was closely followed by the BPZ and the ministries of Transport and Spatial Planning. The National Water Board, the National railway company (NS) and ProRail were also involved as stakeholders of the project. Next to the spatial survey, a network survey was also conducted. The survey was realized in an informal setting, in close cooperation with both public and private parties, and its main purpose was “to give an idea of how the development of each station area can contribute to the spatial development of the South Wing as a whole” (Atelier Zuidvleugel, 2006, p.258). The survey was carried out in three stages: (a) what was feasible in terms of quantity; (b) what developments were most promising; and (c) what local developments were desirable in terms to their contribution to openly stated goals of the Southwing region (Atelier Zuidvleugel, 2006, p. 262).

It revealed that the influence zone of Stedenbaan covered 25% of the urbanized area in the South Wing, stretching over a huge variation of station areas (that range from high-density city centers to stops in the middle of the green spaces between conurbations), in which a great variation of relations between space and network existed (Curtis et al, 2009). An attempt to inventory all stations and thus grab the diverse developments potentials of each station was made, attending to network characteristics (the degree of access by public transport and by car), and spatial features (local housing and employment densities and the degree of mixed use). Nine distinct potentials were unveiled (Atelier Zuidvleugel, 2006), namely: rural areas, small towns, the outskirts of many cities, cities of the future, business sites, supraregional crossroads, Randstad hubs, creative cities, and city centers. Because normally not every station corresponds to a single development potential, what this inventory made manifest was the need for coordination between developments along the line, 150 Km long, mainly to avoid inefficient inter-station concurrence.

At last, three models were used to assess how the potentials at the level of each station could help achieve the goals of the project at regional level. The models were outlined along stated policy objectives, consisting of: ‘densification’, ‘networkization’ and ‘sustainability’. ‘Densification’ derived from the realization that the more users there are around stations the better this is for every station –i.e. the more feasible (from an exploitation perspective) and lively (from an urban perspective) stations become. ‘Networkization’ resulted from the belief that the combined effect of diversity (of transport routes and of programs) and complementarity brings in urban cohesion. ‘Sustainability’ rated urban containment and mixed use developments highly, in the conviction that urban densification will reduce a great deal the use of private car in the South Wing. The models showed how local choices can support objectives at a higher level –and vice versa, how the ambitions of Stedenbaan could help to guide decision-making at the local level. This is nothing uncontroversial though, as the translation from the concept to concrete realizations happens via voluntary agreements which are afterwards implemented in the spatial policy of the five city-regions.

Stedenbaan, the City Line, was the promise of a new type of city and not just a new physical configuration. None of the partners involved though seemed to be aware of the extent to which this project would change the region and whether this should be encouraged or not. Indeed, the integration of transport and land-use might bring positive results, mostly in terms of interconnectivity and interdependence between stations able of generate some scale and network effects (Curtis et al., 2009). Many factors though will irreversibly affect the integrated development of the space and the network. To start with, the size of cities and towns, the intensity of functions, the degree of mixed use, the decentralization of activities, the proximity of other networks and parking facilities… (Banister, 2005). At the end, the Stedenbaan approach might even be considered a pragmatic reaction to how spatial policy is formulated on national level and to the mechanisms put in place for its implementation. To a certain extent, Stedenbaan might be seen convenient for the (public and private) actors in charge of carrying forward the spatial transformations, as they can more easily identify possible windows or scales of opportunity, instead of being constraint to move along the scale ladder. The ensued shift is surely undeniable: from a policy aimed at compact urbanization to the scale-jump the Randstad wings represent.

7. Concluding remarks

In the former paragraphs we witnessed the repeated efforts of the Province of South-Holland to emancipate from the national-local dominance in the Randstad context, starting with its first regional spatial vision (1994), strongly axed on regional transit but that failed because of the lack of clear support from the big cities. It was not until the creation of the Southwing Administrative Platform in 2003 that the Province enjoyed a sort of entente cordiale resulting on Stedenbaan (the City Line), an ambitious transit oriented development scheme that has been recently compromised by the big cities of The Hague and Rotterdam.

Stedenbaan, originally conceived only as a possibility to intensify land uses around railway stations in order to dissuade of the use of private car in the region (taking this value as a proxy for sustainable development), evolved into a more comprehensive project, thanks mainly to the continuous coordination and monitoring that worked both as a reminder of the agreed goals among all partners and as a legitimizing framework towards the outside world. Namely, Stedenbaan shifted the emphasis on densification to diversity and from traditional morphological issues into an innovative reflection on what type of city and urban interactions could be derived from linear mobility infrastructures. In this sense, rather than infrastructure being the leading agent in the urbanization process, this paper suggests that the urbanization process is commanded (i) by the different understandings of mobility and accessibility of the agents in charge of transformation, (ii) by the socio-spatial and cultural dimensions these agents set in motion, and principally (iii) by the scalar opportunities for political emancipation they envision.

The nested model that allowed Thorbecke (1848) to lay the ground for the administrative organization in municipal, provincial and national scales does no longer seem relevant to contemporary spatial processes. Scale seems rather to proliferate and get entangled in different temporalities as well as spatialities (Jessop, 1998). Most importantly, scale conceptions can “become mobilized to shape politics, public policy and projects.” (Healey, 2002, pp. 1783-1785) The nested model of Thorbecke might be out of date, although twisting it does not abolish well-rooted rivalries among the three old tiers: the nation-state, the province and the cities (primarily, the big cities within the Randstad).