State territorial restructuring and the production of spatial scale: Urban and regional planning in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1960–1990

Abstract

The concept of the ‘nation-state’ is too often deployed both as a generic term for central state apparatuses and as a reference to the distinct spalial scales on which nation-state power is organized. One problematic consequence of this conceptual slippage among state theorists has been a failure to distinguish adequately shifts in the regulatory capacities of the central state from more general reconfigurations of state territorial organization on divergent spatial scales. This essay argues that currently unfolding transformations of state form are associated above all with shifts along the latter axis, that of the socio-spatial organization of state power. After a brief theoretical discussion of the spatial dimensions of the modern nation-state based on Henri Lefebvre's theory of ‘state space’ ( l'espace étatique). this argument is developed through an examination of post-war regional and urban planning policies in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). A major concern of this study is to explore and concretize Lefebvre's thesis that the capitalist state is constantly engaged in the ‘production of space’. Shifts in regional and urban planning policy in the FRG since the mid-1970s, it is argued, are systematically linked to a reconfiguration of the spatial form of the nation-state under global capitalism, embodied above all in a transformation of the spatial scale on which state power is deployed. The growing importance of regional and local states as both agents and sites of capitalist restructuring is linked to structural shifts in the spatial scale of stale territorial organization. This approach to the production of spatial scale entails a critique of ‘phase models’ of capitalist development (such as regulation theory and world-system analysis) which fail to specify the spatial scale to which each periodization corresponds. The territorial scale ot capitalist socio-spatial organization has been reconfigured at various junctures during the history of global capitalist development: spatial scale is socially produced.