Abstract
ABSTRACT This article offers a new approach to the analysis of spatial hierarchies and selectivity within national politics. These hierarchies and related state spatial restructurings are approached by analysing spatial imaginaries of the political elites in Finland. This study places these present-day imaginaries and hierarchies in their historical context and analyses the qualitative shifts in Finnish spatial hierarchization. The paper illustrates how the institutionalized hierarchies of the 1960s and 1970s were used as a tool in the emerging Fordist welfare state, and how the hierarchies of today are built on a more competitively oriented basis. The current spatial imaginaries and hierarchies are approached through an extensive suite of elite interviews. These spatial hierarchies are revealing of the existing ways of reasoning and follow the more general spatial and economic rationalities. This paper argues that as the institutional status of the earlier spatial hierarchy has waned and been replaced with network-based spatial systems, hierarchies also exist, however, within the network-based spatial imaginaries and their associated policy practices. The new spatial hierarchies do not have institutional status, but their role in processes of state spatial restructuring is nevertheless important.
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