Abstracts

The paper seeks to identify and understand significant changes in urban-rural governance from long-term and medium term planning to short term planning and thinking. To illustrate ‘short termism” we focus on territorial policies within different types (rural and urban) of space. From this spatial perspective, we argue that rural/urban relationships act as a counter tool for short-termist governance. Today many of European capital cities and rural territories are facing, or have faced, the forces of a double globalisation. On the one hand, they are facing increasing international competition while they need to retain their role in contributing to innovative European development. This paper offers not only an innovative way of assessing the extent to which the discourse of sustainability is genuinely capable of modifying European spatial policy, and particularly the spatial policies of the major capital cities such as Paris and Budapest but also a new approach to the temporalities of that policy by promoting a long term and intergenerational perspective that contradicts the short term political conception which has so characterized the era of the recent process of  EU development. We focus on what is a critical component of governance, sustainability and cohesion, namely the dynamic relation between cities and their adjacent rural areas.