Interactions between Strategic Spatial Planning and Local State in Weak Institutional Settings

Strategic spatial planning, in its widely accepted theoretical conceptualisation, has become the terrain for making balanced decisions about the consolidation of both a city's international competitiveness and its role in a wider international context. Thus, it has emphasized shared responsibilities between the public and the private sector in economies where the roles of the public and the private sphere are clearly complementary. In countries with weaker institutional settings such distinctions are purposely obscure, as both spheres are enmeshed in statist and rent-seeking structures. Based on an investigation of the strategic spatial plans prepared over the past 15 years for the city of Thessaloniki the present paper attempts to explain the specificities and failures of strategic spatial planning in the Greek institutional environment, within the context of four defining features of the Greek local state, namely: (i) the centralization of the Greek government; (ii) the funding arrangements of local government; (iii) the nature of the local institutional intermediaries and stakeholders; and (iv) a political economy which favours consumption over the production of internationally competitive goods and services - this production being enabled by the local state's marshalling of location specific assets.