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ABSTRACTS THEME FOUR - Central places and networks Urban and Regional Networks in the 21st century city. Regarding to the main theme three "Urban Geography" of the conference I would like to present a topic related to urban - regional planning networks. In my Master thesis I looked at a regional planning process in a US American city region. For the presentation at this conference I would like to concentrate on four main parts to discuss urban-regional topics of the 21st century. 1. In a first step I would like to introduce the situation of the US American city region as a very diverse complex and fragmented regional structure. It is constituted of multiple networks of infrustructure, politics, administration, peolpe's behaviour, private businesses, etc. In a fast growing city-region this structural criterias lead to a very fragmented and segregated as well as tense situation of development. 2. Regarding this very complex structure of the city region coordination of a sensible development is very difficult. The organisation of planning in the US-context is very weak. Planners use networks und public participation to influence developments and help to coordinate a regional development. Nevertheless they are very restricted in what they can do and what the effect of the development process would be. 3. On one hand with the presentation of an example in the suburban context I want to show the problematic situation of multiple local municipalities with different interests of development. This situtation is especially difficult for planners to deal with since different interests are involved as well as different planning institutions. On the other hand I want to show how planners deal with this situtation, use the existing networks and design a process to assemble planning in this complex backround.
4. In a conclusion I would like to draw some ideas of theory and practice regarding the coordination of city-regional development in complex situations of multiple networks. Even though the US-american situation is a special one many trends can be applied to the urban situation of the 21st century city in general.
The Austrian Institute of East and South East European Studies together with local experts elaborated a study "The Europe of the Regions: Strategies and Perspectives in the View of the Forthcoming Enlargement of the European Union (Part II on Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania, Slovakia and Turkey)". Study was carried out by common approach and analizes following aspects of regional processes: 1) current territorial-administrative system; 2) driving forces and obstacles for regionalisation and reorganisation of territorial structures; 3) expectations of local and regional authorities opposed to EU membership and COR.
Paper presents main issues of regional processes, characterizes patterns of interaction among authorities at the national and sub-national level, evaluates plans for territorial reorganisation in Latvia.
In the paper will be observed the formation of networks in the very specific conditions - in the post-socialist single-company industrial settlements in Eastern Europe. The formation of those settlements as the industry location places without the ordinary hinterland will be discussed in the context of central place and growth pole (growth centre) theories. The changes, like the transformation of the fordist-type production systems based on strong and inflexible hierarchy to the post-fordist-type contemporary networking relations, are taking place in Eastern European countries nowadays. The areas of study, the post-socialist single-company (or so called "mono-functional") industrial settlements, are the small towns and urban-style villages (500-5000 inhabitants) where at the Soviet time was only single branch of economy or even only the one single enterprise. These specific conditions (or "model-conditions") make us possible to evaluate critically the different factors and their importance in the network-formation process. The paper will be based on the empirical research done in spring 1998 and in May-June 2000 in 6 Estonian single-company settlements by the author of this paper and his colleagues. There is collected information about the structure of entrepreneurship in these settlements, as well as about the fortune and position of dominating (formerly dominated) enterprise and other enterprises during the last 10-15 years. The nature of contacts and the geographical location of partners were also in the focus. The main development ways in those settlements have been during the last 10 years connected with the subcontracting to the Scandinavian and other Western European companies. The main motives for the creation and re-creation of enterprises in this kind of settlements are the closeness to some production inputs (raw materials, energy resources), as well as industrial traditions in the particular fields of activity (included the qualified labour force). On the same way the exhaustion of these resources has been also the main reason for living the settlements. The criteria of location's choice as well as origins of contacts between the external actors (Western European companies) and the domestic actors will be analysed more circumstantially. In the special focus will be the relationships of communist nomenclature (arisen at the Soviet time) as the possible basis for contemporary networks. Although the networks of communist "nomenclatura" have been with the cardinal importance in some Eastern European countries (e.g. Czech Republic), they haven't played any essential role in Estonia because of the different privatisation policy.
For the local self-sustaining development there have great importance the power relations and division of property rights between external and internal actors, as well as between different actors within the district (settlement). The preliminary results of the above-mentioned research project show us that for the guaranteeing the certain and self-sustaining development there is necessary in the former single-company settlements the existence of property rights in the local community.
In this paper I study the administration reform preparations in Estonia and explicate discursive conditions of its failure. The data consist of selected media representations, shorthand records of parliament debates, official documents and strategic papers, and administrative correspondence from years 1997 - 2002. The main analytical interest is in the specific discursive limits of the administration reform practice. The analysis departs from Foucault's archaeological approach to a discourse, in which an analysis should treat the specific modality of discourse, characterized by positivity, relationality, exteriority and rarity. Gilles Deleuze's explicit emphasis on different topologies of discursive spaces is used, in order to differentiate more clearly "spaces of distribution" of the reform discourse in Estonia. Three distinctive spaces - correlative, collateral and complementary spaces of the reform discourse - are described in turns. In terms of correlative topology, the reform discourse emerges in specific relation of statements on "reform" and "administration system": administration is seen as necessarily problematic and reform as something, which must be done with administration because of these problems. Thus, administration reform is supported discursively if both the reform actions are proposed and the administration problems are highlighted, and undermined if the actions are not described or the problems are "overlooked" or put into doubt. The latter is coterminous with the surface of disappearance of administration reform discourse. In collateral space core reform statements appear in association with each other and with statements from other societal discourses. Thus, objects of reform discourse like municipality, province, public services, distribution of functions, etc., are defined in relation to competing discourses - discourses of economy, rationality, democracy, central/local agency, national/international can be distinguished as most important ones deployed in the reform. The specific and almost detrimental role of classical geographic discourse, mixed with more up to date rhetoric, to reform discourse, which specifies municipalities and provinces in terms of area and population, is brought to the fore. In complementary space of reform institutional types of communication, actors, pace and place are discriminated for further analysis. Finally, the effects of interrelations of correlative and collateral spaces with a complementary space are investigated. The general conclusion is that due to the fact that the discourse of administration reform was very plural and undisciplined in terms of collateral topology, the "institutional allocation" of statements is crucial for the reform success as well. In order to contribute effectively to the discourse, a statement - or group of statements - should be replicated by proper actors in a proper time and place, and in a proper way. The conceptual understanding of municipality is exemplary here. Although in general, e.g. in governmental strategies, it was treated in a complex way in relation to many societal discourses, corresponding roughly to the understandings of municipal leaders, in the official correspondence between central and local government, municipalities were treated only in geographical terms. That conceptual oversight was enough to make the whole discourse and its objectives inconsistent and discredit the whole reform in the eyes of those being reformed. And yet, the whole reform discourse depended on the condition, provided by the correlative topology of the discourse that along with subjective position of "reformer" it could maintain also the position of "reformed", until the reform is done.
The aim of this paper is to discuss a possible shift from a central-place theory to a network paradigm in local and regional planning practices. This discussion paper was written mainly to describe issues and to set up a more sophisticated research programme. Since this text is based mainly on written sources, observations and a case study, the use of statistical data is limited. According to the first hypothesis, planning and development of community infrastructure (CI) (schools, sports halls, etc.) has remained rather mechanical or central place theory oriented in Estonia. Drastic changes in administrative structure and community financial system of past decade have resulted in the construction of new CI facilities in larger centres without considering existing CI in smaller centres. On the other hand, because of overcapacity and high running costs, CI built by the collective farms in small rural centres during previous decades often remain unused. In many cases, the lack of collaboration between communities and lack of state control, have caused waste of public resources on the regional scale. Second hypothesis, therefore, argues, that the application of the network paradigm and increased cooperation between local communities may considerably save public resources, create new local jobs, and reduce negative consequences of ongoing centre-periphery differentiation processes.
This paper consists of three chapters. First one describes the heritage of Walter Christaller, his Central Place Theory, and the turn in Western planning theory: shift from a normative top down planning to a horizontal and more balanced networking practices. Second chapter attempts to analyse critically Soviet and post-Soviet planning theory and practices with a particular stress on community infrastructure planning and development. Finally we present a case study of planning procedure from the Suure-Jaani locality - highlighting issues of post-socialist planning on the community level.
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