Hard work with soft spaces (and vice versa): problematizing the transforming planning spaces

This article studies spaces and spatial imageries in planning from two viewpoints. First, it discusses how contemporary planning paradigms contribute to a process that can be labelled the ‘softening of hard spaces’. This means that typically old, well-established (planning) spaces with relatively hard administrative borders become redefined and treated in planning practice as soft entities with fuzzier or more porous borders. Second, it discusses how new soft spaces – such as gateways, new cross-border supranational spaces and ad hoc regional spaces – tend to simultaneously harden through intensifying institutional practices and discourses, as well as because of the need to define what is included and excluded in such new spatial structures/networks. These two processes, the softening of hard spaces and the hardening of soft spaces, are then scrutinized in tandem, and a conceptualization of intermediary hybrid planning spaces is proposed. This conceptual opening, labelled ‘penumbral’ space/border, is then examined. The explanatory value of these arguments is demonstrated by comparing the transformation of Northern Ostrobothnia, an old, well-established region in Finland, and the mobilization of Bothnian Arc, a new soft space stretching across the Swedish-Finnish border.