The past thirty years have seen a proliferation of new forms of territorial governance that have come to co-exist with, and complement, formal territorial spaces of government. These governance experiments have resulted in the creation of soft spaces, new geographies with blurred boundaries that eschew existing political-territorial boundaries of elected tiers of government. This book provides a deeper understanding of space and place, territorial governance and network governance.

I. A Conceptual Framework for Soft Spaces 1. Soft spaces, planning and emerging practices of territorial governance II. Soft Spaces in France, Germany, The Netherlands and England 2. Merseybelt (Manchester-Liverpool) 3. Governance Arrangements in the Hamburg Metropolitan Region: Between Hard and Soft Institutional Spaces 4. The Sillon Lorrain (Nancy, Metz, Epinal, Thionville) 5.Evolving regional spaces: shifting levels in the southern part of the Randstad 6. Ashford and Cambridge - two Growth Areas, three soft spaces III. Cross-Border Soft Spaces 7. Soft Spaces across the Fehmarn Belt: Cross-border Regionalism in Practice 8. Cross-border soft spaces of the Upper Rhine. Overlapping initiatives from the Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Orthenau to the Trinational Metropolitan Region of the Upper Rhine 9. Creating a Space for Cooperation: Soft Spaces, Spatial Planning and Cross-Border Cooperation on the Island of Ireland IV. Conclusions and Outlook 10. Conclusion: What difference do soft spaces make?