STATE TERRITORIAL RESTRUCTURING AND THE PRODUCTION OF SPATIAL SCALE -URBAN AND REGIONAL-PLANNING IN THE FEDERAL-REPUBLIC-OF-GERMANY, 1960-1990

The concept of the 'nation-state' is too often deployed both as a term for central state apparatuses and as a reference to the distinct spat ial scales on which nation-state power is organized. One problematic c onsequence of this conceptual slippage among state theorists has been a failure to distinguish adequately shifts in the regulatory capacitie s of the central state from more general reconfigurations of state ter ritorial organization on divergent spatial scales. This essay argues t hat currently unfolding transformations of state form are associated a bove all with shifts along the latter axis, that of the socio-spatial organization of state power. After a brief theoretical discussion of t he spatial dimensions of the modern nation-state based on Henri Lefebv re's theory of 'state space' (l'espace etatique), this through an exam ination of post-war regional and urban planning policies in the Federa l Republic of Germany (FRG). A major concern of this study is to explo re and concretize Lefebvre's thesis that the capitalist stare is const antly engaged in the 'production of space'. Shifts in regional and urb an planning policy in the FRG since the mid-1970s, it is argued, are s ystematically linked to a reconfiguration of the spatial form of the n ation-state under global capitalism, embodied above all in a transform ation of the spatial scale on which stale power is deployed. The growi ng importance of regional and local states as both agents and sites of capitalist restructuring is linked to structural shifts in the spatia l scale of stale territorial organization This approach to the product ion of spatial scale entails a critique of 'phase models' of capitalis t development (such as regulation theory and world-system analysis) wh ich fail to specify the spatial scale to which each periodization corr esponds. The territorial scale of capitalist socio-spatial organizatio n has been reconfigured at various junctures during the history of glo bal capitalist development: spatial scale is socially produced. (C) 19 97 Elsevier Science Ltd.