areas within the city, residential areas, and business parks are indicated. The Flemish Region
will also take up the demarcation of the agricultural, green, and wooded areas in the spatial
implementation plans. A third example is the area around the Albert canal. Flanders has taken
up this project because of the great importance of the Albert Canal for the further spatial-
economic development of the Region; the Region will draw up spatial implementation plans
in order to allow the area to develop further into a network. The Flemish Region can be seen
here to have made large scale use here of the competence to draw up spatial implementation
plans itself.
The provinces do not perceive themselves primarily as an organ to promote the territorial
interests of the province, but one which is concerned with supralocal tasks and the weighing
up of interests (Vereniging van de Vlaamse Provincies, 2004). The provinces are searching
for features of integration and an area-oriented approach in the policy. In achieving that, they
must keep to the general policy lines, as laid down by the Flemish Government. The Flemish
Spatial Structure Plan is in that respect fairly explicit. Tasks involving all sorts of matters
allocated to the province are indicated. The provinces must, for example, mark out in the
provincial spatial implementation plans “the regional business parks in the structure
supporting small town areas at provincial level and in the further economic junctions.” Since
the municipality of Ypres has been selected in the Flemish Spatial Structure Plan as a
structure supporting small town area, the province must therefore draw up a spatial
implementation plan if a business park is to be developed. That has been proposed in the
West-Flemish provincial spatial structure plan drawn up by the province. Provinces also
develop their own policy. By now, all the provinces have their own spatial structure plans.
Their own policies refer, for example, to the location of sports involving noise nuisance
(including motocross), sewage water purification plants, golf courses, and water tourism.
The subsidiarity principle has been important in the design of the new Spatial Planning
Decree. With respect to the instruments, subsidiarity means that provincial level planning
competences must also be available at the strategic level and also for implementation in the
form of binding plans. The provincial level also has available another important competence:
the approval competence of the municipal structure- and spatial implementation plans
together with the opportunity to lay down urban development regulations. Currently, all the
provinces have a spatial structure plan and the first spatial implementation plans have been
drawn up. Two provinces have formulated an urban development statute; both concern the
collection and recycling of rainwater coming from roof surfaces.
In Flanders, the stronger role for the province is still settling into place. Traditionally, practice
in spatial planning in Flanders has been centralistic. On the basis of the old legislative regime,
the Flemish government draw up the regional plans for 25 sub sectors; these were also
binding for citizens with respect to the land uses prescribed. The consequence was that local
authorities no longer made integral spatial plans, but only what were referred to as special
construction plans for the areas the local authorities were going to develop. Present practice
now needs to be different. The Flemish Spatial Structure Plan still indicates with considerable
precision what is expected of the province for a large number of matters. Provinces complain
currently about the over-liberal transfer of responsibilities by the Flemish Region. “The
provinces have the feeling that, in Flanders, subsidiarity is interpreted in practice as the
shifting of competences to or the preparation of a survey by the provincial level. It should not
be the case that a certain interpretation of the concept of subsidiarity becomes an instrument
with which to transfer difficult dossiers to the provinces” (Vereniging van de Vlaamse
Provincies, 2004, p. 7). In any case, the province is not free: provincial plans and also
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