1 When soft spaces harden: The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region Jonathan Metzger Division of Urban and Regional Studies/ Department of Urban Planning and Environment KTH - Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden Jonathan.metzger@abe.kth.se Peter Schmitt Nordregio Nordic Centre for Spatial Development Stockholm, Sweden peter.schmitt@nordregio.se PRE-PROOF VERSION, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION IN ENVIRONMENT & PLANNING A Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented at an Exploratory Workshop on ‘Planning for Soft Spaces across Europe’ at the TU Delft (Netherlands), 9 – 10 December 2010, sponsored by the European Science Foundation (ESF). The authors would like to thank the workshop participants for all the interesting discussions and reflections and in particular the convener, Bas Waterhout for giving us the the opportunity to develop our ideas. Finally, we wish to extend our gratitude to the three anonymous referees whose insightful comments provided considerable help and guidance in improving the quality of this paper. Word count, incl everything: 9978