This paper analyses urban planning practices in South Yorkshire to reveal how EU strategic spatial ideas and values are reproduced. Specifically, the paper examines how the notion of spatial justice was interpreted as the organising concepts within the European Spatial Development Perspective became situated within a territory severely affected by deindustrialisation in the 1980s, but subsequently a major beneficiary of EU Structural Fund programmes. The analysis reveals how policy-making at this scale used a construct of polycentric urban development that reasserted a model of economic growth based on the indigenous assets held in city centres at the expense of more redistributive measures targeted at the former coal-mining communities in the sub-region.
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