Abstract: This paper reviews and assesses current practices of territorial planning (regional planning), trying to shed light on the potential drawbacks of Economic Geography, which constitutes the theoretical foundation for territorial planning. For this purpose, the challenges on territorial planning posed by market economy, sustainable development, the emerging buyer’s market and transformed world market are put into serious analysis. The above analysis provides important insights into the characters of territorial planning in the new era. The study concludes that regional economic distribution will continue to be first-class issue in territorial planning, while such factors as unbalanced regional development, urbanization, rural development and enterprises spatial strategy will exert critical impacts on the prospects of regional economic framework. Finally, the author calls for more attention to the need to build up a more sound theoretical foundation for territorial planning and accelerate the development of Economic Geography as a discipline.

Key words: economic geography, regional economy, regional planning, territorial planning