Utilizing the policy practice of strategic spatial planning as an entry point into a discussion upon the phenomenon of ‘caring for place’, the paper examines how actors that are enrolled in spatial planning processes come to be subjectivized as territorial stakeholders. By drawing upon insights from Actor-Network Theory and the sociology of attachments, the paper thus explores the co-constitution of stakeholderness and territorially defined entities such as ‘regions’ or ‘places’, and further argues that the relationship between stakeholderness and territory might gainfully be described as a quasi-subject/object-relationship following Latour and Serres.

In the paper it is argued that the relationship between stakeholderness and territoriality is much deeper and more complex than what is often discussed within the spatial planning literature. Rather than seeing strategic spatial planning processes as merely activating ontologically pre-existing groups of stakeholders, as is often done in the planning literature, we might instead gainfully analyze these processes as contributing to the formation of territorial stakeholder subjectivities, which collectively may (or may not) come to constitute a territorial stakeholder community that ‘carries’ – and in a way embodies – the specific territorial entity.

From this perspective, stakeholderness is never an ontologically pre-given property that is to be ‘discovered’ or ‘uncovered’ by diligent analysis. Rather, following Marres, we might come to see that stakeholder subjectivization is a process through which actors ‘learn to be affected’, and where these affections further come to be framed or articulated as territorial attachments and the ‘caring for place’.

Keywords: stakeholders, territory, quasi-object/subject relationship, subjectivization, attachment.