Recompositions scalaires en Europe occidentale : la construction de régions métropolitaines transfrontalières dans l’Eurorégion Transmanche et le Rhin Supérieur

Border Region

European Union, France-Belgium-United Kingdom border; Cross-Channel Euroregion; West-Vlaanderen/Flandre-Dunkerque-Côte d’Opale, Eurométropole Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai, France-Germany-Switzerland border; Upper Rhine; Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau, Basel

Language(s)

Français

Type

Note on a scientific paper, a conference paper, etc.

Portrait of a research project

Main Category

Regional Development – Sustainability

Governance – Power – Cooperation

Language – Culture – Identity

Theories – Concepts – Terms

Introduction

The objective of Pauline Pupier's thesis is to explain the political processes behind the creation of a metropolitan district straddling an internal border of the European Union.

Summary

Lille, Strasbourg and Basel are powerful cities situated close to national borders. Fuelled by economic, political and symbolic functions, their influence creates regions that are both metropolitan and cross-border. Thanks to interviews, cartographic work and textual analyses, this thesis looks at how cross-border metropolitan regions are constructed. This emerges as a process whereby the local actors have to mobilise together and with the European Union to negotiate with the States. This European scale recomposition generates areas subject to tensions where the cross-border conurbation is also part of other, larger regions.

Content

Encouraged by the devaluation of national borders in Western Europe, metropolitanisation generates urban configurations that transcend the borders of Nation States. From the point of view of urban geography and Border Studies, the metropolitan district and the border are complex spatial and social objects that both articulate local and global scales within a relationship of proximity. Around Lille, Strasbourg and Basel, but also along the French-Belgian coast or at the transregional level of the Upper Rhine, local and regional actors are implementing spatial development strategies that are constructing cross-border metropolitan regions.

The thesis demonstrates, using the hypothetico-deductive method, why and how the metropolitan argument is reinforced in these areas by the cross-border argument. It reveals how the actors are involved in bottom-up and top-down processes that are leading to spatial recomposition and rescaling. The methodology draws on empirical observations in the field and interviews with key persons in cross-border cooperation and metropolitan development. The regions along the France-Belgium-United Kingdom and the France-Germany-Switzerland borders are the subject of a comparative examination taking in six case studies. An online qualitative survey, a scalar analysis grid applied to a documentary and cartographic corpus and a geopolitical fragmentation index complete these main investigative tools.

Contents

Introduction
Part 1: Geographical paradoxes of the cross-border metropolitan region
1. Metropolitan districts and borders: contradictory geographical objects?
2. Deconstructing the cross-border metropolitan region: questions and hypotheses
Part 2: Methodological approach via scalar analysis: scales of fields, levels of governance and roles of actors
3. A comparative analysis in Western Europe: four translocal spaces within two transregional spaces
4. A geographical protocol anchored in human and social sciences
Part 3: An attempt to build a cross-border metropolitan area from the bottom up?
5. Cross-border metropolitanisation strategies?
6. Searching for a relevant hypothetical scope
Part 4: Logics of imposition: top-down national and European recompositions
7. The relative cross-border dimension of national metropolitanisation policies
8. The European scale or the return of the border in metropolitanisation
Part 5: The organised "ungovernability" of the cross-border metropolitan region
9. The invention of cross-border metropolitan governance
10. Towards horizontal governance of cross-border metropolitan regions?
Conclusion
11. Conclusion and discussion: The cross-border metropolitan region as an element of a process of rescaling in Western Europe

Conclusions

The results demonstrate how local actors activate the border in their metropolitan argument. Mobilising the border as a territorial resource favours inclusion in an approach at European level, based on a logic of a "scalar elevator". Polycentrism, by reducing border effects, justifies cross-border regional integration.

But the cross-border metropolitan regions are emerging against a background of inter-territorial competition and the recomposition of States. They have not managed to unite all the actors on all the scales in a consensus. Cross-border cooperation, after two decades of experimentation and support, is now entering a new phase where perseverance is mingled with loss of impetus. The metropolitan paradigm that is imposing itself at national and European level offers an opportunity to rekindle the flame. The local actors involved in cross-border cooperation are looking for greater visibility and seeking recognition and resources from the States and the European Union. In an elaborate articulation of the different scales, the construction of cross-border metropolitan regions rests on a bottom-up process. The prescriptive policies and incentives of the European Union and the States are, however, central in the emergence and functioning of the cross-border metropolitan regions. The latter are therefore also dependent on top-down validation by Community actors and State actors in particular.

These dynamics, which constitute the process known as "rescaling Europe", are generating new spatialities. The cross-border metropolitan regions correspond to an unfinished process of territorialisation. An innovative methodology using online interpretive mind maps exposes the multiscalar structure of the cross-border metropolitan regions. Their perimeters are subject to dynamics of adaptation and expansion, like soft spaces. But several of the case studies reveal strong tensions, and two regions have even been dissolved at the French-Belgian-British border. The construction of a cross-border metropolitan region seems to be a risky strategy where cross-border cooperation is removed from its intercultural and citizen-focused considerations.

Key Messages

The cross-border metropolitan region appears as an "urban configuration resulting from a political territorialisation process driven by the actors of cross-border cooperation and resting on metropolitan arguments" (p.77). The Westphalian border is activated by the local actors as a resource acting as a "scalar elevator" (p.317). The geographical and political processes involved in the construction of these atypical spaces are characterised by a "European rescaling process" (p.672), which rests on a political Europe whose foundations remain profoundly marked by the power of its States.

Lead

Pauline Pupier

Author of the entry

Pauline

Pupier

Contributions

Bernard Reitel, Laboratoire Discontinuités (UR 2468), Université d’Artois, Arras, France

Nadine Cattan, Directrice de recherche au CNRS, Paris

Fabienne Leloup, Professeure à l’Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgique

Bernard Reitel, Professeur à l’Université d’Artois, Arras

Christophe Sohn, Chercheur Sénior au LISER, Esch-Belval, Luxembourg

Birte Wassenberg, Professeure à l’Institut d’Études Politiques de Strasbourg