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Thematic issue Borders in Perspective Vol. 7

Visuel
Thematic issue Vol. 7
Abstract

In border areas, there is a special need for cross-border coordination between the stakeholders of spatial development and spatial planning with regard to spatially relevant challenges and future oriented development processes. The process of creating and implementing cross-border spatial development concepts requires intensive communication and cooperation across borders. However, these can make an important contribution to a coordinated cross-border spatial development and thus bundle resources as well as efficiently direct them to coordinated measures and projects. In addition to this added value of cross-border cooperation, however, there are also numerous points of friction and obstacles, which are caused, among other things, by different planning traditions and cultures, administrative systems and responsibilities, or also concern a lack of knowledge about planning instruments in the cross-border context. In cross-border spatial planning and development practice, these obstacles and the existing spatial challenges can also be countered by sub-spatial or subject-specific cooperation institutionalized and organized at different spatial levels. In this thematic issue, strategies and concepts from cross-border spatial development are presented and highlighted, which deal with different topics of spatial development, reflect a spectrum of cross-border forms of cooperation and organization and discuss the added value.

Miniature
Summary

This thesis inquires into the implementation of cross-border spatial planning strategies. Based on the study of cases such as Attert (Belgium), Backerich (Luxembourg), Montmédy (France), and Gaume (Belgium), as well as of the Vosges du Nord/Pfälzerwald Transboundary Biosphere Reserve, the author develops a typology of the different phases of the construction of a cross-border territory project.

Miniature
Summary

Border regions such as the Greater Region or the Upper Rhine tri-national metropolitan region extend far beyond their narrow border areas. While the institutional structures of cooperation have been stabilized by agreements and organizations, instruments to be able to react appropriately to the changing framework conditions of cross-border cooperation are lacking. Increasing cross-border interdependencies, economic structural transformation processes, and new energy policies in the national sub-regions as well as demographic change present new challenges for cross-border cooperation. In addition, there are increasing spatial polarizations, which, on the one hand, affect issues of metropolization in urban centers and, on the other hand, concern public services in rural areas and influence the further development and sustainability of the border areas concerned. Building on the work of the working group “Border Futures,” this volume examines the practice-relevant topic of cross-border cooperation with more recent findings from border area research relevant to planning in a European context. On the one hand, the results are to be made usable for the border regions in the LAG area and, on the other hand, introduced into a broader professional discourse on the further development of cross-border cooperation. Questions of a future-oriented cross-border governance, new spatial functionalities as well as new planning instruments play just as important a role as the possibilities of the current programming period of the EU structural policy for border regions.

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