Universities in the European border regions are facing special challenges due to their geographic location. These challenges may also be viewed as opportunities. Political representatives from the border regions confirm their willingness to engage in stronger European integration in the areas of education and research. In fact, the spatial proximity facilitates international research cooperation, student exchange in general and creation of special coordinated bi- and trinational study programs. The site also leads to special research topics in subjects such as economics, law, literature and cultural sciences. These can be processed by scientists on either side of the border. The quality of personal contact turns out to be supporting pillar for innovative border-crossing programs in all areas..
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.
