The Geography of Border Landscapes
The Geography of Border Landscapes
This book deals with border landscapes, placing the emphasis on the impact that political decisions and ideological differences can have on the environment in border areas.
In this book, geopolitical experts from different countries provide important information on border landscapes thereby enabling us to get a deeper understanding of certain aspects of cultural landscapes. The political border represents a spatial limit to the political organisation of territories. But the way in which these borders are used and perceived can have an effect on the landscape.
For geographers, the concept of the border landscape remains a vague one and has had little or no impact on the discipline. The primary objective is to initiate a debate on the nature of the border landscape. The introduction outlines the history of the concept of the border landscape and briefly presents the different case studies the book contains. Through the different examples, the book describes, classifies and explains the evolution of border landscapes and the changes they have undergone from different methodological angles. Borders have differing levels of permeability that also depend on the nature of the flows and the timescale. Borders are very diverse and have different functions. This book contributes a variety of reflections on the border landscape to facilitate understanding of the concept.
The tables of contents is as follows:
- Introduction: The border landscape concept
- From conflict to harmony in border landscapes
- Geographical investigations in boundary areas of the Basle region (‘Regio’)
- Boundary, values and identity: The Swiss–Italian transborder region
- Some developing and current problems of the eastern border landscape of the Federal Republic of Germany: The Bavarian example
- Geographic problems of frontier regions: The case of the Italo-Yugoslav border landscape
- The impact of sovereignty transfer on the settlement pattern of Sakhalin Island
- Society, state and peripherally: The case of the Thai– Malaysian border landscape
- The Indonesia–Papua New Guinea border landscape
- Coastal islands on an international boundary: Dauan and Parama in the Torres Strait
- Inter- and intra-regional conflicts in Pakistan’s border landscape
- The Gulf of Aqaba coastline: An evolving border landscape
- The evolution and contemporary significance of the Bophuthatswana–Botswana border landscape
- Where the Colorado flows into Mexico
- Peacekeeping missions and landscapes
Each case study deals in one way or another with a complex and changing set of interrelations between society, the economy, the political system and space. Borders can be differentiated from the social, economic and political points of view and on the level of interactions internal to the State. The book is constructed around the three spatial dimensions conceptualised by John House: state-state differentiation, intra-state core and boundary-length differentiation.
Dennis Rumley, professor at the University of Western Australia
Julian V. Minghi, Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography, University of South Carolina
ISBN : 9781 138815582
eISBN : 9781315746593