The Moselle Valley is one of the great river landscapes of Western Europe, with a unique natural and cultural heritage. The part of the valley that lies on the border between France, Luxembourg and Germany reflects the diversity of the Greater Region through its history and international links. For some years now, the Upper Moselle Valley has been facing the challenge of reconciling the current development dynamics with the preservation of its rural landscape.
In order to meet this challenge and to strengthen the functional cross-border connections between Luxembourg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland, the ministries responsible for regional planning have developed the Upper Moselle Valley development concept in cooperation with regional and municipal actors on the basis of the guiding principles defined in the EOM concept.
The working paper covers the thematic field “work and economic development” by describing the challenges inherent to territorial development in the Greater region. It specifically focuses on industrial history as well as on employment and cross-border work within the Greater Region.
High unemployment rates on one side of a border and training opportunities on the other, the lack of training programmes for specialised jobs on the one side of the border and well-defined vocational programmes on the other side: cross-border vocational education and training (VET) is an increasingly used tool to accommodate the differing needs inside the European Union in recent years. This paper present explains and analyses the diverse approaches and concepts of tailor-made as well as more standardised cross-border VET programmes in the Greater Region SaarLorLux (DE, FR, LUX, BE) and explain the different mobility types.
For a decade now, borders in Europe have been back on the political agenda. Border research has responded and is breaking new ground in thinking about and exploring borders. This book follows this development and strengthens a perspective that is interested in life realities and that focuses on the everyday cultural experience of borders. The authors reconstruct such experiences in the context of different forms of migration and mobility as well as language contact situations. In this way, they empirically identify everyday cultural usage or appropriation strategies of borders as vastly different experiences of the border. The readers of this volume will gain insights into current developments in border research and the life realities in Europe where borders are (made) relevant.
The QuattroPole is a network of Cities in the Greater Region, spread across 3 countries and with a total population of 530,000 inhabitants. The name of this network reveals the partnership's metropolitan ambitions. The objective is, first of all, to position this relatively dispersed urban agglomeration on the chessboard of the main European metropolitan centres and, secondly, to raise the awareness of stakeholders and citizens of the joint future of these geographically so-close cities.
The aim of the 3Land project is to redevelop a trinational territory situated to the north of Basel, on both sides of the Rhine. This project has been the subject of two successive cross-border planning agreements between the municipalities concerned in Switzerland, France and Germany. Before these agreements were signed, an urban vision was produced by MVRDV/Cabane/Josepy and completed later by the LIN agency. The project focuses on the densification of a mixed use zone in the heart of the Basel cross-border metropolitan area, the improvement of the living environment and mobility and also economic redevelopment.
These themed dossier looks at the question of local and regional labour markets, whether cross-border or not, through some multidisciplinary quantitative examples concerning the determinants, stakes and impacts of these particular forms of mobility, according to the different units of analysis and/or time periods.
In this way, different comparisons are made on different markets in order to understand how cross-border workers are different to non-cross-border workers (and even migrants) within the different geographical areas of the local and regional labour markets. With the aim of answering these different questions, four articles are selected to try and provide some answers.
This working paper highlights the thematic field “mobility and transports” and presents the challenges which occur in terms of territorial development for the Greater Region. It specifically focuses on the territorial distribution of cross-border worker movements and on the reliance on cars within the Greater Region, as well as on the influence of European policies on the way challenges inherent to cross-border transport are addressed.
This article analyses cross-border employment and secondment of employees within the greater region, SaarLorLux. It questions the practices that have developed from these forms of mobility within this cross-border space at the contact point of 4 European countries (France, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium). It shows that these two forms of employment mobility demonstrate the right to mobility within Europe, which is one of the most important results of European integration. In order to support this, the author has performed various activities on site, e.g. in the scope of interviews with economic and social actors in the greater region.
Continuing training is an essential component of the labour market in the Greater Region and of the Lisbon Strategy. And yet it is a reality that is hard to harmonise at European level and one which resists statistical analysis. Only the European statistical surveys, in particular the labour force surveys, get anywhere a satisfactory degree of comparability of the indicators. They indicate the insufficiencies and imperfections of the continuing training systems in the Greater Region. Thus rates of participation were stagnating in the different components of the Greater Region at the end of the period, and even falling in Luxembourg and Wallonia, remaining below the European target of 12.5%. The allocation of continuing training efforts appears to be suboptimal insofar as it is the best rained works in large companies that have the best access to continuing training (cf. "all other things being equal" analysis). As for the content of the continuous training, an excessive focus on the current workstation means there is a risk of failing to meet the European target on "flexicurity". If the continuing training systems in the Greater Region have some identical features, the differences are worthy of note.
For example there is a more pronounced openness in the Luxembourg and Walloon systems, which allows for training that is less connected to the current post and extends outside of working hours. Lorraine stood out for its higher rate of participation at the end of the period, although this comes at the price of shorter training courses. In 2020, continuing training remains a challenge for Europe and the Greater region, with a target of 15%. Even more so as the current economic difficulties risk curbing efforts in continuing training, even though they are a lever for emerging from the crisis.
