border

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.

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.

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 UniGR-Center for Border Studies Border Textures working group was set up in 2015 to pursue and further develop the cultural orientation of Border Studies in the Greater Region. This research orientation focuses on the symbolic-social dimension of borders, which it addresses from both high and popular cultural angles and everyday cultural angles. To do this the working group has developed the Border Textures approach, which, as a methodology and heuristic, addresses the practises and discourses around borders with their actors, media, materialisations, effects, places and the complex interactions between them. The approach forms an instrument for analysis and refection that helps to understand the social and cultural workings and mechanisms of border (de)stabilisation.

In spite of their small sizes, Luxembourg and Switzerland have a high demand for workers. In particular, they offer employment opportunities to people crossing the border to work. The situation in the main employment sites (Luxembourg, Basel, Geneva) – but also Ticino – is the object of the subject leaflet that 19 authors submit contributions with comparing perspectives. Under consideration of central context features and methodological considerations, the geographers, economists, sociologists and politologists considered in particular the labour market, cross-border everyday life and social perception of cross-border commuters. The multidisciplinary approach was eventually condensed by the editors into shared challenges between Luxembourg and Switzerland.

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.

Since the spatial turn, space has most often been conceived from a relational standpoint, and the border concept has been abandoned as it did not seem compatible with this relation-oriented perspective on space. However, borders still often play an important role for the empirical studies of spaces. Therefore, the authors conceptualise borders in a manner likely to be integrated to a relation-based spatial theory. They conceive the border itself as a link between at least two spaces which it brings together. While it is true that specific differentiations are significant to the construction of spaces, borders can bring a spatial dimension to this difference and create territorial spatial constitutions. The authors demonstrate this mechanism using the empirical example of border constructions on the Balkan route during the migration movements of 2015.

How far are the border areas in fringe areas? This chapter emphasises the relativity of the fringe location of the borders depending on the considered spatial and temporal standards. The ambiguous relationship between fringe and border is initially discussed by various emblematic cases in France and Europe. The standard must therefore be changed in order to look at the type of fringe location, which is then reflected by a multi-scale approach of the border regions, between the EU as a whole and the cross-border regions in North-Eastern France. These elements permit a definition of the fringe area in conclusion.

The book essentially questions the way spaces can be described and empirically studied within or as cross-border relations. To do this, the author focuses on border dwellers in the Greater Region of SaarLorLux, insofar as its circular mobility structure and its presence in multiple neighbouring areas may be considered exemplary for cross-border life realities. The book hypothesises that spaces, rather than being pre-existing, allow for the development of subjectively significant spatial relations through cross-border activities. The concept of space therefore describes the significant social relations developed through border dweller practices, which are partially operationalised and studied empirically through socio-cultural questions.