Theories – Concepts – Terms

The concept of “placemaking” is well established in architectural, urban, and regional planning discourse. It refers to processes through which localities become identity-forming – through spatial design, social practices, or symbolic loading. This working paper offers a first theoretical reflection on the transferability and further development of placemaking in cross-border contexts. It focuses on an initial theoretical approach to cross-border placemaking as an analytical lens for describing site-specific transformation processes along national borders. The Pre-IBA Saar-Moselle (2022-2023) is introduced as a research situation: a curated and experimental planning initiative that served to explore the feasibility of establishing an International Building Exhibition (IBA) in the Greater Region, and more specifically in the Saar-Moselle border area. Through temporary stagings of border localities, narrative framings, and architectural formats, a laboratory space was created in which new forms of placemaking at national borders could be tested. Based on this, the paper develops initial analytical elements for a theoretically grounded exploration of cross-border placemaking. In conclusion, it shows how future research based on case studies in the Saar-Moselle region could contribute to conceptual clarification and interdisciplinary development.

European integration has redefined border regions from national peripheries to spaces of opportunity and cooperation. However, social and economic inequalities in their cross-border dimension remain marginal in research on these regions. This thematic issue addresses this gap through the case study of the Greater Region, encompassing Luxembourg, Wallonia, Grand Est, Saarland, and Rhineland-Palatinate. Despite advanced economic integration, the region exhibits stark disparities in income, housing, and public service access. The contributions presented examine how such inequalities shape labour markets, mobility, and social cohesion, while also addressing the shortcomings of current statistical tools to capture transborder dynamics. From the role of wage differentials in driving cross-border work to the housing pressures on surrounding territories, this issue highlights how integration processes can produce both inclusion and exclusion. By focusing on the Greater Region, it contributes to broader debates about inequality beyond national frameworks and underscores the necessity of transnational analytical tools for understanding marginalisation within a unified Europe.

Since the mid-2010s at the latest, there has been discussion of the border as a complex phenomenon, aimed at a more comprehensive and differentiated understanding of b/orderings. However, there seems to be an imprecise use of the term ‘complexity’ in the academic debate, and sometimes, still, an everyday understanding of complexity prevails. To sharpen the debate around a border’s complexity, in this comment, in a first step, I show what border scholars currently consider complex and question which analytical and conceptual developments in the wake of the bordering turn have encouraged the increasing talk of complex borders. In the second step, I suggest how border research can be inspired by complexity theories, in focusing on performative interrelations and their emergent dis/orders that become spatially and socially effective.

The scientific literature on the Euroscepticism of border populations provides contradictory results. This Working Paper takes a spatial approach, to show that the level of support for the EU among border populations should be surveyed on a local scale, and not on a regional scale. Euroscepticism is estimated on the basis of the vote in the European elections of June 2024, in the case of the French region of Grand Est, which borders on 4 countries. Several characteristics of this vote are analysed and related to the socio-economic profile of the territories, using a quantitative geography approach. The results show that there is a border specificity in attitudes towards the EU, in the sense of disengagement (abstention). They also show the variety of border contexts, and, among social groups, a lesser effect of euroscepticism among blue-collar and white-collar workers close to the border.

Despite the increased discourse on the complexity of borders, there are hardly any references in the academic debate as to what exactly complex borders mean or complexity-oriented border research. This paper starts here and discusses the promising relationship between complexity thinking and border research. To this end, it explains what is currently qualified as complex in border research and what understanding of complexity can be found there. The core ideas of complexity thinking are then presented and linked to the ordering and ordered principle of the border. Building on this, border research approaches and methodologies are identified that can be considered enablers of the complexity perspective and, thus, as starting points for complexity-oriented border research.

San Diego’s central neighborhoods are in the midst of a municipally and privately led redevelopment phase, which is gradually progressing from one neighborhood to the other and slowly transforming lower-income communities into ‘trendy’ places for affluent populations. This is particularly the case in the neighborhood of North Park, which has been redeveloped in the last decades and has recently begun to expand eastward across two inner-city highways into the large Hispanic and Asian American community of Mid-City. Particularly along the large commercial streets that link the two communities, previously produced and habituated differences are currently re-negotiated – socially and functionally but also economically, symbolically, and architecturally –, which provokes the emergence of a (temporal) hybrid in-between zone that is simultaneously part of the one and the other neighborhood. These changes are tied to municipal and private redevelopment efforts and are of significant everyday relevance for the residents of North Park and Mid-City alike. However, these processes have not yet undergone in-depth analysis. Our paper addresses this gap by developing a theoretical framework of multi-dimensional b/ordering processes, which takes account of the multi-faceted complexity of this transitional and temporal borderland. On the basis of this framework, empirical results from a mixed-method research study (qualitative interviews and participatory observations among others), conducted between 2019 and 2022, will be used to trace how San Diego’s progressing redevelopment trend furthers the multi-dimensional shift, perforation, and re-negotiation of boundaries and thus the emergence of a hybrid urban borderland between North Park and Mid-City.

While the materialities and functionalities of borders have changed drastically in recent decades, the ordering principle of the border persists. At the same time, the selective character of borders is emerging with a clarity that has hardly been seen in Europe before. This is the point of departure for the issue papers, which discuss the observation that borders do not have the same significance for all people. For this purpose, the authors work with the concept of multivalence, which assumes that borders have social valences or relevances that differ regarding certain groups of people. The thematic issue with case studies of governance, flight, reporting, film, and literature shows multiple valences of borders, which stand for inequalities and refer to powerful cultural orders.