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.
This article focuses on a crucial but neglected aspect of borders in Europe’s changing borders: the role of citizens in envisioning, constructing, maintaining and erasing borders. Borderwork is very much the business of citizens, of ordinary people. They are the one involved in constructing, experiencing and contesting them throughout Europe on any spatial scale from the geopolitical to the local. Our everyday life is subject to securisation. From checkpoints outside supermarkets, the use of credit cards while shopping, we face different kinds of borders.
Mid-sized towns in rural areas support the spatially balanced and sustainable development as enforced by territorial policy, as well as preservation of area-comprehensive public service in all partial areas. However, the article also shows that mid-sized towns have a wide range of development potentials that require targeted support by instruments of state development, regional and structural policy. In the scope of the debate about future-capable regional development and assurance of infrastructure supply in rural spaces, a number of fields for action becomes evident for rurally-peripheral areas in order to design the challenges of socio-economical structural change processes.
All in all, it therefore can be said that the article makes an important contribution in the scope of the discussion
of design of development and socio-economic structural change in rurally-peripheral regions, and that it has ad direct practical benefit for politics and planning practice.
The temptation to abolish borders corresponds to a desire to kill off a myth, but it neglects the fact that the border, with its four functions of translation, regulation, differentiation and relationship, is a living notion in society. The rediscovery by Brazil of its land borders, like the problems that are arising on this question in the States of what used to be Eastern Europe, show that the relationship function can only be exercised in an active, stable and non-conflictual way if the other functions are fulfilled. A border is the measure of pluralism against the dangers of chaos; it serves as much to "express" order as it does disorder.
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.
This study is an opportunity to analyse the consequences (for the citizen) of the setting up of space that is a genuine cross-border space as regards access to maternity care. It also underscores the importance of health cooperation in the Greater Region in order to avoid having areas of vulnerability. The examples studied in this regional space provide useful information for decision-makers in terms of territorial development. The analysis underscores the importance health cooperation based on collaboration at different levels: administrative, economic and technical, but also cultural in order to determine whether such an approach is feasible.
This article aims at evaluating the democratic status and prospects of the strategic, institutional and cooperative level within CBRs, based on a case study of the Øresund Region, situated on the border between Denmark and Sweden, and complemented with secondary evidences from other CBRs. The following questions are asked:
Do the strategies promoted have a democratic scope?
Are institutions reasonably accountable, in a traditional sense, to citizen within the region?
Is the concrete cooperation inclusive of broad categories of citizens?
The aim of the book is to show what means exist to soften borders and avoid the discrimination and marginalisation that separation can generate. To extend the debate, the book draws on the theoretical framework of social ecology. Social ecology is concerned with the complex relations between nature and society and seeks to provide perspectives by showing how environmental issues are dependent on the social context.
The cross-border coalfields led to the development of towns along the border throughout the SaarLorLux area. The industry fell into crisis. The urban spaces now need to counter the demographic and economic degradation. More and more borders disappear as well. New organisational strategies are now being introduced. This article presents two of them: The strategies of conurbations and the cross-border city networks. The article discusses strengths and weaknesses of these strategies.
The article presents the development strategy that was introduced in the late 1990s by the conurbations in Lorraine near the French Luxembourgian border. These cities, developing during the heyday of the mining and steel industries, had to face difficult economic and social situations in the years after the economic miracle. They found new paths for development thanks to the regional policy of the EU, which was targeted at cross-border cooperation. The presented research work dealt with the contribution of this new strategy to improve the living situation of the people near the borders and their development perspectives.
