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.
In essence, the report concludes there are two different ways: the first is to give Limburg (or Dutch border provinces in general) a specific role in the application of existing multi- or bilateral instruments at the Benelux or EU level. This could include a vital role related to the EU instrument under debate (cross-border mechanism).
The second option would be the establishment of a specific national legal instrument that would provide the Province of Limburg (or all border provinces) with innovative tools to adapt Dutch legislation in the context of border obstacles.
The aim of the MMUST is to develop a decision support tool and to evaluate transport policies in favour of cross-border mobility in the Greater Region. This tool is being developed through a scientific partnership involving researchers working on mobility and transport from three of the countries in the Greater Region and through consultation with the main public actors that manage the mobility flows studied. The tool developed has the following features: a unified approach to all the mobility transport data available, a multimodal approach allowing the impact to be assessed of all types of transport existing or to be promoted and prospective approach through the evaluation by enquiry and modelling of different alternative mobility scenarios.
The EMR Connect project arose out of the difficulties encountered by operators in the field in establishing a cross-border public transport network. The governance of the project is provided by the main public transport operators in the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion. The project is intended to provide a practical service and plans to create a shared body of knowledge of the cross-border transport network, simple paperless resources for passengers and targeted projects to encourage intermodality.
The LEADER subsidy measure is characterised by a "bottom-up approach", i.e. the people on site decide about the local integrated rural development strategy (LILE) for their region within the LEADER action group (LAG). They choose the projects to be subsidised based on transparent and objective selection criteria. To make rural spaces in Rhineland-Palatinate future-capable, the funding period of 2014 to 2020 has sustainable projects and processes at the focus of promotion in twenty selected LEADER regions. Beyond this, the innovation and economic power in the regions, intermunicipal cooperation, tourism and nature protection are to be strengthened. The goal is achieving a sustainable structural further development of the LEADER regions by developing and trying out answers to urgent challenges of our time. This includes, in particular, demographic change, countering climate change, preservation and creation of jobs, environmental and resource protection.
LEADER permits participation of rural spaces and their populations in the subsidy backdrop of the EU, thereby also contributing to letting the EU goals reach rural spaces and enabling them to contribute to the Europe 2020 strategy, while also increasing acceptance and citizen proximity of the EU.
There is significant renewed interest for borders. Empirical observation has shown that border stabilisations and destabilisations are multifaceted and are therefore increasingly perceived as complex processes. With this publication project, the 20 authors critically and productively address the concept of “border textures” in order to produce an analysis and reflection instrument likely to strengthen the complex research on borders from all angles.
The working paper pertains to the thematic field “demography and migration” and highlights the challenges for territorial development in the Greater Region. Particular emphasis is placed on cross-border residential mobility at borders with the Grand Duchy, on population ageing and on the guarantee of general interest services in rural regions.
The ESPON project “Metroborder” includes an investigation and the further development of the approach of a Cross-Border Polycentric Metropolitan Region (CBPMR) within the Greater Region and the Upper Rhine (Rhin Supérieur). The study refers to the “understanding of metropolises as nodes in a globalizing world” (p. 43). Aspects of the functional integration and governance structures in the case study regions are analyzed. Strategic options and specific approaches to the further development of CBPMRs are presented.
The EUBORDERSCAPES project analyzed the conceptual changes in the study of borders that have taken place in the past decades. The project focused on the social significance and subjectivities of state borders. “Objective” categories of state territoriality were critically interrogating. Parallel to the study of conceptual change, the main research question was “how [do] different and often contested conceptualisations of state borders (in terms of their political, social, cultural and symbolic significance) resonate in concrete contexts at the level of everyday life”.
