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.
This chapter questions the marginality of border areas. The marginal nature of border areas is often highlighted in public politics, but rarely directly presented in all its ambiguity. Although these spaces may contain places of marginalization (prostitution, concentration of various types traffic, accumulation of refugees confined to the border), these situations are far from a generalization. Thus, it isn't enough to define them this way. The ambiguous relationship between borders and margins is addressed symbolically by the various cases (in France and in Europe). To test the character of the margin phenomena, a multi-level approach is proposed.
