Border Futures – Zukunft Grenze – Avenir Frontière.

Border Futures – Zukunft Grenze – Avenir Frontière
Future viability of cross-border cooperation
What current discourses are relevant for border areas? What opportunities for and hindrances
to integrated territorial development are created by the specific situation of
border regions? How can these be utilised or overcome in a targeted fashion? These
questions were central to the discussions of the working group “Border Futures”. Border
regions like the Greater Region or the Tri-national Metropolitan Region of the Upper
Rhine extend far beyond the immediate area of the border. While institutional structures
of cooperation can be stabilised with agreements and organisations, there is a lack of
instruments with which cross-border cooperation can react to changes in its parameters.
Cross-border cooperation faces new challenges from increasing cross-border interactions,
processes of economic structural transformation, new energy policies in the national
spaces, and demographic change. Another factor is increasing spatial polarisation,
which influences the further development and future viability of the affected border areas,
involving on the one hand issues of metropolisation in urban centres and, on the other
hand, the provision of services of general interest in rural districts. Building on discussions
of the working group “Border Futures”, this volume sheds light on the theme of
practice-related cross-border cooperation with recent research relevant to planning in
border regions in the European context. The findings are intended to be applied to the
border areas in the territory of the Regional Working Group and should also contribute
towards broader specialist discourse on the further development of cross-border cooperation.
The issues of sustainable cross-border governance, new spatial functionalities
and new planning instruments play a role here, as do the options provided by the current
programme period of EU structural policy for border areas.