Border Futures – Zukunft Grenze – Avenir Frontière. Future viability of cross-border cooperation 

What are the current discourses relevant for border areas? To what extent specific situations of border regions evoke opportunities for or hindrances to an integrated territorial development? How can we utilise opportunities or overcome hindrances in a target-oriented way?

These questions were central to the discussions of the working group “Border Futures”.

Border regions like the Greater Region in France 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 national energy policies, and demographic change.

Another factor is an 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