Cross-Border Cooperation in Spatial Planning: Facts and Future Lessons From European Borderlands

Introduction

Borderlands or cross-border regions are territories that can be found adjacent to national or international borders, as well as the areas far away from the center. Therefore, socio-economic issues and cultural interactions occur between numerous nations and ethnic groups (Cherkes et al., 2021). Over last few decades, these regions have attracted further attention in academic disciplines and practical concerns. These regions have been mainly considered from various geographical, sociological, spatial and demographical perspectives. And so, this is where the concept of Cross Border Cooperation (CBC) has been formed in Europe (Jurado-Almonte et al., 2020).

The CBC is a collaborative development process of constructing neighborly particular associations and relationships among local stakeholders and authorities on both sides of borders. It aims to tackle mutual obstacles and challenges known commonly in the borderlands and to exploit the available development potential in border areas, while enhancing the progression collaboration for the purposes of the overall harmonious development of border communities in the European Union (EU) (Kurowska-Pysz et al., 2018). Despite the fact that 37.5% of the EU population lives in borderlands in 2022, including 38 internal borders, made up of geographic barriers resulted in conflicts within regional development planning and unbalanced growth in the context of socio-economic issues (Toca et al., 2017), (Opioła & Böhm, 2022).

The EU has been making remarkable efforts in the procedure of advancing extensive relationship and integration of cross-border regions for more than four decades. However, the perspective and function of borderlands have transformed during the last decade including a critical element in the EU neighborhood and enlargement policies and perspective (Villanueva et al., 2022). The spatial arrangement of borderlands across EU provides the opportunity to distinct additional contrasting of outcomes along with neighboring features. Despite the existing conflicts of cross-border regions, transitions from one territory to another comprise moderately smooth due to rather common geographies and socio-cultural and historical relations (Németh et al., 2013).

Fortunately, European cross-border territories cover both core and peripheral areas including inland, coastal and insular territories, urban and rural extents, densely and sparsely populated regions, flat and mountainous lands, as will discussed in following sections (Murphy et al., 2009). The cross-border territories, as mostly are mentioned as common peripheries, are characterized by related marginality in a wide range of contexts and fields including border types, topology, border crossing, transportation network, infrastructure, cross-border accessibility and mobility, socio-economy, culture, and demography (Gómez et al., 2021), (Vulevic et al., 2020) (Christodoulou & Christidis, 2019).

As we discussed, cross-border areas are extents of contact between territorial systems with various political, cultural, socio-economic and institutional legacies (Jacobs, 2016), (Ulrich, 2016). As the CBC has become an intermittent target of European territorial policies, the growing characterized impact of the EU on territorial policies at various levels provides required economic and legal means for preparation of the construction process of integrated European territories (Seferaj, 2014). Strategic territorial development at cross-border level requires the convergence of targets in the interest of all parties. These schemes are based on territorial diagnostics taken into account at cross-border level (Martín-Uceda & Vicente Rufí, 2021).