La « région métropolitaine trinationale du Rhin supérieur » : contrer la périphérie étatique par la centralité métropolitaine

In 2010, the cross-border cooperation between Germany, Switzerland and France became the “trinational metropolitan region of the Upper Rhine”. This article aims at drawing the genesis of this new strategy. It relies on a geographic and scalar approach and uses data from a document analysis and a cor...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Pauline Pupier
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Société Royale Belge de Géographie and the Belgian National Committee of Geography 2019-02-01
Series:Belgeo
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Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/32078
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Summary:In 2010, the cross-border cooperation between Germany, Switzerland and France became the “trinational metropolitan region of the Upper Rhine”. This article aims at drawing the genesis of this new strategy. It relies on a geographic and scalar approach and uses data from a document analysis and a corpus of interviews. It points out that German regional actors were the true drivers of the strategy. They reacted to the federal agenda on metropolitanisation and created a cross-border consensus aligned with the German political and academic standards. In fact, the metropolitan argumentation raised European awareness and forced the national recognition of a trinational metropolitan region. The actors of the Upper Rhine use the centrality component of metropolitanisation in order to counteract the peripheral component of state border. This case study presents a process of cross-border region building which includes a national and a supranational re-scaling process.
ISSN:1377-2368
2294-9135