Abstract
European borderlands characteristics are determined by the interaction of differences in geography along with various conflicts in demographic and socio-economic factors. These regions are more isolated than the other areas due to the barriers that restrain the opportunity to interact with cross-border areas. Most cases of border areas are isolated in their own geography. During the last decade, the European Union has designed and implemented several integration procedures to accelerate the transform process of borderlands from primarily peripheral regions into interesting spots for sustainability growth. Addressing accessibility and mobility issues in peripheral regions requires a comprehensive view of the factors and indicators at multiple scales and levels. Mobility-oriented accessibility planning approaches miss some inherent aspects related to spatial and socio-economic circumstances. When moving from theory to practice, analyzing how mobility is addressed by current strategies has resulted in emerging some challenges and inconsistencies in transport systems and infrastructure.
TopIntroduction
Combination of specific geography, culture, language, socio-economic interactions and conflicts, and a wide range of demographic engagement has formed state cross-borders and borderlands (Kolossov & Scott, 2013). In fact, border regions are considered as a multi-dimensional materiality that consists of particular correlated features and characteristics. These areas also include all kind of natural and artificial limitations along with political interactions (Kmec et al., 2016). As a result, borderland and cross-border region studies have been considered as a significant branch of regional studies over the last two decades (Makkonen & Williams, 2016). In this regard, the concentration of extensive literature review is mainly being triggered by a series of high-impact developments accompanied by an increasing interest in internal and the cross-border isolation barriers (Martín-Uceda & Vicente Rufí, 2021).
Borderlands and cross-border areas are directly in the forward-facing of geographical cohesion of the EU countries and states. However, most of them commonly appear to be out of sorted developed and heterogeneous in the context of transport infrastructure and planning (Christodoulou & Christidis, 2018). These regions are principally noticeable by an overall weak connectivity at local to regional scales, low-density and unbalanced distribution of settlement, fragility in socio-economic structure, and debilitated interrelation among stakeholders, facilities, and services (Mercado, 2002). Specifically, environmental obstacles and inadequacy of capacity in potential regional planning have caused limited inter-regional accessibility for a remarkable part of the EU borderlands (Medeiros et al., 2021).
Nevertheless, the EU has designed and implemented a wide range of integration action plans to meet the demand of accessibility and mobility among border areas over the past decades (Pagu, 2002) (Gkoumas, 2021). These efforts have undergone some conceptual, moral and methodological paradigm shifts resulting in the proposal of different planning approaches that highlight the importance and combination of new values and principles such as regional planning, infrastructure, mobility, accessibility, and sustainability (Bibri et al., 2020). They mainly aim to achieve transformative regional accessibility and mobility toward improvement and opportunities and take place at various levels (Kammerlander et al., 2015).
In this regard, a growing number of border region studies is being triggered by a series of high-impact regional development plans, including the Brexit process in EU (De Ville & Siles-Brügge, 2019), Cross-Border Cooperation (CBC) (Castanho et al., 2017), Cohesion Policy of the European Commission (EC) for 2021–27 (Naldini, 2018), and The Trans-European Network (TEN-T) Policy (Casaca & Marlow, 2007). Furthermore, European Spatial Planning Observation Network (ESPON) (Vitale Brovarone & Cotella, 2020). European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) (Evrard & Engl, 2018), Cohesion Fund (Martín et al., 2019), Single European Transport Area (Wiesenthal et al., 2015), Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) (Vettorazzi, 2018), and Communication Boosting Growth and Cohesion (Hix et al., 2005) are the main supplementary European initiatives related to the improvement of cross-border accessibility and mobility.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Regional Planning: Geo-technology techniques and specific structure for comprehensive development at regional scale through rational transformation of spatio-temporal dimensions that aim to manipulate specific areas in a rational way toward a wider view to achieve better regional integration.
Peripheral Regions: Territories on the edge of larger areas that are less developed than the semi-periphery and core-countries due to environmental and socio-economic obstacles resulted in receiving disproportionately small share of global wealth and regional opportunities and services.
Sustainable Development: The way of unifying communities and society in order that they could be extant in the long term in the context of environmental preservation and socio-economic equity based on present and future imperative concerns.
Mobility: Moving individuals from one place to another one within or between regions based on necessity of access to opportunities and services, and displayed preferences for mobility due to transportation efficiency.
Transport Infrastructure Provision: The process of setting up transport infrastructure including essential steps toward improving accessibility to specific opportunities and services to make them available for all social groups.
Accessibility: Measurements for spatial distribution and disparities of opportunities to access for specific individuals that mainly deal with spatial impedance between demand and supply, and the availability of services.
Borderlands: The land on either side of a border between countries that is mostly far from core of socio-economic flows of territories.
Accessibility Planning: The process of identifying and investigating the challenges in the access to opportunities and services for specific social groups in a particular region by developing strategies for accessibility improvement.