Paper Titles & Abstracts

Cross-border linkages and cooperation have become key strategic concerns in improving economic competitiveness and, at European level, facilitate integration and economic cohesion. Conventionally, the main actors and arenas of such engagement have been formalized agreements between states about cross-border co-operation, although EU policies, such as the Euroregions, have sought to down-scale such efforts to the regional and local level. Yet, defining such territories with clear boundaries has essentially been a top-down matter, leaving the actors within such designated areas to put strategies into hands-on policies. But there has been a growing trend among cities to act independently of such nationally arranged platforms and become international actors in their own right through engagement in cross-border networks and policies (e.g. Eurocities). Much of this is 'virtual' in spatial and institutional terms, so as to minimize the potential emergence of any new competing centres of power. But this network-based urban internationalism creates new divisions and inequalities in opportunities, effectively leaving the non-urban, less connected and less pro-active parts of regions behind. And this, again, challenges the very democratic principles tasking policy makers with the representation of regional development as an integral whole. This shift to selective urban-centric and network-based regionalization is conceptualised here as de facto post-regional. It questions the very integrity of the regional scale of governance and its capacity to represent regions as cohesive spaces. The international Øresund Region between Sweden and Denmark is used to illustrate the scalar complexities of spatial and institutional overlaps and intersections of responsibilities, interests and political capabilities and institutional capacities. This manifests itself in competing positions between the established formal regions and the main cities for influence on shaping the international agenda of collaboration within, and degree of institutionalization of, the Øresund Region between the urban and regionally-based actors.