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Europe, perhaps more than any other region in the world, is characterized by the presence of border cities and conurbations, urban areas whose morphological and functional continuity can be felt across one or several national borders. In 2010, the ESPON Metroborder program thus identified some forty urban communities within the EU and on its limits. However, this dimension of towns and borders has long been neglected, by the states as much as by the European Union. And yet, as part of the opening regime specific to internal borders, those urban spaces are emblems and vectors of European integration on the local scale. This article demonstrates how border cities have been an essential part of the European integration process since its very beginning and how their contribution has been fostered by the EU’s regional policy programs, especially since the 2000s, helping them to be recognized as specifically dynamic urban border spaces and to use this label in order to develop a multitude of cross-border projects.

This paper analyses the nature and intensity of the functional and institutional integration in three cross-border metropolitan regions in Europe: Basel, Geneva and Luxembourg. Results show that there is not necessarily a reciprocal link between the size of the functional area and the extent of the cooperation. Whilst no metropolitan-sized organisation is on the agenda in Luxembourg, the cases of Basel and Geneva show that the presence of a national border offers an opportunity to invent original forms of governance, increase the autonomy of the local authorities by different types of cooperation which transcend the institutional and territorial divides, and promote the international character of the metropolitan centre. In a context of global competition, these features represent an undeniable benefit.

This article focuses on the way public bodies have invested borders in the European Union and especially how some parts of the limit of sovereignty are transformed into cross-border places in the process of construction of cross-border metropolitan regions. These places, binding two national territories instead of separating or distancing, are the results of cooperation’s projects between territorial authorities on local level. Two projects are analysed: the Garden of the Two Banks in Strasbourg and Kehl between France and Germany achieved in 2004 and the Jacques Delorsplein in Menen and Halluin between Belgium and France, created in 2014.In the first case, the border spaces located on both sides of the Rhine river were regenerated and transformed into a common cross-border recreation and leisure area whose symbolic heart is a pedestrian and bicycle bridge. In the second case, the margin spaces located on the borders between two neighboured municipalities became a public square. The genesis and the reasons of the creation of these two spaces are different, but the comparison is quite relevant considering their transformations into public spaces, their symbolic meaning and the need of cross-border cooperation to ensure the urban management. The ‘refoundation’ of the border area is due to a change of the functions and more deeply in the transformation of its meaning inside the urban area, enabling new people’s space practices. The transformation of the border from articulation or interface to a living space is both the results of cross-border governance and a innovating answer to issues regarded as being similar by the public bodies. The metropolitan context enables to get resources necessary to build the basis of a cooperation and to produce a place in the ‘urban semic system’ which is constructed at cross-border urban scale. The appropriation of these two spaces by the people is still very different. The Garden of the Two Banks is a popular public space in the cross-border urban area of Strasbourg-Kehl while the Jacques Delors square is only the starting point of a regenerated area project.