Border/s. Conference report

2016

The aim of this book, indeed, is re-reading the history of the Mediterranean basin starting from a double interpretative key: sea and border. In order to avoid possible misunderstandings it is good to clarify the sense of these two words, as the sea – and the Mediterranean in particular – is itself a border. The starting point is to re-read the past of the Mediterranean and to move the observation point from the land to the sea aims. This perspective wants to carry out a de-construction and to start the cancelation, step by step, of the consolidate ethnocentrism of our analyses, in the sense given to the word by William Graham Sumner (1906). It aims, in other words, at avoiding to look at members, structure, culture and history of local groups, other than one’s own, with reference to their own values, habits and rules, as this interpretation of the other unavoidably spurs to overestimate one’s own culture, devaluating that of the others. Secondly, after this first approach, it is p...

Anssi Paasi's research has contributed significantly to how political geographers understand the interrelated concepts of region and border. Paasi argues that regions and borders are both territorial and relational in that they are based on material practices in the landscape but also are created, reproduced, and contested through narratives. This article applies these ideas to the Mediterranean, a region with a long history of connection but with a current discourse and practice of division as the European Union attempts to limit the movement of immigrants through the sea, to argue that the idea of regions and borders are produced through 1) the iterative process of material interactions with the landscape and other humans and 2) symbolic representations of these spaces and relationships.

DEMOMED: Observatoire Démographique de la Méditerranée-www.demomed.org Riassunto Abstract Questo articolo esamina come fare confronti internazionali su scala mediterranea in una prospettiva demografica e geografica. Questo studio si concentra sulla variabilità osservata delle superfici e delle popolazioni di diverse reti disponibili per i paesi mediterranei. Ci chiediamo in primo luogo su ciò che rende rilevante una griglia rispetto ad un'altra. Inoltre ci proponiamo di utilizzare l'autocorrela-zione spaziale come indicatore di qualità delle caratteristiche stati-stiche e spaziali di una griglia per una data variabile. Basandoci su un confronto tra diverse griglia infra-nazionali, tra cui due reti realiz-zate ad hoc, esploriamo la variabilità generata dalla griglia prescelta su una variabile che unisce lo spazio e la popolazione: la densità. I risultati sottolineano l'importanza di questo tipo di approccio prima di qualsiasi opera di confronto internazionale e ricorda la...

Fabian Lemmes and Stefan Preiss´ Conference Report on "Mediterranean Mobilities and Borders", an international workshop organised by the DFG-network "A Modern Mediterranean: Dynamics of a World Region, 1800-2000" in cooperation with the European Institute, Istanbul Bilgi University and the German Orient-Institut Istanbul, Istanbul June 21- 24, 2018

È vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale o ad uso interno o didattico, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata, non autorizzata.

Edita: CIDOB edicions Elisabets, 12 1. It could be said that the year 2005 represented the discovery by the European Union of sub-Saharan immigration and its impact on their Mediterranean member countries and their

Medi-terranean Borderization, or deterritorializing Mediterranean space, 2012

This contribution applies the Territorialist Approach (TA) in order to analyse cross-border cooperation in two areas located along the Eastern French-Spanish border. TA is an innovative, multidisciplinary and culturally oriented approach for territorial studies, which is rooted in the Italian school of geography. According to this approach, " territory " is perceived as the result of a longstanding cyclical process of interaction between human settlements and the environment, whereby each civilization 'stores' a set of tangible (artefacts) as well as intangible (meanings, values and symbols) assets that drive local relations and shape the local identity (the milieu). Therefore, we regard cross-border territories as complex territorial units, wherein geographical, socioeconomic and cultural patterns have been affected by the evolution of border functions and by the changes in national, international and sub-national policies. In this sense, local cross-border networks, both formal and informal, contribute in keeping a shared local milieu. At the same time, in Europe, local Cross-Border Cooperation (CBC) is boosted by European integration processes by means of political, financial and legal support. It represents an opportunity for local agents to develop joint actions for the endogenous enhancement of the borderland. In this sense, the local milieu represents a very important factor for generating local development. The two case studies were conducted in Cerdanya and the Coast of Albera Marítima (CAM). Our analysis on Cerdanya demonstrates how community-led initiatives, which are based on local needs and the shared territorial capital, represent a feasible alternative for local development. The case of the Albera is geographically even more peripheral, wherein the absence of stable cross-border local networks, on the one hand, and of feasible CBC projects, on the other, exacerbates its geographic remoteness and the anthropic pressures on the fragile coastal environment. Zusammenfassung Örtliche grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit als Ter-ritorialstrategie für Grenzregionen? Untersuchung von zwei Fallstudien entlang der östlichen Grenze zwischen Frankreich und Spanien unter Verwendung des territori-alen Ansatzes Der Beitrag befasst sich mit dem Territorialansatz in der Rau-mentwicklung zur Untersuchung der grenzübergreifenden Zusammenarbeit in zwei Gebieten an der östlichen franzö-sisch-spanischen Grenze. Es ist ein neuer, fachübergreifender und kulturorientierter Ansatz für Studien zur Raumentwick-lung, der seine Wurzeln in der italienischen Geographieschule hat. Danach ist " Territorium " das Ergebnis eines lange wäh-renden zyklischen Prozesses des Zusammenspiels zwischen menschlichen Siedlungen und der Umgebung, wobei jede Zivi-lisation eine Reihe von materiellen (Artefakte) und immateri-ellen (Bedeutungen, Werte und Symbole) Werten bewahrt, die die lokalen Beziehungen fördert und die lokale Identität (das Milieu) formt. Deshalb sehen wir Grenzregionen als komplizier-te räumliche Einheiten, in denen geographische, sozio-ökono-mische und kulturelle Verhaltensmuster durch die Entwicklung von Grenzfunktionen und Veränderungen der nationalen, in-ternationalen und regionalen Politik beeinflusst worden sind. Sowohl formelle als auch informelle grenzüberschreitende Netzwerke tragen zur Erhaltung eines gemeinsamen lokalen Milieus bei. In Europa wird die grenzüberschreitende Zusam-menarbeit durch politische, finanzielle und rechtliche Förder-maßnahmen gestärkt. Sie bietet für lokale Vermittler eine Mög-lichkeit zum Ausbau gemeinsamer Maßnahmen zur endogenen Stärkung des Grenzgebiets. Die Untersuchung zu Cerdanya zeigt, wie von der Gemeinde geleitete Initiativen, die auf loka-len Bedürfnissen und dem gemeinsamen räumlichen Kapital beruhen, eine machbare Alternative zur lokalen Entwicklung darstellen. Die Küste von Albera Marítima (CAM) dagegen liegt geographisch eher abseits, wobei das Fehlen grenzübergrei-fender lokaler Netzwerke einerseits und machbarer Projekte der grenzübergreifenden Zusammenarbeit andererseits seine geographische Abseitslage und den anthropischen Druck auf die sensible Küstenregion verschärfen.

Belgeo

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