04 Feb ‘Benchmarking Cross-Border City-Regions: Basque and Øresund Comparative Territorial Connection’ published in Regions Quarterly Magazine by RSA

After the fieldwork research from 2010 to 2013 between Øresund region (in Denmark and Sweden) and the Basque region (in Spain and France), while carrying out some direct participation fieldwork research such as, a congress Euskal Hiria 2012, a workshop in St Telmo Museum and several lectures in Sweden:

Here is the article that will be published in the RSA Regions Quarterly Magazine:

Calzada, I. (2015), Benchmarking Cross-Border City-Regions: Basque and Øresund Comparative Territorial Connection, Regions Quarterly Magazine, In Depth, pp. 4-8. Regions no 297. Issue 1. Spring 2015.

This article compares two contrarily complementary European cross-border city-region case studies from the social innovation multidisciplinary viewpoint. To do this it applies the ‘5-System’ city-region analytical framework presented sequentially at the RSA 2013 Winter
Conference in London (Calzada, 2013) and the RSA 2014 European Conference in Izmir (Calzada, 2014). The Basque Country (OECD, 2013) nationalistic city-region (Calzada, 2011), divided between the Spanish and French nation-states, shows surprisingly low cross-border territorial development strategic synergies.
In contrast, the Øresund non-nationalistic city-region (OECD, 2003) shows a highly cooperative and fluent cross-border dynamic that started in 2000. Analysed purely from the city-regional strategic perspective, Øresund, through its non-nationalistic city-regional promotion, has attained a certain level of cross-border territorial synergy between Malmö and Copenhagen; meanwhile, the Basque Country, also involving two nation-states but driven by a nationalistic political strategy, has failed to connect with and benefit from the cross-border territorial synergies between Spain and France, and even indeed between the two administrative entities in Spain.