This article analyses the process of spatial integration in ten European cross-border metropolitan regions by comparing three indicators, relating to flows of cross-border commuters, differentials of gross domestic product per capita and residents' citizenship. Our results allow, firstly, confirmation of the hypothesis that the greater the economic disparities, the greater the level of interactions measured by cross-border commuting. Our work also allows confirmation of the hypothesis that strong economic interactions have an impact on the cross-border integration of communities, measured by the proportion of residents based on the other side of the border. Finally, this article leads to a typology based on three models of cross-border integration being proposed: by specialization, by polarization and by osmosis.

Introduction The concentration of economic activity in metropolitan regions is without doubt one of the most striking aspects of contemporary economic geography (Barnes and Ledebur, 1991; Kra« tke, 2007). This process of metropolisation goes hand in hand with a redefinition of the traditional prerogatives of states in relation to urban centres and with a regeneration of cities as territorial (Brenner, 2004; Le Gale© s and Harding, 1998) and international actors (Ku« bler and Piliutyte, 2007). In this way the state has passed from the role of a top-down resource-allocating and regulatory authority to that of a partner and mediator (Kohler-Koch, 1996). As Jessop (2004) argues, this reconfiguration of the role of the state is organised based on two privileged directions. By transferring part of their sovereignty to a supranational authority, the member states of the European Union (EU) have contributed to the construction of an economic system of regulation and to the removal of obstacles that may have impeded exchanges between them (Scharpf, 1999). At the same time the reforms of government functions carried out since the 1980söincluding a transfer of authority and resources to local governments, deregulations, and privatisations (Rodr|¨guez-Pose and Sandall, 2008) öhave given new room for manoeuver to a large number of actors such as public agencies, local and regional authorities, firms, and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). These different processes have participated in the emergence of multilevel governance within the framework of the EU (Hooghe, 1996). In this context many studies relating to metropolitan governance have shown the difficulty of building institutional territories of cooperation. One of the reasons is that the types of cooperation, when they exist, often take place within narrow parameters

No abstract

This paper provides evidence of how national borders affect the structure of policy networks. Our analysis of the Basel cross-border metropolitan region located across Switzerland, France and Germany considers the case of public transportation in border regions. Using a social network analysis of the relationships between 44 actors, we show that national borders play a diminishing role in the formation of policy networks for both information exchange and decision making. Local actors develop different brokerage roles according to their country of origin: Swiss actors function as coordinator and representative brokers vis-à-vis actors located in France and Germany.

To date, most of the literature on trade networks in West Africa has considered networks in a metaphorical way. The aim of this paper is to go one step further by showing how social network analysis may be applied to the study of regional trade in West Africa. After a brief review of the literature, this exploratory paper investigates two main issues related to regional trade. We start by discussing how recent developments in regional trade in West Africa have contributed to challenging the social structure of traders. We then discuss the changes that have affected the spatiality of regional trade by looking at the influence of spatial location and geographic scale on traders' abilities to trade. In both cases, we argue that the value of social network analysis in exploring how traders have progressively adapted to social and spatial changes in economic activities has been greatly underestimated. Our discussion is illustrated with the case of two trade networks located between Niger, Benin and Nigeria.